-
2. Accessing Food
- The MIT Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
2 Accessing Food Grocery Gaps When Peter Ueberroth, the businessman who helped facilitate the 1984 Olympics Games in Los Angeles, strode to the stage along with executives of four leading supermarket chains, there was much anticipation regarding the promises they were about to make concerning food access in inner-city Los Angeles. The 1992 civil disorders in the city had visibly shaken Mayor Tom Bradley and other policymakers, surprised Ueberroth and other business leaders, and caught the press unaware. It had also forced the political and business elites to confront the enormous economic and social problems of South, Central, and East Los Angeles, where much of the rioting had occurred. Lack of access to affordable fresh food and the loss of decent paying jobs as supermarkets abandoned these areas had become a major concern. At the July 1992 press conference , Ueberroth and the leadership of the Ralphs, Vons, Albertsons, and Smart and Final supermarket chains said they were ready to pledge that thirty-two new supermarkets would be built in the riot-torn areas. They asserted that this private sector initiative, under the auspices of the recently created Rebuild L.A. organization, headed by Ueberroth, would help turn things around in the riot-scarred city by creating thousands of new jobs and providing the fresh and affordable food that had disappeared from these communities. As Ueberroth put it, “America doesn’t solve problems unless it’s done by the private sector.” By building those supermarkets, Rebuild L.A. would demonstrate that the private sector could undo what its own actions had wrought and that “capitalism still works,” as one Rebuild L.A. board member commented about the thinking at the time.1 40 An Unjust Food System The promises, it quickly emerged, turned out to be hollow. A few supermarkets were built in the riot-torn areas, but several were later abandoned. The food retail industry continued to experience consolidation and market concentration, further eliminating some of the stores that had once served low-income neighborhoods. Vons (now owned by Safeway) decided to focus completely on a higher-end clientele and closed stores it had opened in areas affected by the riots just a few years after it made its promises in 1992. Others followed suit. As a consequence of this supermarket flight, a grocery gap had emerged, with these neighborhoods now being characterized as “food deserts”—a term first introduced in the 1990s in England to characterize areas without affordable fresh food or full-service markets.2 Fifteen years later, in three of the neighborhoods where Rebuild L.A. had promised relief, a group of community residents and students from the local middle and high schools undertook what they called a “community food assessment.” Armed with survey sheets, maps, and a checkoff list of items to look for, participants walked the streets to evaluate the food environment and surveyed venues where food was sold. The exercise, organized by Project CAFE (Community Action on Food Environments ), was designed to establish a “census of the physical location of the places that sell food,” including supermarkets, fast food and fullservice restaurants, and convenience or liquor stores. The results con- firmed the worst. Of 1,273 food-related establishments that were mapped, fast food restaurants were the most prevalent (29.6 percent of all food sources identified), followed by convenience or liquor stores (21.6 percent). Less than 2 percent were full-service supermarkets, which also meant, given the preponderance of the liquor stores that sold food, that the food products available in these communities were less healthy (with nearly no fresh foods available for purchase) and cost more. In one particularly striking illustration, the surveyors discovered that some food on the ground being consumed by pigeons appeared to be healthier than the junk food available in stores and sold by vendors on the same block, adjacent to a neighborhood elementary school. Grocery gap, even more than food desert, was indeed the appropriate term for these neighborhoods where promises were easily made but quickly abandoned.3 The Project CAFE results are not unusual, as food assessments in other cities and urban core neighborhoods have yielded similar results. In 2002, [35.172.193.238] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 21:07 GMT) Accessing Food 41 the ten-year anniversary of the riots and Rebuild L.A.’s promises, the Urban & Environmental Policy Institute (UEPI) released a report entitled “The Persistence of L.A.’s Grocery Gap” that highlighted the failure of the supermarket...