- Lack of access to fresh
food is no accident - it's a multi-faceted issue that hinges on power. - Looking at the state of Indiana as an example, racial discrimination and years of divestment have contributed to worsening food access conditions for specific communities.
- And the people most hurt by this issue are those with limited access to driving, such as the elderly and individuals with disabilities.
The Peace Garden at St. Alban's Episcopal Church in Indianapolis has a busy springtime schedule on the books, with upcoming events that invite volunteers to prune, till, and plant vegetables such as collards, lettuce, and tomatoes. That fresh produce will go to food pantries on the Indiana capital's east side. Last year saw a crop of 7,000 pounds of vegetables.
Joan Trendell, a retired public servant who now runs the garden for the church, told Insider that volunteers at the garden are a diverse bunch. Some of the women who frequently get their hands dirty planting and picking produce are over 80.
"They're just amazing," Trendell said.
But older people also make up many recipients of the garden's bounty.
"The older folks that may be individuals living together or close by to each other," Trendell told Insider. "They kind of support each other. You also might see someone come in that's helping out a family member. They can receive theirs, as a proxy."
According to the National Council on Aging, around 7.3 million older adults are "food insecure" in the US. In 2018, a poll from the National Aging and Disability Transportation Center found that one in five Americans over the age of 65 stopped driving, a key factor that deprives older people of access to grocery stores. The USDA's Food Access Atlas tracks stats around food accessibility. Insider's analysis of the atlas found that in Indiana's Marion County - where Indianapolis is located - over 12,000 seniors live a mile away from a grocery store, while over 24,000 live half a mile away.
Activists are divided on the role that corporations might play in terms of lessening the issue of food inequality. But the consensus is that a solution isn't simply opening more stores that stock food, as physical distance from supermarkets is just a piece of the problem. The issue around lack of access to nutritious food is also multifaceted and takes on different forms across localities. But the experts who spoke with Insider emphasized the risks that older adults in particular face in losing access to quality food.
'A hollowing out'
When it comes to food access, Indiana is a middling state - not among the very worst, and certainly far from the best. But the Hoosier State does offer a few key glimpses at how varied a problem lack of access to healthy food can manifest.
St. Albans isn't the only Indianapolis organization taking a hands-on approach to fighting food inequality. The Flanner House is an Indianapolis social-services agency that dates to 1903. Nowadays, it runs a veritable fresh-food distribution machine, including a two-acre farm that grows 50,000 pounds of produce a year, a small, 2,800-square-foot store called Cleo's Bodega & Cafe, and even a mobile bodega created from two buses retrofitted with refrigeration technology.
"Part of our motivation is not just to be able to make food available to folks, but to hold this up as a model that is affordable and sustainable in moderate and low-income neighborhoods," Brandon Cosby, the executive director of the Flanner House, told Insider.
Indiana University's data-tracking program SAVI found that as of 2019, there were 208,000 people living with limited access to supermarkets in Indianapolis alone, including 10,500 without car or bus access. In Indianapolis, limited access to traditional supermarkets is largely a relic of racist policy and business practices.
"This is driven by racism, disinvestment, bad policy, and bad corporate practice," Cosby said. "We don't talk about food deserts - the desert is a naturally occurring phenomenon. There is nothing natural about this, so we call it what it is 'food apartheid.'"
According to Daniel Knudsen, a professor with the Food Institute at Indiana University who studies
"There are big accessibility issues, but they're not related in any way to race - they're related to poverty amongst a largely white population," he said. "It has to do with the hollowing out of rural America due to industrial agriculture."
According to Knudsen, the populations in these places have shifted away from towns as small, 3,000-acre family farms have gone under. The result is "massive disinvestment in these rural areas."
When there are only so many families, large grocery stores are not going to stay, Knudsen said. "So what you see is a proliferation of dollar stores and relatively few grocery stores. And many times those grocery stores do not carry a full line of products."
'They're in serious trouble'
Lack of easy access to supermarkets doesn't affect everyone equally.
"Older adults and people with disabilities really struggle to access nutritious food when it is not available in their neighborhood," Emily Engelhard, the managing director of thought leadership at Feeding America, told Insider in a statement. "Sometimes they must resort to whatever food is easily available when they are not able to travel long distances, change buses, or spend long periods of time traveling because of their health."
In one 2018 study published in Innov Aging, 42% of respondents over 65 said they had difficulty walking 10 blocks and 38% had difficulty climbing stairs, meaning they generally have a hard time getting food home. That same year, Feeding America reported that 5.3 million seniors suffered from food insecurity, as well as 4.5 million adults age 50 to 59.
