Resources / Ripples & Wipeouts

A friend of ours who is a med student at Columbia says some Americans are so overweight that they could live for a full year without food, just as long as they had water.  A doctor at the Outer Cape Health Center in Provincetown, MA, points out that this is the first generation of American children who are expected to have shorter life spans than their parents! 

What is going on?  Has our excessive consumerism become fatal?  Is it greed?  A breathtaking lack of self-discipline?  Are we eating ourselves sick as Rome burns?  Well, maybe.  But before you pass judgment on—I’ll say it, fat people—consider this observation from Angela Glover Blackwell, the charismatic CEO of the nonprofit group, PolicyLink:  In some neighborhoods of the US, it’s easier to buy a gun than it is a tomato.

Access to fresh, wholesome food, especially fruits and vegetables, has become a luxury for many of us.  (That’s us, as in “we the people,” “united we stand,” “land of plenty” and all that.  For a baby boomer who grew up in the 1950s, believing what they taught in history class, this is pretty hard to take in.) So why no tomatoes? 

Well, according to PolicyLink and other groups that focus on development, which means how and where we build things, many neighborhoods are neither constructed nor designed to support healthy living.  On the contrary, some areas of our country are simply sacrificed to business interests that tear up the land and pollute our air and water with impunity – still, 30+ years after the Clean Air and Water Acts.  And they are not doing this in Riverdale, Grosse Point, Fisher Island, Melrose or Malibu.  Surprise!  Poor neighborhoods seem to be the ones that find themselves with brown fields and bus depots.

But that’s only part of the problem.  There are multiple factors that keep people from getting tomatoes:  sketchy food distribution systems dominated by agribusiness, neighborhoods that lack the public services to attract supermarkets and other service businesses, highways that bisect neighborhoods and make walking difficult, lack of reliable public transportation, no safe public parks.

Now I concede that individuals have a major role to play in maintaining a healthy weight.  But if you’re a kid who lives in an area where it’s not safe to go out and play, where asthma is a major child health problem and the nearest market is miles away, you don’t exactly have a lot of options to get exercise, fresh air and fresh produce.  And neither do your parents, who are probably making minimum wage and struggling to make ends meet.  I think America (that’s us, people) owes these kids more.  And we can get it for them if we work together for positive changes in this richest of all nations. 

Find out more about equitable development and what you can do to make it happen:

An Editorial in the April 21st New York Times

PolicyLink’s Equity Blog

Unnatural Causes, a PBS Documentary

Urban Habitat

Living Cities

--BONNIE