Sweet canned corn and cornstarch crowd a shelf next to loaves of white bread and Louisiana Hot Sauce at a gas station. A window display stocks an arrangement of rainbow candy—Skittles and Starbursts. Rows of knockoff red Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, Twinkies and sugary soft drinks bulge out on shelves behind the cashier. This gas station fashions itself as a convenience store or mini-mart—except customers can’t walk in. The space only fits one person, the employee.
I drive past vacant lots and empty land in Englewood, a South Side neighborhood struggling with unemployment and poverty about 20 minutes south of downtown. Englewood is short on many retail amenities and services—full-service grocery stores and restaurants included. My office used to be in Englewood so I know how convenient it is to grab fast food when there’s nothing else to eat in the neighborhood. I pass a Burger King and White Castle before pulling up in front of Chaz Food & Liquor, a corner store with a yellow facade and red lettering whose colorful motif reminds me of the Care Free Curl activator bottle. The store windows are dirty. Vertical metal bars guard the building on South Halsted. “Food” in the store name must be an ironic trick, as liquor and potato chips are the only items for sale. All of the store merchandise is behind either a glass door or a partition.
The gas station and the corner store are prominent grocery store options in a neighborhood where traditional grocers are scarce. Under different circumstances, this may not seem like a big deal. Why not pick up a candy bar or calorie-rich honey bun before pumping gas? In a free market society, why should a liquor store owner be responsible for selling any healthy food? Because the government says so. Both the corner store and the gas station accept food stamps and must provide nutritious options, according to federal requirements. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) administers the food stamp program, known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). There are a set of haphazardly enforced rules. This particular gas station ignores those requirements by failing to stock perishable goods. No fresh produce, no fresh meat, no dairy. It’s also hard to believe that a gas station could meet the standard for SNAP benefits with more than half of its sales coming from eligible staple foods. Meanwhile, at Chaz Food & Liquor, bright signage boasts that the store accepts LINK, the Illinois food stamp card. The federal government prohibits the sale of liquor with food stamps. But the store makes money by selling high-fat, salty bags of potato chips (and similar junk food), all of which can be purchased with food stamps.
Gas stations and corner stores are types of fringe stores. In Chicago, more than 2,200 authorized food stamp retailers serve low-income customers. Fourteen percent include gas stations or liquor stores. Pharmacies and dollar stores comprise another 15 percent. In neighborhoods like Englewood, corner stores are what are available. They’re not 7-Elevens. That’s much too fancy. Most corner stores lack aesthetic appeal. Garish neon “food” and/or “liquor” lettering adorn the exteriors. Junk food trumps fresh food. Grocery items tend to be overpriced, and most fruit and vegetables are canned. Corner stores are also the poster child for peddling the infamous Flamin’ Hot Cheetos—artificial red snacks that leave your fingers and tongue stained for hours. Each bag contains 26 grams of fat and a quarter of the amount of salt recommended for the entire day. In addition to the artificial coloring and flavoring, Ashley Gearhardt, a clinical psychologist at the University of Michigan, calls this snack hyperpalatable, or highly addictive: “It’s something that has been engineered so that it is fattier and saltier and more novel to the point where our body, brain and pleasure centers react to it more strongly than if we were eating, say, a handful of nuts. Going along with that, we are seeing those classic signs of addiction, the cravings and loss of control and preoccupation with it.”1
I don’t mean to be condescending by suggesting people shouldn’t be able to buy candy, cookies or liters of soda pop with food stamps. It’s perfectly legal. The point is that some stores are rewarded even when they violate USDA standards. Big money is involved. Across the country, SNAP provides $80 billion in food stamp benefits. Let’s drill that down to a micro level. Chicago’s South Side Roseland neighborhood, for example, is overrun with “fringe” grocery stores. On average, they earn $5,000 a week in food-stamp sales.
* * *
Everyone eats.
Food is a common denominator. Food is part of the human condition. Food nurtures fellowship.
Food access can be racist.
Most often segregation is examined and explained through the lens of housing and public education. But the mundane task of grocery shopping is an unlikely by-product of separate but unequal. “Food deserts”—large geographic areas with no or distant grocery stores, combined with an abundance of fast-food joints—contribute to health disparities in black communities. Picture grocery shopping at a gas station, liquor store or dollar store. Or trying to purchase (nonexistent) fruit and vegetables at a convenience store that loads its shelves with processed food. This is the grocery reality in many Chicago black neighborhoods, regardless of income. Black families earning $100,000 annually are not immune, proving that this issue goes beyond class and is squarely a race issue.2 Retailers have long had an aversion to South Side neighborhoods, regardless of residents’ incomes. We see racism, not classism, at work.
