savor the earth window farm project food security assessment

7/30/2019 Savor the Earth Window Farm Project Food Security Assessment

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Food security is an issue that affects many people all over the

world, especially in the global south. The areas with the

highest level of food insecurity are those that use

unsustainable agriculture and irrigation methods, have acidic

soil due to heavy mineral contents, where they do a lot of

mining and have a concentration of resource conflicts,exploitation and violations of human rights.

http://documents.wfp.org/stellent/groups/public/documents

/liaison_offices/wfp185786.jpg


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Believe it or not, the areas within the United states with the

highest levels of food insecurity experience a lot of similar

problems. While there are many that we could discuss, today

were going to just look at a brief picture of what we refer to

in the United States as the food desert.

http://maps.ers.usda.gov/FoodAtlas/


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Why dont we start by first getting a better understanding of

what food insecurity actually means. (refer to chart)


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Here we have the Food Environment Atlas generator online

courtesy of the USDA that shows the poverty rates by

percentages all over the U.S. A lot of this poverty is

concentrated in the American South, or in regions that have

high resource exploitation or have acidic soils due to high

mineral concentrations, and in the case of some of thesecoastal regions salt water -- which makes it difficult to grow

food.


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This map shows the states with the highest number of SNAP

participants. Snap stands for Supplemental Nutritional

Assistance Programs, such as food stamps.


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Yet ironically, we have an interesting phenomenon here, that

some of the same areas with the highest densities of poverty

and people who rely upon government assistance are paying

considerably more than the national average for food per

person.


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All of that data was for the year 2008. In 2008, we also

witness a phenomenon in which the states with the highest

levels of poverty hold the highest levels of obesity


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Americans today look at obesity as one of the biggest threats

to public health. And there is a negative assumption made

that obesity is the result of poor health choices, laziness, and

American overconsumption. The way that obesity is

portrayed in the media is that American obesity is the status

quo, part of the American lifestyle.


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Nutritional disorders can affect any system in the body and

the senses of sight, taste, and smell. They may also produce

anxiety, changes in mood, and other psychiatric symptoms.

Malnutrition begins with changes in nutrient levels in blood

and tissues. Alterations in enzyme levels, tissue abnormalities,

and organ malfunction may be followed by illness and death.

Poverty and lack of food are the primary reasons why

malnutrition occurs in the United States. Ten percent of all

members of low income households do not always have

enough healthful food to eat. Protein-energy malnutrition
http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Anxietyhttp://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Anxietyhttp://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Anxiety


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occurs in 50% of surgical patients and in 48% of all other

hospital patients.

http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/malnutrition

If you look back at the CDCs statistics for Diet Related

Diseases, African Americans represent the highest percentage

of those living with diabetes and hypertension -- followed by

hispanics and then whites.


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Lets look and see where the highest concentrations of the

African American population reside.


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Does that look kind of familiar to you? if I go back and show

you the poverty map the density of low income populations

fall within some of the same regions of


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Yet when you look at this map of diabetes rates, you might

notice that with some notable exceptions for California, New

Mexico and Colorado, a lot of the areas with the highest

diabetes rates also fall in these low poverty areas with high

obesity. They also fall within areas with high urban

concentrations. But that may not be news to you. So whatseparates places like the states who did not follow this trend

from those in high areas?


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So lets look at this map. Here we have the density of fast

food restaurants per 1000 people. But the fast food data

doesnt really explain the trends that we saw with obesity,poverty or diabetes.


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But the trend that DOES begin to exhibit some similarities is

the high concentrations of low income areas that have limited

access to grocery stores. This is where you begin to see our

food deserts


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And for those of you who dont know, a food desert is an area

in which people have as large and isolated geographic areas

where mainstream grocery stores are absent or distant.

Currently there is a food desert research initiative going on

that has been tracking the statistical link between Food

Deserts and worse diet-related health outcomes.

http://fooddesert.net/


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So in places like New Mexico, Colorado and Arizona, where

you might see farmers markets, within the grain and feed belt

or community based agriculture, you see people with better

access to a safer quality of food than you do in those high

poverty areas.


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This picture of Berea College students was taken from an

article featuring the top 10 greenest colleges.

http://www.thedailygreen.com/environmental-

news/latest/greenest-college-cafeterias-4608093


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If you take a look at how much people who live in high

poverty areas have to pay for snacks


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Versus the price the same people have to pay for vegetables

in grocery stores, It kind of makes you wonder. People in low

income areas have less money to work with, they live in areas

where they have very little access to grocery stores and it cost

more to buy vegetables than it does to buy junk food, I dont

know that you can really point your finger at the people.


