We Already Know Our Food System Is Broken, Here's How We Can Fix It

The following is an excerpt from Fair Food: Growing a Healthy, Sustainable Food System for All. Excerpted by arrangement with PublicAffairs, a member of The Perseus Books Group. Copyright (c) 2011.

Many of our country's systems are in need of repair. We have an education system that is failing some of our youth and ultimately compromising our future. We have a health care system whose costs are spiraling out of control, leaving many without insurance coverage and depriving more and more low-income and working families of adequate medical care. We rely on an energy system that will not sustain us in the future. And we have a financial system that has come close to melting down.

But there is another system that gets much less attention than it deserves, even though we all rely on it to keep us alive -- if we are lucky, three times a day: our food system. When a system we depend on to meet essential needs isn't working, the consequences are enormous. The food system that evolved to bring us abundant food at low cost has grown out of control, nourishing us by destroying some of what we hold most precious: our environment, our health, and our future. The problems it has engendered -- from agricultural chemical runoff in our rivers, streams, and oceans, to soaring rates of diet-related illness (such as diabetes) in our inner cities, to the loss of prime farmland due to urban and suburban sprawl, to corporate conglomeration that concentrates 80 percent of our meat supply in the hands of only four companies -- are not isolated issues to be solved one by one. Rather, they are symptoms of a food system that is broken and needs to be redesigned.

With any broken system, the place where the dysfunction is most acute is in our inner cities. Take one city, Detroit, which stands out as the most troubled of them all. Detroit is enormous. At 138 square miles, it could encompass San Francisco, Boston, and Manhattan all at once, yet it has lost residents and jobs at an alarming rate. Designed to accommodate more than two million people, it houses fewer than 900,000, and its citizens live among almost 130,000 abandoned homes.

At around 16 percent, Detroit's official unemployment rate is one of the highest in the nation, but the city's mayor and local leaders are suggesting a far more disturbing figure -- the actual jobless rate, they say, is closer to 50 percent. One in every three people lives below the poverty line. The federal government pumped more than $480 million worth of food stamps into the city in the past year, but less than 10 percent of the stores where these benefits can be redeemed are considered grocery stores or supermarkets. Many of these benefits are spent at what are considered "fringe" retailers, such as gas stations, liquor stores, party stores, dollar stores, bakeries, pharmacies, and convenience stores.

Good food has all but forsaken Detroit. The last two supermarket chains moved out in July 2007, making it the only big city (the eleventh-largest in the United States) without any major supermarkets. Most of the city's residents would have to travel more than twice as far to reach a grocery store as they would to get to a corner store. Many rely on gas stations, liquor stores, or convenience stores for their food. It's not uncommon to be asked in Detroit, "What gas station do you buy your groceries at?"

If we want to repair this broken food system and create a chance for a healthy generation of Americans, we need to start in cities like Detroit. The men and women of this city, like many others, want change. They recognize the gaps in their diet and enjoy cooking. They'd love to have access to the fresh produce available at suburban supermarkets, but transportation difficulties keep them away. "People would walk to their neighborhood store if it offered a selection of healthy, fresh produce and if it was clean and safe. . . . There's so much excess demand for that kind of thing in our local neighborhoods," one Detroiter told me recently. "You can't get any produce," fumed another. "And the children, they don't even know what produce is. I was picking a pea pod this morning, and none of the children knew what a pea pod was. Never heard of it."