Despite the abundance of unhealthy food options, Englewood also leads the way in improving food choices. Tracts upon tracts of empty lots dot blocks upon blocks. Instead of considering the land as vacant deficits, urban agriculture disciples repurpose them as assets. Urban agriculture runs the gamut—from small community gardens to full-scale organic farming on acres of land—and growing food for self and neighbors in a sea of food deserts nourishes residents even as the long-term sustainability of such efforts remains dubious. Recently opened farmers’ markets and the opening of new grocery stores coupled with a growing appetite for healthy food have had positive impacts. Meanwhile, a debate rages among food justice advocates about what grocery models work best in a neighborhood where junk food is the current grocery favorite. Luring big-box grocers and national chains compromises local entrepreneurship. Urban agriculture may seem like sharecropping if it is not handled delicately. Corner store owners must be coaxed into upgrading their businesses. But without a doubt, no other store created quite a stir as the upmarket Whole Foods, which announced in 2013 that it would open a store in high-poverty Englewood by 2016. That announcement ignited questions about affordability and gentrification in a low-income black neighborhood.
But again, everyone eats.
And food may be an unlikely strategy to help stabilize a place like Englewood. Attempts at transforming the food ecology are still very much works in progress. But many people are trying to change the way people shop, eat and grow food in the South Side.
To be sure, the American problems of obesity and poor health cut across race, class and geographic lines. We live in a “fast-food nation” that presents an “omnivore’s dilemma.” Conflicting messages abound. First Lady Michelle Obama’s signature “Let’s Move” program wants to solve childhood obesity within a generation through empowering schools, communities and parents to guide children to eat healthier. Juxtapose that with the Big Gulps and super-size portion messages shoved down our collective throats. School lunches appease a child’s palate, while efforts to retreat from cheesy nachos and pizza have generated mixed results in school cafeterias. We also live in a foodie society that gushes over trends such as cupcakes, Sriracha sauce, bacon, gluten free and duck fat. U.S. farmers rely too much on corn and soybean subsidies, and questions persist about whether those commodities benefit the rural community and consumers. Pesticides threaten the environment. Several food thinkers, such as Mark Bittman and Michael Pollan, yearn for a national food policy to help stop preventable deaths caused by bad diets and to fix our muddled food system.3
In urban centers like Chicago, a broken food access system is about more than too many potato chips; it’s a public health issue. In 2006, Chicago-based researcher Mari Gallagher published a report—which popularized the term “food desert”—titled “Examining the Impact of Food Deserts on Public Health in Chicago” that found that they exist almost exclusively in black areas. Simply put, in these areas, the nearest grocery store is roughly twice the distance as the nearest fast-food restaurant, which overlaps with higher rates of obesity in those neighborhoods.
“All of these findings point to one conclusion: communities that have no or distant grocery stores, or have an imbalance of healthy food options, will likely have increased premature death and chronic health conditions, holding other influences constant . . . it is clear that food deserts, especially those with an abundance of fast food options, pose serious health and wellness challenges to the residents who live within them and to the City of Chicago as a whole,” Gallagher’s report said.4
In Englewood, the death rates from stroke, diabetes-related illnesses and coronary heart disease are higher than city averages. According to Gallagher’s report, people who live in majority white, Latino or diverse tracts travel the shortest distance to any type of grocery store. The report concluded that more than 20 percent, or 550,000 Chicagoans—a substantial number of them single mothers and children—live in food deserts.
Gallagher updated her findings in 2011 with a progress report. In five years, the population living in food deserts had been reduced by 166,428, with that number moving to what she dubbed a “food oasis”—a place with an uptick in healthy options. Still, 70 percent of the total food desert population is black. Gallagher concluded: “Unless conditions improve, we predict continued premature death and suffering of Chicago Food Desert residents from diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease and certain kinds of cancer. We also predict continued high rates of obesity among adults and children. . . . [T]hose who suffer most will be African American adults and children.”5
Whole Foods
In a peculiar way, Whole Foods and Walmart are similar national chains, albeit on opposite ends of the economic scale. Both have an aversion to unions. Both have opened in places outside their demographic sweet spot, and fears, denunciations and head scratching have commenced.
Highbrow Whole Foods (pet name “Whole Paycheck”) lures yuppies with a penchant for its organic produce and its bevy of artisan cheeses, natural health products and free-range meats. In some stores, you can push your shopping cart while sipping a craft beer or Sauvignon Blanc. Whole Foods gets pilloried for nurturing food elitism—with the sticker-shock receipt as proof. Shopping bags inscribed with “Kale Is the New Collard” further accusations of haughtiness.
Lowbrow Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, oozes all the charm of a drab strip mall. The discount chain commands the market by offering competitively priced or, better yet, cheap wares. The big-box operator routinely comes under fire for not paying employees fair wages and hiring undocumented workers—and then turning them over to authorities. Walmart represents the homogenization of suburbia and rural life. Thanksgiving Day is barely a holiday for shoppers and employees; Black Friday commences before the turkey gets cold.