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Britta Riley and Rebecca Bray are artists working to create

crowd-sourced R&D solutions for environmental issues. They

envision the DIY aspect, not as a nostalgia-inducing hobby or a

compromise during hard financial times, but as a futuristic

infrastructure-light alternative to big R&D. They work to

frame a movement where people feel validated, welcomed

into an effort to break apart scientific breakthroughs into

actionable tasks, and motivated to contribute. They believe

it's time to take the potential contributions of the general

public to the environmental movement more seriously. They

are currently residents atEyebeam, the art and technology

atelier in New York. http://brittaandrebecca.org/
http://eyebeam.org/http://eyebeam.org/http://eyebeam.org/http://eyebeam.org/


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The kind of areas that Riley and Bray design for are urban

areas; areas like we have illustrated here that are full of

convenience stores with no gas/ 1000 population was

considered an indicator of food insecurity. But then I

remembered that in many urban areas with poor food

security thats the only place where people can buy food if

they dont have access to transportation.


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I dont know how many people remember the convocation

speaker who came and spoke about environmental justice, Dr.

Robert Bullard of Clark Atlanta University. Bullard is known as

the father of environmental justice shared in one of his

publications that about Only 8 percent of African Americans

live in a census tract with a supermarket, compared to 31percent of whites. Many of Atlanta's black neighborhoods are

saturated with fast food outlets, liquor stores, and

convenience stores that make their profits off junk food, beer,


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wine, and cigarettes. Convenience stores industry account for

27 percent of teen purchases of tobacco. Food redlining forces

manypoor black Atlantans to spend more money and time,

and travel farther and accept lower quality and less healthy

food. Food shopping at convenience stores takes its toll in

higher prices in health costs. Convenience stores mark up food

prices by at least 20 percent, amounting to a tax of $1,200 a

year per family in higher food expenses for residents of "food

deserts. Bullard also critiques the lack of investment in

including more African Americans in green and

sustainability initiatives and training for green jobs. Bullard

who is an activist believes that in Atlanta, the area where he

mostly focuses this particular environmental justice argument,

that Black Atlantans should be demanding more equitable

development from their government, especially when their

tax dollars are being used to fund, support, and subsidize

public-private smart growth, new urbanism, and green

initiatives.
http://www.ajc.com/opinion/poor-suffer-from-bad-278085.htmlhttp://www.ajc.com/opinion/poor-suffer-from-bad-278085.htmlhttp://www.ajc.com/opinion/poor-suffer-from-bad-278085.html


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And while Ive lived on both sides of the tracks and

participated in some very active groups on both sides of the

tracks, I would have to say in my experience that while I

believe that sustainability has tremendous applications to

help lift and keep low income communities out of poverty

when I look around and see the lack of African American

participation at sustainable community development

programs I wonder, are we really doing enough to prepare

African Americans for green jobs? Most of the African

Americans I know dont even understand how helpful

sustainability can be in helping deal with issues such as


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reducing hunger, creating economic opportunities in their

own communities and improving their health. And we

havent even scratched the surface. If you were to ask any

African American student on campus about how the principles

and applications of sustainability can help saves them money

or what lessons in sustainability that they have had that they

can take home that they can use to give back to their

communities, Im not sure that youd hear very encouraging

answers to those questions. But the good news is, that by

stumbling across the work of the window farm developers, I

was given a really cool mechanism to get more American

American and low income students directly involved into a

field that very few people (proportionally speaking) are

prepared for. So it becomes a good opportunity to look at

what are some of the issues that we can address that would

enable us to close the achievement gap.

http://pollan.blogs.nytimes.com/

http://readymadeblogs.mydevstaging.com/blogs/readymade

//crowdsourcing-the-cottage-garden/


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In my background paper I address some key issues and

challenges that this project and my experience working on this

project have presented. This project has left me with many

questions such as: Access to Education, Cultural Barriers,

Learning to Engages Young African Americans, Lack of

Identifiable Leadership, How do we develop more Practical

Methods & Engaged Methods for exposing a more diverse

group of students to the benefits of sustainability practices

that go far beyond recycling? How do we close That Green

Achievement Gap, and so on.


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So the goal of the project was not only to create something

that could provide education about some of these more

daunting & complex issues, but also to explore more of the

lighter side of things. Here I address some of the

developmental opportunities this project can present for

increasing community involvement and the role of interactive

learning about sustainability through projects like this as a

community development tool. Working on this project raised


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a lot of questions that are going to give the black cultural

center some opportunities for really good programming. My

role in this was simply to kind set up a framework for them to

get the ball rolling on this, and the rest of what happens will

be determined by the groups who collaborated with me on

getting this thing built.

Before we begin, Id like to give a special thanks to:


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savor the earth window farm project food security assessment

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