"An Earth Day Solution For Urban Food Deserts"

"Veronica Kyle of Chicago is not happy, but she is hopeful. Her upset stems from knowing that too many blacks and Hispanics living in urban settings must travel far to purchase fresh, nutritional, appropriately priced fruit, vegetables and meat products. During that trip, they traverse food deserts. She says those are neighborhoods that major supermarkets have effectively redlined, where shops sell 20 fried chicken wings for a dollar, where there are too many liquor and fast-food stores. Where there are far too many dialysis centers and where too many amputees, the victims of poor diets, walk the streets.

Kyle is an outreach coordinator for Faith in Place, an umbrella organization of more than 500 Illinois religious congregations united 'to promote clean energy & sustainable farming.' Speaking optimistically, Kyle declares, 'there are black people getting serious about changing this unhealthy paradigm.'

For more than a decade, across the country, there's been a growing network of African-American locavores, or farmers, vendors, and fans of naturally or organically cultivated vegetables and livestock grown or produced within a 150-mile radius of markets. They meet up in some of the most unlikely places, from Brooklyn, N.Y., to the southeastern part of the country to Wisconsin to Chicago to northern California. Many of the farmers, descendants of blacks who fled sharecropping and segregation during the Great Migration, now sell victuals at farmers markets that are becoming fixtures in black neighborhoods. The farmers also sell to food co-ops in the same areas. Some supply produce to black-owned (and other) restaurants, as well as well-known natural food supermarkets."

Frank McCoy reports for The Root April 22, 2010.

See Also:

"Fighting the Food Justice Fight, One Veggie at a Time" (The Root)