Whole Foods and Walmart eventually tapped out their respective core bases: affluent urban areas and rural and suburban markets. Hence, both have made new urban forays, viewed as plucky moves. Walmart originally met resistance during the 2000s in union stronghold Chicago. It took years for the Arkansas-based company to gain city approval to build a store, which resulted after Mayor Richard M. Daley overrode the city council. To shore up support, Walmart officials used the hooks of food deserts and lack of jobs in South and West Side neighborhoods. Consequently, stores have opened in the very same places devastated by deindustrialization and unemployment. Englewood seemed to be a place where Walmart would affix its blue font and golden spark logo. Instead, Whole Foods shocked Chicagoans when it announced that it would open an 18,000-square-foot store in Englewood.
Walter Robb, co–chief executive of Whole Foods, made the announcement in Englewood at Kennedy-King College, one of the city’s two-year colleges that has a lauded culinary program.
“We realize the first step is to listen to what people in Englewood actually want. We know that we can do certain things but we know without partnering with the community, it doesn’t really amount to anything. This is not a helicopter-in drop, build a store. This is a situation where we start to meet people and learn and listen to what’s needed here,” Robb said.6
Michael Bashaw, Midwest regional president of Whole Foods, responded to questions about affordability in a neighborhood that has 25 percent unemployment and 42 percent of residents living below the poverty level by saying: “We think this is an opportunity to bring a store to a community that would like us to be there and we would like to be a partner with the community. Some items may be somewhat cheaper and some will be similarly priced. We do competitive pricing analysis constantly. And we know that we are more competitively priced than what some people would perceive based on identical items.” Executives touted the private-in-house 365 Everyday Value line as being competitively priced.7
The immediate response to the announcement resulted in comments sections of news stories filled with race-baiting about residents stealing from the store, killing each other and continuing to eat unhealthy sticky buns and soda pop. The Economist quoted an Englewood resident saying it is easier to buy guns and drugs than food in the neighborhood—fueling the stereotype of guns and violence as all-day, everyday norms.8
Twitter lost it. Tweets included racist musings from whites and low-expectation reactions from blacks. “@WholeFoods is opening a store in Englewood, Chicago. . . . Whoever thought this is a good idea has gotta be on drugs.” “@WholeFoods is making plans to open a store in Englewood. Chicago will have the healthiest gangbangers in the nation.” “They’re building a whole foods in Englewood. One of the worst pars [sic] of Chicago. Foolish.”9
Shortly after the Whole Foods press conference, I read a Facebook post from a black person predicting that “niggas have been given notice” that they will be kicked out of Englewood by 2016. Gentrification jitters fluttered at the idea of Whole Foods entering the neighborhood. But it’s not Pottery Barn. It’s food. Everyone eats. A perverse type of reverse racism surfaced during the hullabaloo of the announcements: Poor black people and black people, in general, didn’t deserve a Whole Foods; let them cling to their honey buns and Flamin’ Hots.
Englewood is part of a broader strategy for Whole Foods, which has expanded its reach by committing to food deserts and underserved “inner-city” markets. In 2013, the Austin-based chain won over Detroiters, making it the first national grocer to open in the city in years. Food justice advocates partnered with the chain to ensure employment opportunities and healthy-cooking classes. Local products line the shelves, including a hibiscus tea that Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Line chef created. These days the chef’s great-granddaughter is mass-producing the recipe in Detroit. On grand opening day, the Detroit store sold more produce than any other store that opened in the history of Whole Foods. In New Orleans, a Whole Foods anchored a local fresh food retailer initiative to bring healthy eating and economic revitalization to a corridor with commercial challenges after Hurricane Katrina. A Whole Foods broke ground in Newark, New Jersey, an area dogged by images of urban decay, in the summer of 2015.
In fall 2014, I met Whole Foods co–chief executive Walter Robb at a press conference in the community garden of Miles Davis Academy, a public school in Englewood. Whole Foods Foundation pledged $20,000 to eight local public schools to support their gardens to help schoolchildren learn to eat healthier. Robb, dressed casually in jeans, engaged with students who cheerfully showed off their lemon sorrel and oregano. Robb and I chatted briefly about Englewood and various food dynamics in the neighborhood.
While many black neighborhoods are overrun with crappy food, there’s nothing special about eating “farm to table.” Black people have done it. Even on the South Side of Chicago, my father had a hobby backyard garden in the 1980s where he grew tomatoes, greens, radishes, peppers and a dozen other vegetables. We were organic and didn’t even know it. Leftovers were put in plastic bags and given to neighbors and family members. I learned that, at the end of summer, we could take green tomatoes, wrap them in newspaper and put them in a dark area of our basement to turn them red.
