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What People in Oregon Said About Food Access - on “Think Out Loud”

By: NWHF Staff | Posted on: March 15th, 2011 | Share:
Categories: Disparities • Economic Issues • Food & Nutrition • Public Health • Rural Health • Transportation • Urban Issues

"Super Healthy" by Nora Hobson age 12 - Third Place Winner in CHP's 2009 Photo Contest

We’ve been discussing the issue of food deserts and how access to food affects health for some time now. Yesterday, Oregon Public Broadcasting’s Think Out Loud program covered the issue, which was accompanied by a lively online discussion. When you disregard the offensive rants, non sequiturs, and personal attacks, a few interesting viewpoints emerged, such as:

• Maybe we need less Zoning, and more haphazard, naturally-sprouting business locations - more lemonade stands and backyard produce stands without being harrassed by City health Inspectors?
• More health inspectors is an answer for a concentrated population, not fewer - you’ve never heard of epidemics? Do you have any idea how easy it is to spread cholera?
• We repeatedly try to find reasons to negate personal responsibility, by finding outside sources, outside circumstance that are to blame for these humans’ present condition.
• If most of the nation is eating far more sugars in GMO foods and a higher percentage is getting diabetes, can the engineers, patent owners, growers, distributors and sellers of GMO foods be sued in class action suits for the diabetes that they caused?
• A significant portion of the (adult-onset) diabetes epidemic is attributable to the heavy dependence we have on processed foods.
• One key tool I’ve found in bringing better nutrition to less affluent areas is gardening, while another is “food buying clubs,” both of which are fairly easy to organize at the neighborhood level with a few families, some friends or a small church group.
• The problem with an industrial food system is that it mainly feeds industry. As the emphasis switches from local production of fairly nutritious whole foods to large-scale commodity farming by corporations, shelf-life increases but nutrition goes down. Engineered “frankenfoods” such as high-fructose corn syrup and genetically-modified organisms dominate the industrial food chain with resultant “hyper-palatability,” obesity and health concerns.
• I live in rural Cowlitz County, Washingon.  I’m half a mile from a gas station with a small selection of junk food, beer, and fishing bait and seven miles from a Safeway…To me, promoting small local production for local consumption would make a lot more sense than trying to promote building more capital- and transport-intensive groceries and farmers markets in areas where they don’t already exist for one reason or another.
• Regulations were ostensibly put in place to protect consumers against big producers, but are more and more used by big producers to protect market share, “pulling the ladder up to the treehouse” with government brought in as a business partner to help stifle competition. One of the advantages of the buying-club model is that as a private group or friendly association, a lot of these issues are avoided.
• There is no grocery store between the 82nd Fred Meyer and the 122nd Safeway. Imagine a swath of Portland from Seven Corners to Mount Tabor, without one grocery store. That’s what we have out here.
• I suggest educating the children about what good quality foods are so that they constantly demand them and grow up to always demand them.The giant processed foods industries have huge “mis-education” (advertising) budgets that ought to be countered in the public schools.Sort of like with disease vaccines, the kids ought to be innoculated against the processed “foods” industries.

Is there any viewpoint missing here?

Do any of these views come close to your own?