“It is important to understand that food insecurity and hunger are not the same thing,” says Charles Platkin, Ph.D., J.D., MPH, executive director for the Hunter College NYC Food Policy Center. “Someone can be food insecure without being ‘hungry.’ They are not interchangeable.” The USDA defines food insecurity as “a household-level economic and social condition of limited access to food, while hunger is an individual-level physiological condition that may result from food insecurity.” Even if a city does have a big chain grocery store, it may be 20 to 30 miles from a given neighborhood, says Max Scoppettone, director of research and development of the sustainable environment design firm Plant Group. Since most people living in urban areas rely on public transportation to get around, accessing these supermarkets is inconvenient and may be costly. As a result, they must rely on corner stores or bodegas, which don’t always offer fresh or nourishing food. Although cities are more commonly associated with food deserts, Scoppettone says they can also exist in rural areas. “These communities are an effect of social inequality,” BB Arrington, certified nutrition coach and sustainability educator, tells mbg. This name gets at this unequal way the food system is distributed along racial, geographical, faith-related, and economic lines. In other words, food apartheids are not a product of happenstance. They are a product of the long-standing systemic injustice. According to one 2018 study, structural racism1, or “the totality of ways in which societies foster racial discrimination, via mutually reinforcing inequitable systems,” has created both social and economic disadvantages for Black and brown communities. These disparities drive higher rates of food insecurity among racial and ethnic groups. “Lack of access to food has a cascading effect: malnourishment, health-related issues due to challenging eating patterns, the call for external medical/nutritional support, which is most often financially out of reach,” BB explains. Bringing more health food stores into predominantly Black and brown communities won’t solve the problem, nor will a single community garden or educational workshops on health, she says. “The greater issues of race, economics, geography, in relationship to the cultures that have been created as a result, need to be taken into consideration.” Traditional large-scale farming is exacerbating these issues by contributing to land destruction and deforestation, polluting water sources, depleting soil health, and lowering air quality. According to BB, economically challenged communities are usually the first to be affected by these climate factors (see also: environmental racism). That said, “as much as the small-scale approaches are needed with the community gardens, we shouldn’t ignore this larger existing food infrastructure,” Austin says, adding education and policy changes are crucial to create sustainable solutions. This means that as an individual, voting in policymakers who have food justice on the agenda is another way to help support change. Still, “you can’t be an outside organization coming into the community and telling them what to eat,” he says. Doing so may only fuel mistrust. “You need to build on the existing culture and food cultures that are out there and help support the plant life for those systems.” Along with finding access to land, educating younger generations about the more involved processes of agriculture—including water and soil quality testing—can have big impacts down the line and may encourage future careers in agriculture. “I believe in the green collar economy as a practical way to get people working and get good wages while building the sustainable infrastructure that we’re going to need for the next hundred years, or however long,” he says. Teaching proper soil management practices and alternative land management techniques, like regenerative agriculture or permaculture, can also help manage (and potentially reverse) the negative impacts of climate change. “It also increases biodiversity of the soil, which is critical for human survival and can be employed on lands unsuitable for other agriculture,” functional medicine doctor Mark Hyman, M.D., previously told mbg. These practices, combined with equitable policy, can help create long-term food security and resiliency.