My pleasant exchange with Robb led to a phone interview a few months later about Whole Foods’ position in the grocery ecology. Robb is keenly aware of the store’s image as a purveyor of white elitism. He told me that several years earlier, he started reflecting on those critiques and wanted to know why. “Natural food or whole food—with a small ‘w’—in its truest form is really just foods of different cultures and different communities. I mean, you’re talking about different grains that have been eaten on the planet for forever, right? And if you look at traditional diets of different cultures, there’s nothing elitist about them at all. In fact, in some ways, this whole [healthy eating] movement began with looking at simplifying things and looking back to traditional whole foods, traditional whole diets.”10
Robb’s journey in trying to change the elite paradigm of Whole Foods began with his friend USDA secretary Tom Vilsack, who took him to Detroit in 2009. There Robb learned the health disparities between the black city and the white suburbs. He says finding a way to serve broader communities became a moral issue.
Robb approached Whole Foods senior staff and his co–chief executive and asked for a bit of faith and trust in his pitch. “As I started learning about Detroit and seeing what was happening there, this seemed like a very constructive step for us to take as a company and a direction in which we could make a contribution. And the more I learned, the deeper it went, the further it went, the further it took us into elitism and racism and cultural relevancy and community relationships and how people perceive companies and all these areas we unfolded in our journey in Detroit,” Robb told me.
Robb learned that black Detroiters didn’t need lectures from white people on how to eat healthy. He’s also had black people tell him that he shouldn’t make the store a “Half Foods”; he should ensure the store is stocked with quality products because no one wants a bootleg version. When Mayor Rahm Emanuel called Robb to consider a Chicago location, Robb drove around Englewood and observed the wilderness of open urban food-less space. But he bristles at the term “food desert”: “I think it’s insulting to the communities to sort of suggest that they have nothing going on, when in fact there’s a tremendous amount going on. It’s a term that needs to go away, that needs to be replaced by something that’s much more positive and constructive.”
Robb explained that Whole Foods isn’t embarking on a charity mission by opening stores in underserved areas. In Detroit and Englewood, the business model evolved because the real estate costs were much lower in their respective parts of town, which, in turn, makes items in the grocery aisles cheaper.
“But it is a business. Detroit is profitable and I expect Englewood will be a successful business as well. I know people are making fun of us and saying all sorts of things and I don’t really care because in the end, we’re putting real money down, we’re creating real jobs, we’re making really new suppliers. As long as it’s done respectfully in a way that’s culturally relevant and that’s guided by the community, I think it’s a positive thing,” Robb explained.
That said, Whole Foods doesn’t plan to be ubiquitous. Chicago, Detroit, New Orleans and Newark are just four stores in grocery-challenged areas. The company predicts 500 stores globally by 2017, and the longer-term goal is to have 1,200 in the United States. “But [opening stores in food-challenged areas is] a meaningful part of our growth because it’s so purpose driven, right, intentional around taking our purpose and trying to make it real. And you know, I said in Detroit, we have brought a point of light to the city of Detroit. But I hope that we’re a large enough, big enough, open enough company to recognize that Detroit is a point of light for us. Or, in other words, I hope we can learn as much as we can contribute,” Robb concluded.
A little more than a year after the store opened in the Midtown neighborhood, Slate writer Tracie McMillian challenged whether Whole Foods could change the way poor people in Detroit eat. “At the prices I saw this fall, it’s hard to see how eating a healthy diet, with lots of produce, would be an affordable option if you were to shop primarily at Whole Foods.”11 McMillian found that fresh items were 58 percent more expensive and packaged items were 4 percent more costly compared to other area stores.
But Robb is undeterred. For him, shopping is voluntary, and Whole Foods’ presence is not causing anyone to give up choices. And he maintains that in some instances, there’s a trade-off in buying the cheapest or the most expensive food.
“I’m under no illusion that we’re the guiding light, but I definitely think it’s been a positive step and a constructive step and it’s part of what needs to happen here. And I see this as being a step in my own personal learning and growth as a citizen, as what I hope will be a more multicultural society that has more tolerance and is accepting and understanding of different situations. So that’s what I’ve experienced. And my hope for Whole Foods is as we take these steps, we stretch, we bend, we learn and how that will help our company to improve is still to be seen.”
Naomi Davis, the founder of Blacks in Green, a local nonprofit dedicated to environmental principles in black communities, shakes her head at Whole Foods.
“It is a Trojan horse for the gentrification of Englewood,” she told me.12 “It’s been a long time coming. It’s a plan that was hatched a long time ago that’s coming into fruition.” Davis explained that the new street lamps and street paving from years earlier are her telltale signs. “If they [the city] had invested that money into an academy for incubating neighborhood businesses, you’d have a completely different neighborhood.” The city did invest in a new community college with a culinary program. “But the private side is a luxury grocery? If economic development isn’t structured to increase household income, what the hell is it doing?
