Fighting for ‘food justice’ in West Oakland
Getting a six pack of beer or a bottle of whiskey is no problem for the residents of West Oakland, Ca. Getting a dozen eggs or a quart of milk? That’s a different story altogether. Bluntly stated, there are no grocery stores in West Oakland, but there are a total of 57 liquor stores—for just 30,000 residents.
Among these residents, the diabetes rate is three times higher than in the rest of Alameda county, hypertension rates are elevated, and mortality rates rival those of nations in the developing world.
“We see a real problem when Cheetos are a choice for breakfast,” says Brahm Ahmadi, co-founder and executive director of the People’s Grocery, an organization aiming to address the lack of access to--and lack of knowledge of--healthy food in the West Oakland community.
“The absence of grocery stores, the absence of fresh foods in this type of inner-city environment didn’t just happen. It’s part of a larger structural problem.”
The “grocery gap”, he says, has to do with health and economics in addition to social injustice. It stems further from a lack of political will, neglect, material deprivation, and the lack of a mechanism for developing local businesses.
“We started this organization to develop a solution,” Ahmadi says. “Our core foundation was a commitment to social justice and that we could create a new food system that was socially responsible about creating a more equitable food system.”
“We call it ‘food justice’: all people have a human right to healthy food,” Ahmadi adds.
“We don’t believe that one should be barred from such choices based on income. Food is not just a commodity. It is a basic need for all people.”
In this vein, programs offered by the People’s Grocery’s fall into three overarching, sometimes overlapping categories: Urban agriculture; enterprise development; and education, outreach and leadership development.
The group operates a three-acre farm and a number of community gardens to “build or strengthen a capacity for local food production.” The food grown in these areas—seasonally and locally available vegetables likes tomatoes, squash, peppers, eggplant, and a variety of greens—goes into “grub boxes” which are sold to local residents at a discounted rate. The boxes are also sold to people in wealthier areas at a marked-up price.
“These are people who want to support this mission by buying food from us, creating a premium for us to cut prices, provide a discount” to lower-income families, Ahmadi says. The grub box allows the Grocery to “adapt the payment and pricing mechanism to the reality of low-income shoppers, and to build a bridge to other communities.”
The group also runs the “wholesale hookup,” which offers bulk buying for households, and at one point even operated a small grocery store on wheels where fresh produce and other healthful products were sold in different areas three days a week.
But the group’s ultimate goal, Ahmadi says, is to “develop a brick-and-mortar food retail store”—that is, to build an honest-to-goodness grocery store in West Oakland, hopefully by the end of 2009.
“We have a business plan that we believe is viable. We’ve recruited initial team members. Most things are in place,” he says. “It’s all contingent on real estate and, of course, on raising the capital for the venture.”
Location is particularly important in West Oakland, Ahmadi says, because 40 percent of households don’t have cars, making shopping outside the immediate area very difficult.
A local grocery store would also plant an economic seed in West Oakland since the area loses $30 million a year in food expenditures made elsewhere.
The final focus for the organization is providing nutrition education programs for residents and, Ahmadi says, “engaging the community to become aware of the health implications of their choices.”
Through the Growing Justice youth program, young Oakland residents take part in an intensive summer job-training program, which is followed in some cases by internships during the school year. These interns can act as peer nutrition educators, delivering the message of healthy eating to others; as farm and garden workers; or as enterprise interns who assist in running the program.
“Our hope is that we can begin to develop a new leadership cadre from these historically marginalized neighborhoods,” Ahmadi says, and for these youngsters “to become the new entrepreneurs.”
Photo Caption: People's Grocery intern, Jennifer Copto, picks tomatoes for "grub boxes," or fresh produce sold at discounted prices to low-income shoppers. (Photo by Scott Braley, 2008)
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