The issue that I chose to investigate and learn more about this semester is food insecurity and injustice. In my Global Public Health class, we’ve recently been discussing race and how people of color tend to have unequal access to health care and healthy foods, and as a result of that, have poorer health as compared to those with easy access to food and health care.
I think one of the root causes of food injustice in Columbus is the redlining that happened in our city back in the 1930’s. The banks were done giving mortgages to people who couldn’t pay for for their house, resulting in foreclosure. When the city decided to section off parts of the city that they thought would be good places to offer mortgages to people in- affluent suburbs that were predominately white – it forever changed the ways those neighborhoods would be looked at and what resources they would have access to.
There were four categories that each neighborhood could fit into: Type A (most desirable for mortgages), Type B (still desirable), Type C (declining), or Type D (highest risk). Places like Hilltop, Franklinton, and South Linden are areas on the original map that appeared red. Those are also the places where some people live more than 10 miles away from the nearest grocery store. Many of these people don’t have cars, and many families have children. Say a single mom has no where for her children to go but she needs to go to the grocery store. She can’t ride the bus but has to walk there. She probably won’t end up going to the store to get health nutritious food for her children because it’s just not realistic to walk 10 miles there and 10 miles back. She has no other choice but to find food at the nearest place to her. That food likely won’t have the nutrients that her children need to live long, healthy lives.
Some of the biggest challenges to overcoming the redlining issue is the fact that it’s already been set in stone. These high risk neighborhoods have already been segregated and established, and no one wants to pour money into them to improve them. There are already preconceived notions and feelings that people have towards neighborhoods like South Linden, and in order to even begin thinking about improving them, people need to be thinking of the root causes of why they were even redlined in the first place. This is a historical struggle that will be a difficult one to overcome. The segregation of our city has progressed and led to far greater consequences for the minority groups than one could have even imagined.
With suburbanization came the policies of transportation and housing in the areas. Food retailers had incentives to move out of urban neighborhoods to be able to maintain their businesses, which impacted everyone living in the neighborhood’s ability to buy food.
The little documentary that I found is one from The Ohio State University. It addresses right off the bat that food insecurity isn’t about food, but the access to resources needed to survive. The video made a really good point about talking to the community members to promote self-sufficiency and job creation. This is getting into the root causes of why the neighborhoods are the way that they are. The bias could be from the fact that the man speaking in the video is the President and CEO of the MId-Ohio Food Bank, and so he may only be showing the worst sides of this issue in order to try and evoke our empathy, and not considering other relevant statistics.
The Kirwan Institute at Ohio State is helping the vulnerable youth through a program called My Brother’s Keeper. They seek to help young men of color overcome disparities in the neighborhoods that they were born into and are now growing up in. Another program called, The Children’s Hunger Alliance in Columbus, partners with daycares, schools, and summer programs to provide nutritious foods for children growing up in low income neighborhoods. The issues of food insecurity and racially segregated neighborhoods are very prominent and troublesome in the city in which we live. Hopefully, my actions that I take over the next month will be able to do a little something about that.
https://medium.com/the-block-project/housing-food-deserts-5fb81f6187e4
https://statisticalatlas.com/neighborhood/Ohio/Columbus/Greater-Hilltop/Household-Types
https://library.osu.edu/documents/redlining-maps-ohio/maps/Columbus_map.JPG
Kirwan Institute renews pledge to help vulnerable Columbus youth