“Whole Foods hasn’t gotten its lie straight. They say [the Englewood store] is not philanthropy. But then suddenly it’s all about ‘we want to make sure our food is affordable.’ How do you do that within your business model? Nobody has explained,” Davis continued.
Food justice advocate and Englewood resident Sonya Harper disagrees. She told me that, growing up in Englewood, her family never shopped in the neighborhood. It’s not something she thought about. It was as habitual as eating dinner together. Harper says Whole Foods has made a meaningful connection in Englewood in a way no other grocer has.
Practically speaking, Whole Foods’ presence is simple.
“It’ll increase our options by one,” Harper told me.13
I attended one of the early community meetings an Englewood neighborhood group held with a Whole Foods representative. Residents asked about affordability, but the prevailing sentiment was that people were happy something new was coming to their often-maligned neighborhood. Jobs. More food options.
* * *
On a narrow, one-way street, Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls” blasts out of a one-story home in Englewood. It’s a Saturday morning, and the song is part of a soundtrack for weekend chores. On the same street—smack in the middle of a residential block—Growing Home’s Wood Street Urban Farm celebrates an open house. Baskets of collard greens, arugula, scallions, radishes, kale, beets and turnips bask under the warm autumn sun. Swarms of bees circle the bounty on this September day. Homemade apple coleslaw soaked in lemon and honey sits out on tables along with freshly made guacamole and a black bean salad. I overhear a woman tell her friend that she would never eat that kind of food before coming here.
The year-round urban farm opened in 2007 in the shadow of a viaduct on a vacant Englewood lot. Several years later, it became the city’s first USDA-certified organic farm. Several warm hoop houses ensure harvests throughout the year, even in the frigid winter. Every Wednesday in the summer and fall, farmers set up a market, selling everything from purple basil to lemon cucumbers.
This is a picture of urban agriculture.
In 2005, Englewood residents designed a quality-of-life plan for their neighborhood. In the quest to uplift the community via schools, housing and economic development, urban agriculture surfaced as a twofold strategy: employment engine and method to increase the availability of fresh produce. That led the nonprofit Growing Home, Inc. to expand its agriculture-based job training program to Wood Street. The transitional employment is aimed at helping people who were formerly incarcerated, homeless and overcoming substance abuse. Trainees learn to farm in Englewood and on a farm 75 miles south of Chicago. More than 90 percent of Growing Home graduates go on to full-time permanent employment.
DeAndre Brooks already had a passion for food when he started at the Wood Street farm in 2012. He had tired of going in and out of jail on gun and drug charges. While working for a carpet-cleaning business, Brooks cooked dinners on the side and delivered fresh catfish, jerk chicken and pork chop meals to beauty salons and currency exchanges. A friend told him about Growing Home, and after he finished his training, the nonprofit hired him full-time. As a crew leader, he grows and harvests at the farm.
“It’s a desert over here,” Brooks said of Englewood. “If you don’t try to push out the word of how food should be, you’ll never know. All you know is what you see in your local market.” He’s slowly weaned his children off Flamin’ Hots and introduced them to Swiss chard. Brooks’s long-term goal is to have his own food truck with soul food without beef and pork.14
Opportunities beyond the Growing Home farm are important to Sonya Harper. She returned to her community to do outreach for the social enterprise up until 2015. As a black woman, sometimes her work presents conflicts. She’s a convert to the urban agriculture movement and agrees with the premise, but she’s irked that most people excited about urban ag in Englewood aren’t from the community or people of color.
Harper is part of the grassroots Grow Greater Englewood coalition, which is trying to act as a food-system watchdog as well as drum up community interest. When one local foundation doled out grant money, Harper says no one from Englewood applied. And she doesn’t just want residents toiling on the land owned by others. “My vision is that I would like to see at least half of any urban ag projects be done by any entity in the community with black people. I’m just going to say it,” she told me.
Urban agriculture is in demand. The city has embarked on a long-term green and healthy neighborhood initiative over the next couple of decades that includes urban ag. But the discipline of urban ag is very skills based, so many larger nonprofits with direct experience are signing up; and many of those groups aren’t black-run. Some efforts already have gone belly up, such as a couple of farmers’ markets and a former city bus that loaded up with fresh produce and drove around food deserts. In 2015 the bus hit the streets again with a new business plan. Other programs rely on subsidies and grants to stay afloat. And as utopian as growing greens on vacant land sounds, how does someone earn a living wage harvesting collards?
That’s the quandary for L. Anton Seals Jr., a community activist who serves on the Grow Greater Englewood coalition with Harper.
