Food access is not the answer

Today's LA Times article on food access and obesity confirms what I have been suggesting throughout this entire blog.

Eating healthy is a question of having money, not of having access to food outlets. Poor folks are going to buy the cheapest food even if a conventional grocery store with healthier options exists. The quickest way to improve people's diet is to increase their income. 

The food movement up to this point has centered on technical fixes to obesity - namely, increasing access to healthy food - but what is needed are interventions that combine community economic development with increased food access. Main Street Birmingham and Project Hopewell are developing public markets in Southwest Birmingham for precisely this reason, but this project is only one piece of the solution.

Birmingham needs comprehensive community economic development beginning with food production through urban farms and possibly aquaponics cooperatives, proceeding to value-added products such as cakes, breads, and jams, and ending with the public markets that are being created.  Comprehensive projects like these will increase access to healthy food, raise incomes, provide employment, and integrate food within every aspect of community life.

These projects are inherently political in the sense that they challenge dominant economic development paradigms that center on financial power, instead devolving control to individual entrepreneurs and in ideal cases, worker-owners of a cooperative.  This stands in stark contrast to the ill-conceived and ineffective focus on access.

The pieces are in place to do real community economic development around food, and the time is now to shift the movement from technical fixes to revolutionary projects.