Food Apartheid

A Liquor Store near our old home in West Louisville

In 2007, I left southern Indiana to take a job with Community Farm Alliance (CFA) in Louisville, Kentucky. At that time, CFA had an office in the Portland Neighborhood of West Louisville, which had opened in 2003. My job description was “business development organizer.” My responsibilities included incubating two different local food distribution businesses to “rebuild the local food system."

Rebuilding a food system? But didn’t we already have a food system? After all, how could we live without a food system when food is the most important item we purchase, necessary for life, the fuel for everything we do?

Turns out we do have a food system, but that it is severely broken. And it seems to be broken on both ends. That is, on the supply side, conventional agriculture has led to the creation of food that tastes like Styrofoam and sometimes has the equivalent nutrition of that substance. On the demand side, people in the know, with money and access, are clamoring for local food, with small family farmers scrambling to find market channels and meet the need. However, not everyone has equal access to this new clean, fair, local food. This Jewish mama, who lives for the knowledge that everyone I know and love is eating well, was shocked to find out that my job description included attempting to rebuild a food system in a city that had created a “food desert,” where a large percentage of its residents had limited access to fresh, affordable food. The majority of the residents who live in these neighborhoods of Louisville are African-American and low-income families.

Low-income people of color in our American cities are being denied access to fresh food for very complex reasons that will surface over the next few blogs. As a result, they suffer disproportionately. Their neighborhoods have limited options for purchasing fresh, healthy food, and as a result, the residents, especially the children, are getting serious diet-related illnesses due to limited access to fresh fruits and vegetables.

Back in 2007, I had never heard of the term “food desert.” I had certainly experienced a rural food desert first hand. But I have lived in many US and foreign cities, including Queens, New York, Paris, France, San Francisco, California, Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington where farmer’s markets and small produce stores seemed to be everywhere. How could this wealthy American city—home to the Kentucky Derby, Bourbon and Southern Belles—have allowed a food desert to happen?

I decided that the best way for me and my daughter to understand this “food apartheid” was to move into the neighborhood ourselves, which we did in April of 2007. This turned out to be an important move on our part, as we got to live the problem others often just talk about. What I lived with and saw in West Louisville that year, and the three years since I left the neighborhood to move to another one that is more food blessed, has turned my life upside down. Since that April day, I don’t think a day has gone by when I haven’t spent a portion of it trying to work with residents, farmers, and organizers to figure out solutions to this problem.

Our house in West Louisville that first year became the neighborhood hub, as the local children soon found out we were a house full of fresh cooked food, lively conversation and a friendly dog. But finding that food to cook was another story. In the entire neighborhood of nearly 65,000 people, there were only two major grocery stores—both Kroger’s—a grocery store chain headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, and a Sav-A-Lot. In West Louisville there is an average of only 1 full service grocer per 25,000 residents, compared to Jefferson County wide ratio of 1 per every 12,500 residents. According to the last census, about 51,000 of West Louisville’s 64,741 inhabitants are African American, or 79%. By census tract, the average median household income is $20,900, about half of the Jefferson County-wide median of $39,457. In some parts of the neighborhood, the median household income drops below $10,000, less than one-fourth of the county median.

The Louisville Metro Department of Public Health and Wellness reports in its Preliminary Food Desert Analysis that nearly 100,000 Louisville citizens live in ‘food desert’ communities characterized by extremely low-access to fresh food.  Yet, low-income West Louisville is home to the highest density of fast food restaurants in the country.  In 2007, as a result of poor access to healthy food, only 13% of African American men, and 23% of African American women in West Louisville were consuming the recommended daily servings of fruits and vegetables, compared with 24% of white men, and 34% of white women in the same area. The lack of access to fresh foods, and the ease of access to foods with lesser nutritional value, has led to extreme health disparities. In 2007, an astounding 67% of African American women and 74% of African American men living in West Louisville were obese.

Children from low-income communities of color suffer disproportionately as family’s loss knowledge about produce origin, nutritious meal preparation, and budget planning for healthy diets. As a result, Kentucky has grown the third highest childhood obesity rate in the country at 37.1% of children.

More later on the road my daughter and I traveled with the neighborhoods to meet these challenges.

Does your dog eat salad?

A few weeks ago, we had some extra salad and wanted to see if our 11 year old Chocolate lab, Cocoa, would eat it. She licked the plate. We thought it was so funny that we made this video. Watch Cocoa eat a shredded beet salad with carrots, sunflower seeds, lettuce and miso/tahini lemon dressing. See, anyone can eat fresh food if it is prepared right!

To Kvetch is Human, to Act is Divine

Southern Indiana Blueberries.....coming to our bellies sometime in June!

My assumption in moving to Orange County, Indiana, a farming community, was that the surrounding farms would, well, have food that I could buy. Boy was I wrong. At that point in time, the only easily accessible tomato anyone could get was to be found in Wal-Mart, which had moved into this small county of 20,000 people sometime around 1996, and had slowly but surely eliminated all other competition. So, besides the few Amish families in the county that would set up small retail stands on their farms, the only bet in town for purchasing a tomato, even in the middle of a southern Indiana summer, was a Mexican tomato from, yes, you got it, Wal-Mart. OK if you don't mind eating Styrofoam.  Everyone was growing corn, soybeans and hay, due to financial incentives from the government. So, we were surrounded by farmland, which had the potential to make our community somewhat self-sufficient, but it was being used to grow a commodity crop and we were forced to rely on a multinational corporation in order to eat. Crazy but true, and true for many, many rural communities in the United States.