“Developing urban ag may be a Trojan horse in our community. There’s a reason why we [in the United States] have large agribusinesses. [Farming] takes a long time. If you want to grow something, you’re not on your time. Seeds won’t grow faster because you want them to. We live in a midwestern city—November through March—you’re not doing that.” He also works with the Eat to Live Garden in Englewood that is supported in part by a North Side community farm. Seals says the urban ag movement focuses too much on employing rather than using the tracts of land for black self-determination, so that blacks can grow their own crops. Eat to Live hopes to foster small business incubators. “What I envision is black-owned stores offering locally sourced fruits and vegetables from Eat to Live—folks making stuff and putting in stores; soap, shea butters, pies all in one place.”15
Seals told me that he understands that behavior has to be changed to get people to shop at urban ag and that not all growers will be black. “When it comes to advocacy, I’m still struggling with this. You want access but then big places want to come to Englewood.” He paused, showing his own sense of conflict. “It’s still being figured out. There hasn’t been a big pool of money because the yield is so low.”
Meanwhile, Chicago’s last black-owned full-service grocery store closed in 2008. It was in Chatham. After 25 years, the owners wanted to move on, and their sons expressed no interest in the business. Two Arab businessmen bought Chatham Food Center.
Language around food access is tricky. On one hand, the term “food desert” is a potent visual descriptor. On the other, it paints a negative image. “To me, when you think of a desert, you think of something dry and desolate and nothing happening, and it ignores the assets that are already there. When you take that approach, it’s a sexy term and people latch onto it. It doesn’t boil down for a sound bite. It made it easier for people to come in and say we’ll give water for your desert,” Seals explained. By “people” here he means corporations.
Naomi Davis is a transplanted New Yorker who lives in Chicago and often waxes about her childhood in a middle-class black Queens, New York, neighborhood awash in small businesses. She’s a big proponent of neighborhood-owned businesses and keeping cash flows and profits within a community. Local models and support for mom-and-pop grocers have been overlooked, she told me. Davis believes the big-box or corporate model is counterproductive for black communities because that model extracts wealth from neighborhoods. “Why would Michelle Obama get behind fake grocery stores to come to the neighborhood, such as Walgreens?” The Chicago-based drugstore chain—a staple in any neighborhood, including underserved ones—has committed to being an oasis in a food desert. “I don’t have a particular beef with Walgreens, but enterprises like Walmart are not the solution—period or exclamation point. And yet they’ve been touted from the White House on down, congratulated. An apple is $1.39 at Walgreens. One apple. That’s not a grocery store; that’s a convenience store at the corporate level.”
* * *
The corner is a place to talk shit, drink, socialize, chill.
In the song “The Corner,” Common rapped: “We talk play lotto & buy German beers” and “It’s so black packed with action that’s affirmative.” The Last Poets chimed in: “The corner was our Rock of Gibraltar, our Stonehenge / . . . Our testimonial to freedom, to peace and to love.”
The intersection of race and food is also at the corner.
On West 69th Street in Englewood, a small corner store is near a heavily trafficked corner next to an empty, garbage-strewn lot. The store’s name isn’t even on the building, but plenty of pictures of products are: popcorn, meat, milk, detergent and juice. Security bars adorn the outside. The owner painted them blue, but the effect is still a prison feel. Inside, the front of the store is packed with candy, chips and artificially flavored drinks. The floor tile is cracked. When it rains, the ceiling leaks, dripping onto those cracked tiles.
A store like this can be found on any street in any food desert. Despite their unsavory reputation, corner stores are important in such neighborhoods because they are the existing economic food model. That model isn’t inherently bad. The problem is that these stores perpetuate unhealthy eating. When run properly, they can fill in food gaps. Corner stores don’t have to be de facto junk-food depots.
The Inner-City Muslim Action Network (IMAN) understands the corner store paradigm and the intersection of race and health. Black neighborhoods, Arab store owners. Community organizers launched Muslim Run in 2010 to appeal to the sensibilities of Arab Muslim store owners: sell less junk, stock healthy food.
“Oftentimes we think about Latinos and blacks, but what about Arabs and blacks, right? Arabs are operating in these neighborhoods 60, 70 hours a week. And also, what does it really mean to be a store that is owned by Arabs, Muslims?” Shamar Hemphill, who’s black and an IMAN organizer, asked me. “Sociologists always talk about this middleman minority complex. These stores operate within that same realm if we’re not pushing them to do that or anything beyond just my store’s making some dollars. It’s beyond a community obligation, it’s a human rights violation if you have a store and you’re operating it at low standards.”16
When Muslim Run first started, IMAN interviewed Arab store owners and black residents. Racial stereotypes peppered responses from both groups. The former thought black customers were shady, and the latter thought Arab business owners treated them like shit. Many owners argued that they didn’t stock fresh produce because people wouldn’t buy it. After IMAN doled out grant money to stores for refrigeration and fresh apples and bananas, people actually did buy them.
