Race, Class, and Food Insecurity
May 21, 2014 § 5 Comments
When we lived in Pointe-Saint-Charles in Montreal, we lived about two doors down from a community garden in the shadows of the massive Église Saint-Charles. That community garden had been there as long as I could remember, it pre-dated my first residence in the Pointe back in 2002-4. The people who used it were the poor, working-class and marginalised Irish and French Canadians who lived in the Pointe. But, by about 2009 or 2010, the garden had been taken over by the gentrifiers, forcing out the old school urban harvesters. Many of these gentrifiers thought they were new and unique in gardening in an inner-city neighbourhood. Indeed, this is something I saw over and over again in Montreal, on the Plateau, Saint-Henri, the Pointe, and other neighbourhoods, as hipsters discovered the benefits of community gardens.
But they were hardly new ideas in old working-class neighbourhoods, particularly in the Pointe. The Pointe had long had community gardens. Aside from this one in on the rue Island, there was also a bigger one in the shadows of the railway viaduct along the rue Knox. And the problems arise when the original inhabitants of the Pointe were forced out of these gardens by the gentrifiers. The gardens were used to supplement diets, obviously. I also noticed something else when I lived in the Pointe in the early part of the past decade and when I was in Saint-Henri mid-decade. In both neighbourhoods, the local IGA (grocery store), both owned by the same family, the Topettas, opened new, glitzy stores. The IGAs in the Pointe and Saint-Henri had been in grotty store fronts, on rue du Centre in the Pointe, and rue Notre-Dame in Saint-Henri. When the new IGA opened in the Pointe c. 2002 and in Saint-Henri in 2005-6, I noticed a lot of low income families wandering around the stores with a slightly dazed look on their faces, complaining about rising prices. This was ameliorated some by the opening of the big Super C at Atwater Market, which generally had much lower prices than either IGA.
I was thinking about all of this as I was reading an excellent article on TheGrio about food insecurity and food gentrification. The article was written by Mikki Kendall, an African American feminists in the States, about the process of food gentrification. Kendall writes about having grown up poor and eating the more undesirable cuts of meat, like hamhocks, neck bones, and the like. She recalls her grandmother being an expert at turning “turning offal into delicious.” Kendall notes the gentrification of what I call poor people’s food. As haute cuisine chefs re-discover these traditionally less desirable foods and turn them into fancy dishes for the wealthy, it drives up the prices of these cuts.
[As an aside, I can’t help but wonder if the joke is ultimately on the wealthy eating these cuts of meat at expensive restaurants and I think of Timothy Taylor’s brilliant début novel, Stanley Park, which recounts, in part, the story of Jeremy Papier, a chef and restaurauteur in Vancouver. Papier favours local ingredients and culture and comes to rely on animals trapped in Stanley Park for his fancy restaurant on the border of the Downtown Eastside, the poorest urban neighbourhood in Canada.]
But to return to Kendall and the IGA and community gardens in Pointe-Saint-Charles: Kendall notes that with the rising cost of these traditional cuts of meat used by the poor comes an inability to purchase them:
Yet, as consumers range further and further afield from their traditional diets, each new “discovery” comes at the expense of another marginalized community. Complaints about the problem are often met with, “Well, eat something else that you can afford” as though the poor have a wealth of options, and are immune to dietary restrictions based on religion, allergies, access, or storage capabilities.
So, ultimately, the poor are left to eat processed food, which isn’t good for any of us. That is the only thing that is easily accessible. When I was student, I noted with deep and bitter irony that the cheapest meal option was often McDonalds. Or, if I went to the grocery store, aside from Ramen noodles (a processed food I cannot stand), the cheapest option was Kraft Dinner (or Mac & Cheese for you Americans), another slightly vile processed food (full confession: KD remains my comfort food of choice, I import large quantities of it from Canada).
And the end result of all of this bad, processed food is the toll it takes on the health of the poor, both in urban centres and rural areas. In the United States, African Americans are, on the whole, poorer than everyone else. In Canada, it is the aboriginals. It is no coincidence that food insecurity hits African Americans in the US hard. It is also no coincidence that rates of heart disease, hyper-tension, diabetes, and obesity are much higher in African American and Canadian aboriginal communities than in the rest of both nations.
We can and must do better.
Matthew Barlow 
In the near future, water will be added to food insecurity and the toll it’s takes on the poor or marginalized.
In some parts of the US, I think we’ve already reached that tipping point, frankly. In the South and Southwest, in particular.
Note that the WWII Victory Gardens set up in Boston along the Fenway are still in use. I haven’t done a systematic survey of them, so can’t say how many are still used for food; some are definitely usd primarily for recreation.
We walked through there last fall, after growing season was open, it looked to me like they were used for both recreation and food.
[…] is a topic I have written a lot about here (for example, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and, finally, here). And, of course, I […]