Scavenging

In mid June, the Sun-Times followed up on a story about how “living in a food desert — primarily the city’s African-American neighborhoods with no full-service grocery stores — can shorten your life.” The Chi-Town Daily News followed up with its own story that focuses more on Chicago community supported agriculture.

Farms like City Farms seem to be everyone’s answer to the shortage of fresh food on the South Side. I’ve even heard of people talking about stringing a series of farms all throughout Chicago’s vacant land that could grow enough food to support the whole city. Something I think was probably a pipe dream from the Chicago Center for Urban Agriculture.

I want to know the limits what you can cook in a food desert. Sure it’s hard to find good food in a lot of neighborhoods, but what’s the reality? How close can you get to cooking a good meal without having to walk more than 3 miles to get supplies?

There was this New York Times article over the weekend, too. It aggrandizes that whole notion of “people are ready to do hard manual labor again” that keeps coming up in all these New Society pieces that run in the magazine.

Here are some of the studies cited in the stories if you’re looking for some long reading:

Most recent report from Mari Gallagher, “Chicago Food Desert Progress Report 2009” [pdf]

Daniel Block’s 2008 report that restarted the whole conversation, “Finding Food in Chicago and the Suburbs” [pdf]