At the 69th Street location, the corner store owner replaced candy in the front with produce from local urban agriculture endeavors. IMAN has adopted the store. Organizers want to help it stock organic, halal meat and ensure that there’s a consistent rotation of fruit in the front in addition to injecting some aesthetic appeal. IMAN believes corner stores can be beautiful: no metal bars, no bulletproof glass. Positive interactions between black and brown people.
“There’s a culture where people come in and may not immediately feel like—yo, why do you have this here? Why is this there? Why is this old? Why isn’t this clean?” Hemphill said of the store. “But what we’re doing is working through some of the best business strategies and practices to begin to show them—because remember, they don’t have a model or they don’t have a business degree to really show them. We’re going to have a business liaison come in every week that’s a resident from the community that will check in with about looking at the products, what’s old, what’s right. Remove this off the floor, set this here.”
Ashraf Asmail is from Palestine and moved to the United States in 2003. He co-owns the corner store with his brother, who opened it originally. At IMAN’s urging, Asmail agreed to experiment with selling fresh produce. His English is a little broken, but I ask him why he decided to participate.
“Because I thought this is a real good idea. At the end of the day, this is junk and because, for me, I know, I’m a human and I study nutrition, okay? Real food is better than something junk. The vegetable and the fruits is rich, you know? From one apple you can survive. But not from a candy or from cigarettes or whatever,” Asmail explained.17
He says people have definitely been buying the fruit. “If I make my cost and I’m losing nothing and everything’s moving fast, I got two benefits. I’m not losing nothing and they got something healthy and fresh.”
On a weekday afternoon, IMAN showed up at the no-name 69th Street corner store. A group of visiting Malaysian musicians lined up in front and beat their drum to incredulous onlookers. The store has hosted community meetings and eventually will offer cooking demonstrations in back.
“What we’re trying to do is show the viability of what we can use—how we can use our spaces, our corner stores. More than just stores where we purchase food. We know it’s the intersection in cities like Chicago. Most people come and hang out, and what we want to do is give them a whole different type of experience, and we want to show the store owner that he can utilize the space,” Hemphill explained.
Uplifting corner stores as a food access solution is logical. Durable chains Aldi and Food-4-Less have an Englewood presence, but traditional grocers eschew neighborhoods like this one. Therefore, why beg them to open? Corner stores can be bright as a sunflower and as nutritious as a honey crisp apple.
When I moved to the integrated South Side neighborhood Hyde Park, I had walkable grocery options. There is a full-service grocery store and a lovely corner store a block away with a clean interior and kind staff. The shelves are stocked. The halal store sells an array of olive oils, lentils and spices. If that seems too “exotic,” consider the coffee machine, fresh meat, shiny fruit and sticks of appropriately priced butter. And yes, the store carries Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and other chips, but they aren’t the dominant display. My own understanding of corner stores and their neighborhood benefits expanded once I lived near some with ample variety.
That wasn’t always my reality. I used to live in a food desert in Bronzeville, but because I had a car, I could drive to get the groceries I needed. If I had stayed in my neighborhood, my option would have been the junk-food corner store variety with dubious-looking meat.
I also shop at Whole Foods. The store may have changed public discourse about food like no other grocer, bringing terms like “organic,” “artificial additives” and “genetically modified foods” to people’s consciousness. But the chain is nectar for white yuppies. That pesky “Whole Paycheck” label is not for naught. I’ve vacillated between loving the store and giving it the side-eye. In the past, I’ve yelled at myself, an admitted impulse shopper, for spending $150 on two bags of food. And for a spell I rejected Whole Foods because I felt its premise cultivated elitism around healthy eating. Yet excellent customer service, smoked gouda spread, eggnog gelato and English cheddar cheese seduce me.
When I lived in a food desert, I had car privilege to shop elsewhere. When I moved to a food oasis, I experienced life in a healthy neighborhood.
In my years of reporting on food access issues in Chicago, I learned that building new grocery stores isn’t the only answer. Food justice advocates promote more. Nutritional education must be a component in neighborhoods where fresh produce on store shelves isn’t the norm to change shopping habits and behaviors. A number of farmers’ markets offer cooking classes to teach people how to sauté green vegetables. Opportunities for community engagement, from cooking demonstrations to working with mothers of infants on public assistance, have emerged. These days public schools promote healthier school lunches with student cooking contests or campus gardens. Each year food stamp spending at farmers’ markets increases in Illinois and the Midwest as a whole. But putting a dent in food deserts and improving health outcomes is going to require a long-term strategy. The demand for fresh food won’t happen overnight.
* * *
Chicago’s meatpacking district sits in the western shadow of downtown. In 1990, Oprah planted her Harpo studio flag there and changed the desolate warehouse strip into a funky turf of glittering restaurants, champagne salons on cobblestone alleys and art galleries in lofts.