I have to say that this wake up call was for me somewhat self serving at first. I really wanted that good food for my family and me, and was not happy to have to drive 50 miles each way to buy it. I would often sit in the parking lot of the Wal-Mart crying over the poor quality of the produce and lack of any real organic food, and being forced to shop at a store I didn’t want to support. I would watch as young moms filled baby bottles up with cola drinks outside in the parking lot. I felt unhealthy, not myself. Luckily Linda Lee from the Lazy Black Bear farm, my neighbor, had started a garden and would often let me forage. I started a small garden myself. That summer was a horrible drought, and I was lugging pails of pond water up to our garden, in my third trimester of pregnancy. The local animals would often try my produce out for themselves the very same morning I was fixing to pick it. They have perfect timing! My dog even joined in the revelry, helping herself to the one watermelon I was able to grow in that dryness.

This was for me, the beginning of a lifetime of living according to, "To kvetch is human, to act is divine." After a summer of kvetching, in 2000, I found a group of like-minded neighbors and friends who wanted to work together to honor what was good about the community, and work together to create the opportunities. We all met up at a series of gatherings hosted by Orange County Economic Development. They had gotten a grant to do a feasibility study on what would make Orange County a better place to live, with help from Ball State University. Our small group wanted to keep going, so from that, we formed a small nonprofit called Orange County HomeGrown. The original group included Andy Mahler, Melinda Sketo, Helen Vasquez, Jim Wootten, and others I am now forgetting. We organized in the Amish and English farming communities and found many farmers or wanna be farmers who felt as we did, and wanted to grow food if there was a market.

Cicada Ruth Hoyt at 8 years old, showing off our local kale and garlic. She learned to love kale while foraging for it as a baby, in Auntie Linda Lee's garden.

Many, including members of the town council of Paoli, the county seat, were hesitant to support us, and denied us the use of the courthouse lawn. They were the same group who gave the Wal-Mart the permits to locate in a flood zone, and promised that the increase in traffic into town would increase business to the Square….but you know the end of that story. They said they were afraid of the increase in traffic a farmers’ market would bring. But the nearby town of Orleans had a forward-thinking leader who supported us setting up on the Orleans Square. Fast forward to 2011. The Orange County Farmers' Market has nearly 90 vendors, operates on Saturday mornings from May until October, and was voted one of the top ten farmers' markets in the country in 2010. Amish farmers, small organic farmers, crafts, etc fill up almost two sides of the Square. Locals bring out their instruments and play every market, and anyone is invited to join in. Orange County HomeGrown now have two staff people, a market manager and an events coordinator, and some of the original board is still involved. There is a book exchange mobile, youth activities, cooking demos, yoga, zucchini boat racing, and the list goes on. This group later birthed another group that started a natural foods coop, the Lost River Coop, in downtown Paoli. When I go in there I sometimes think it may be a mirage, as it doesn’t seem real that a small seed of desire could grow into such abundance.

Journey to food justice

My daughter, Cicada Ruth Hoyt, at age 7, filling up her cup with water from our spring on Meshuganah Ranch

Welcome to my new blog. I have been working on food justice-related issues since I landed in the Ohio River Valley region in November of 1998, from the foodie capital of the Pacific Northwest: Portland, Oregon. Where I landed was in the small rural town of Paoli, Indiana, about 50 miles northwest of Louisville, Kentucky, in Orange County. Orange County is one of the most beautiful places on earth. It is home to the Hoosier National Forest, and its topography of gently rolling hills covered with farms and forests is sitting on top of one of the most extensive karst cave system in the United States. It is also considered one of the poorest communities (to government statisticians, that is) in the State of Indiana. But Orange County is rich in community spirit, and infused me with some of that good ole Hoosier spirit that sticks to me to this day.

When I arrived, the Jewish population swelled by 100%: from one family to two families, in a community of 20,000. There was one grocery store, a super Wal-Mart, which opened in 1996 and proceeded to slowly but surely eliminate all other grocery stores in town. The nearest natural food store was 50 miles away....and, as in many other rural communities in the region, your choice of restaurants included a few fast food and a few local places, including Bob's Superburger, famous for using local beef in their burgers, before eating local became the domain of the high-income hoidy toidy crowd. Potlucks are popular, but difficult for me, as the tradition in Kentuckiana is to flavor your vegetables in pork grease, taboo to a kashrut-keeping Jew.

Being a Jewish woman from New York in a town with a limited Jewish life was often a challenge for me. At various times I felt embraced by my friends there, and at other times, I felt as if I was living in my own little world that few others around me understood. Over time, I made close friends, and the locals got used to celebrating the Jewish holidays with us. Some even became my Hebrew students (referring to me by the name of Rabbi Moskowitz). People would often confuse me with the one other Jewish woman in town, even though we looked nothing alike.

But the biggest and most intriguing challenge I faced in that small rural enclave was lack of access to good, local food. That one small but very significant fact would play a huge role in flipping my world upside down, and set me on a path of becoming a food justice organizer. But that story I will save till my next entry. Stay tuned for the story of Orange County HomeGrown, or, how I learned to stop kvetching and start acting.