How Will Dallas Combat Its Food Deserts?
If you don’t know the phrase “food desert,” then you should head over to the Guardian, which has re-printed an article from the March 2014 edition of Atlanta Magazine about a peculiar and baffling feature of urban poverty in the age of sprawl: huge areas of city’s with no access to a decent grocery store. It’s a problem that is getting increased attention here in Dallas. It came up during the Mayor’s South-Dallas-bridging-building-somthing-or-other panel back in January, and it is what is driving efforts by council member Tennell Atkins and Paul Quinn college’s Michael Sorrell to open a grocery store in South Dallas.
But if you needed some perspective on just how dire the situation is, this latest report nails it:
In Atlanta, the ninth-biggest metropolis of the world’s richest country, thousands of people can’t get fresh food, and some are getting sick as a result. Which raises a simple question: why can we build multimillion-dollar highway systems and multibillion-dollar stadiums, but not more grocery stores? If we can build a museum dedicated to a soft drink and one that celebrates college football and another that trumpets civil rights, can’t we help our neighbours with what seems to be a most essential and basic right: putting an affordable and healthy dinner on the table?
Article Credit
“How Will Dallas Combat Its Food Deserts?”
By Peter Simek
FrontBurner. D Magazine, 17 Mar. 2014. Web. 10 July 2014.