And food insecurity in Indiana predominantly affects those living without car or bus access. Cosby told Insider that the Flanner House has taken more vulnerable residents such as senior citizens into consideration by launching a mobile bodega during the pandemic.
"We can bring the grocery store to their neighborhood - or to their senior housing community," he said. "They can walk out their front door and be able to get access to those food options."
Jessica Minor, the director of programs and assessment from AccessABILITY, a disability rights organization based in Indianapolis, told Insider that food is part of her organization's central mission as well.
"By working with people with disabilities, there are a few things relating to food that we do on a regular basis for our consumers," Minor said. "We connect them with food pantries, provide them with food directly - for example, during the pandemic we've been able to help them with Instacart and have food delivered - and we systemically advocate for more resources within our community."
But Knudsen said that seniors or individuals with disabilities living in rural environments without access to stores can find it even harder than accessing supermarkets. In his experience, many of those communities may be "close-knit," but also often lack the proliferation of food pantries, community and private gardens, and food activism that's flourished in cities like Indianapolis.
"In rural areas, if seniors don't have a relative or a friend who can drive them, or they don't have delivery, they're in serious trouble," he said. "They become really reliant on taxi services or the goodwill of people at their church who make a point of picking them up once a once a week or so to take them shopping."
Profiting off 'food apartheid'
Dollar stores as a
"But what's going to happen is you're going to be eating that out of a can," Knudsen said. "On a good day, you're going to be able to eat it by thawing it out."
Knudsen said that dollar stores in recent years have "done a better job" of bringing in more frozen fruits, vegetables, and proteins, although he said this isn't a universal push. Dollar General in particular has emphasized its desire to expand frozen and - ultimately - fresh options through its DG Fresh program. But according to Cosby, these changes are a cynical move to gobble up shoppers' SNAP dollars.
"It's poverty pimping of the highest order," he said.
Then there's the effect that dollar stores can have on the existing retail landscape of a locality. In 2018, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance found that the arrival of a dollar store in a community can cut annual sales at neighboring supermarkets by 30%. Speaking with Insider several months ago, Dollar General's CEO, Todd Vasos, said that his company views both urban and rural areas - the latter of which account for 75% of store locations - as opportunities to expand.
"We do know that the grocers have moved out years and years ago in these areas," he said. "We started to look years ago into expanding into small towns, and we knew there was that niche to fill."
But dollar stores have proliferated over the course of the past 30 years. In terms of its footprint in Indiana, Dollar General expanded to 566 locations in 2020 from 108 in 1994. That's a net gain of 458 stores, according to documents from the Securities Exchange Commission. Its major rival, Dollar Tree, went from eight stores in Indiana in 1994 to 348 in 2018.
Many activists, like Cosby, want the conversation around food access to move from attracting specific grocery stores into specific communities. In fact, among food-access activists, corporations often end up looking more like part of the problem than the solution. Cosby said that the business model of big-box stores and other major retailers "is not a terribly profitable design," and the emphasis on impulse buying does not make them attractive for poorer areas.
As a result, food policy that revolves around an impulse like "we need to get Kroger to open a store here" is not a viable solution. And additional food pantries - which, for Cosby, represent a reduced "quality of life" - are not part of his solution either.
Instead, Cosby and the Flanner House are pushing for "food sovereignty," or a community's right to "access to affordable healthy food in a culturally appropriate and responsive way."
"What people need is access to affordable, healthy food options," he said.
Knudsen added that improving and expanding public transportation - including into rural areas - and bolstering benefits like SNAP could do a lot to minimize food insecurity.
"Poor people know how to eat correctly," he said. "The problem is they don't have the money. Poor people make the best choices they can with the money they have."
Trendell also said that governmental solutions are a key part of lessening food inequality as there's only so much that local groups can fix.
"We've got to make sure that those federal supports are always still in place because it really is the backbone for making sure people eat," she said.
Another way to help seniors who don't drive is to help them get to social events so that they can fight the pandemic of loneliness. He recalled an older woman who attended a focus group that he helped put together on food inequality. The car-less woman had been struggling to make trips to the supermarket to buy food. But she ended up leaving the meeting with a fortified social circle.
"She made a bunch of friends at the focus group, for crying out loud," he said. "They were, like, 'Oh yeah, you need to come to our church.' That was huge for her."