Hungry for Change: Borderlands Food & Water in - Southwest ...

Getting grilled: First Lady Obama initiates a food fight | Photo © iStockphoto.com/
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business owners in Africa and Latin America. The healthy
food initiative the company crafted with Mrs. Obama was
part of a new wave of good corporate citizenship. Despite
these contextual qualifications, persistent skepticism in
the liberal and left-of-center media and blogosphere
dogged Mrs. Obama’s strange-bedfellows deal with
Walmart. On one level, the various efforts by the First
Lady to get involved on matters of food security, nutrition
and poverty (like her White House vegetable garden and
the Move Your Body campaign to get youth excited about
exercise) are a breath of fresh air. And not surprisingly, at
the center of her efforts to engage the largest retailer the
world has ever known, I sense a typical Obama-White
House pragmatism. Mrs. Obama and, implicitly, the president,
seem to argue that the big-box supermarkets must
be brought into the conversation of food security, health
and food justice. This is an important point in need of a
pulpit. To advocate only for alternative co-ops, farmers’
markets or organic produce is to be out of touch with the
millions of people whose food habits are inevitably connected,
by virtue of geography, supply or economics, to
large chain grocery stores.
The deal that Mrs. Obama brokered with Walmart involves
large-scale commitments from the retail giant.
Walmart promised to offer more healthful foods, increase
charitable donations to nutrition programs, redesign
store supply options for easier identification of low sodium
and low sugar foods, and open more stores in areas
known as “food deserts” (zones where people lack access
to supermarkets within one mile of urban homes and
within 10 miles in rural homes). Described by the First
Lady as a historic deal having the “potential to transform
the marketplace,” what harm could possibly come, I found
myself straining to ask, from such noble goals?
But hard as I tried to strike the middle-ground of pragmatism,
the earnest responses from activists in the food
justice movement whom I truly respect gave immediate
pause to the cheering. The First Lady’s initiative, most
argued, got food security policy wrong. LaDonne
Redmond of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade
Policy cut to the chase:
“Walmart is using the term ‘food desert’ as a Trojan horse
to get into our communities and bring about more corporate
control of our food system.”
Blogger Eric Hill expressed skepticism:
“More Walmart stores in food deserts doesn’t mean that
more people are going to be eating healthier.”
My own colleagues and collaborators in the Arizona food
battlegrounds Gary Nabhan and Kelly Watters, went
even further in a GRIST article in June 2011:
“The $400 million that the Obama administration has set
aside to create greater food access in so-called food deserts
will likely go to attracting full-service grocery franchises
that heap upon our children megatons of empty
calories…the lack of a big-box store in our community
may be an asset, not a disadvantage in keeping our children
healthy and secure.”
In an unpublished manuscript he shared with me,
Nabhan bluntly stated that the Michelle Obama 2011
Walmart initiative:
“…may go down in history as the most extensive and rapid
assault of Corporate America on the urban and rural poor
ever witnessed, but it was promoted under the guise of
providing fresh, healthy foods to those Americans who
are most at risk nutritionally and economically.”
Still, I insisted: Emotions alone should not drive this conversation.
For a moment, let’s set aside the fact that for
most intellectuals and food activists, the brand name
Walmart has come to stand in, as McDonald’s did a decade
earlier, for anything and everything that is wrong
with the industrial-agricultural-complex and global food
procurement system. And of course, I am aware that the
critics are right in one fundamental sense: Regardless of
right or left ideologies, the reality of the process called
“Walmartization” cannot be brushed aside. Walmart now
sells more food than any other store in the world. Its
hardnosed practices of procurement to obtain the lowest
prices worldwide, the aggressive and unprecedented
expansion of stores as a key strategy to secure the largest
volume for their retail, and the $36 billion in profits
(not sales) that it posts annually, compared to the average
wage and benefits of its employers, provide more
than ample reasons for concern. On the other hand, I
find it hard to simply dismiss Mrs. Obama as a shallow
political figure—one who has been duped by this bully
“Walmart is using the term ‘food desert’ as a
Trojan horse to get into our communities and
bring about more corporate control of our
food system.”
company into doing its bidding for more profits and
world dominance. As details of the deal unfolded, it became
clear that Mrs. Obama sought to have the greatest
impact on the largest number of people. I came to the
sympathetic conclusion that key advisors must have
convinced Mrs. Obama that the “food desert” phenomenon
was the single most important factor affecting
food security and nutrition. If that case was presented
to her with all the weight of social science research behind
it, then it made sense that the Obamas set their eyes
on brokering a deal for greater food security with the
meanest “devil” in the food system. It seemed as if my
mental ruminations had finally led me to find a logical
path to explain the motivation (and perhaps to excuse
it?) of the dubious Mrs. Obama-Walmart friendship.
Yet, for months, I walked around with an uneasy feeling:
Who is advising the Obamas? Worse yet, whose voices
are invited to sit around their debate tables at the exclusion
of more grassroots, progressive and knowledgeable
points of view?
To answer my own question, I went looking for the data
that may have influenced Mrs. Obama’s perception of
where the “problem” of food security lies, and that subsequently
may have informed her choice to design a fitting
“solution.” As it turns out, this data was not difficult
to find. Health and nutrition journals are brimming with
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reports of research projects examining what is generally
known, in academic circles, as the “neighborhood environment
thesis.” The typical research hypothesis goes
something like this: The food environment, including
the number and type of food stores available to residents
of a neighborhood, is associated with diet quality and
consumption of specific food items such as fruits and
vegetables. Furthermore, research strongly suggests that
targeting the levels of access to and variety of fresh
fruits and vegetables in a neighborhood (not just in matters
of individual choice) may have the greatest potential
to create sustainable dietary change. Studies report
that shopping or living in close proximity to a large supermarket
(which tend to have the widest selection of
fruits and vegetables) is associated with greater consumption
of fruits and vegetables; conversely, fruit
and vegetable intake decreases in white, African
American and Latino neighborhoods that have limited
availability to supermarkets and fresh produce, and
greater proximity to corner and convenience stores and
fast food outlets.
The combined research findings of this thesis offer preponderance
of the evidence in favor of the benefits of
locating supermarkets in poor and minority communities.
For example:
n One study found four times fewer supermarkets
located in African American neighborhoods than in
Caucasian neighborhoods.
n Several studies show that low-income neighbor
hoods have a higher density of unhealthy food
sources, specifically fast-food restaurants.
n A 2004 study reported only 18 percent of stores in
East Harlem carried food items recommended for
people with diabetes, compared to 58 percent of
stores in New York’s Upper East Side.
n One study found that supermarkets had double
the amount of heart-healthy foods than neighbor
hood grocery stores, and four times more heart-
healthy foods than convenience stores.
n A benchmark study determined that the presence of
a single supermarket within a census tract was
associated with a 32 percent increase in fruit and
vegetable intake in the area.
If incontestable, this social science-backed evidence
would support Mrs. Obama’s deal with Walmart; if all the
evidence was irrefutable, Mrs. Obama’s alliance should be
seen as a most practical and transformative step forward.
The problem, as I discovered upon reviewing the extant
literature, is that the “evidence” is not so clear, after all.