One Friday night, I met up with my friend Jenny at the newish Green Street Smoked Meats. Reviews raved about the meats. We arrived at 5 p.m., when the spot opened, and already a line had formed for the cafeteria-style service. The atmosphere is shabby chic, rustic barnyard. No servers take your orders, and you eat off napkins and paper plates. An early-bird crowd consisted of families with babies in fashionable strollers. As the night progressed, groups of friends and dates gathered at the communal tables, tearing apart meat with their fingers. Jenny and I ordered salmon, a slab of ribs, fried pickles and broccoli salad. When the cashier rang everything up to $51, I thought I misheard. The food tasted good, not great. Even though I knew it was in a high-rent area and part of a “scene,” I still couldn’t get over how much everything cost. I’m not cheap, but something bothered me about the experience. Jenny summed it up: “It’s no Lem’s.”
Lem’s Bar-B-Q is a South Side takeout institution. Rib tip and hot link smoke billows down the entire block. A whole slab costs $25 and comes with fries. I have no idea if Lem’s wants to expand. People who dine at Green Street are part of a foodie scene. Both restaurants exist in their respective enclaves with their respective clienteles, but what nags me is that food gaps in Chicago aren’t limited to grocery stores. Those gaps seep into other areas as well.
For example, the South Side is short on sit-down, non-diner restaurants compared to the North Side, but there’s no shortage of comfort food. Southwest Side Latino neighborhoods boast the best taquerias. Never mind all the white fried chicken joints spilling over downtown and the North Side. We have Harold’s Chicken Shack, a venerable chain that masters the sublime mild sauce, all over the South Side. Food Network’s Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives highlighted the wrong fried shrimp place in Chicago, Big & Little’s. Haire’s Gulf Shrimp on South Vincennes runs circles around the competition, and it always tickles me to read white Yelp reviewers who consciously note how far they drove to get, in their estimation, the best local fried shrimp. At my job, we once conducted a tummyache-inducing doughnut crawl as part of a radio experiment to pinpoint the best independent-owned shop in Chicago. The underdog winner hailed from the Roseland neighborhood on the South Side—and it cost a third less than all the doughnut du jour eateries that have popped up in the city.
Perhaps the division between North and South Side restaurants shouldn’t be judged by which one has the most white-linen tablecloths, craft cocktails or number of servers. But those disparities resonate with me for myriad reasons: lack of capital for would-be entrepreneurs, co-opting of food deemed as ethnic and perceptions some have about crossing their own mental/physical boundary within the city for savory sustenance.
Orrin Williams thinks so too.
As a black urban ag vet, he and his partners want the South Side Washington Park Perry Street Farm to stand in contrast to other local programs. Located on the other side of the expressway separating Englewood and Washington Park, Perry Street celebrated its first harvest in 2014. Kale and watermelon grew on the one-acre plot. Across the street is a single-family home that serves as the farm’s headquarters. It stands alone in the middle of an open field. No other houses are on the block.
The erstwhile living room walls are chalkboard on one side and dry-erase boards on the other. Scribbled on them are the phrases “South Side renaissance,” “community economics” and “impact soil.” As Williams and I talk, I can hear the gurgling of aquaponics. In the building, old water bottles grow basil and lettuce with the help of pet store fish.
Williams wants people to be farmers and make a livable wage by doing so. He doesn’t knock the job training urban ag initiatives but told me: “We don’t want to be a workforce-development program. We want people to come with skills that we can put to use.”18
Perry Street harvested another crop in 2015, but all the rest is in the infancy stage as grants are applied for and different funding models are explored. The strategy is to build up the community via a food system.
“How long are we going to be dependent on California with its droughts? That’s food insecurity.” Like L. Anton Seals Jr. and Sonya Harper, Williams understands that growing and selling fresh fruits and vegetables may not be enough to create living-wage jobs. How can bagged lettuce, pies and kale chips be transformative?
But a grocery store co-op could be. Williams says Perry Street Farm is creating a small village that mirrors the way other neighborhoods place value on local small businesses, not chains. For Williams, a nearby cafe could buy its herbs and salad mix from the farm. The South Side could have its share of locally sourced cafes and restaurants that are warm and inviting—more than takeout. The goal of the Perry Street Farm creators is to use a food-based enterprise system to grow small businesses while providing fresh food.
There are a great many ideas about how to fix our segregated food system: improving corner stores, holding grocery stores accountable, promoting entrepreneurship, holding food stamp retailers more accountable and educating consumers around healthy food choices. No one way is going to cure food ills; a multipronged strategy is necessary ultimately to change the way people shop, eat, regard their health and grow food.
This is nothing lofty or esoteric. Because, after all, everyone eats.