By Hannah Werle / Jambar Contributor
For many Youngstown residents, accessing food, especially affordable and healthy foods, is a hardship. This is because Youngstown, as defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is a food desert.
The USDA defines a food desert as, “areas in the United States where people have limited access to a variety of healthy and affordable food.”
According to the USDA’s Food Access Research Atlas, Youngstown is considered a low-income and low-access area, where a significant number of residents are more than one mile from the nearest supermarket.
In addition, Youngstown has at least 12 census districts with more than 100 housing units that don’t own a vehicle and are more than one mile away from the nearest supermarket.
Currently, the only grocery store in the city is the Sparkle Market in Cornersburg on the West Side of Youngstown.
Robin Perry is the network coordinator for Healthy Community Partnership-Mahoning Valley, an organization that operates under the Community Foundation of the Mahoning Valley, which helps residents with healthy food access and education.
Perry explained that while there may be stores within a food desert, they typically don’t have diverse and healthy foods.
“At the base level, there’s no [full-service] grocery store in the community. So there’s nowhere for someone to go to be able to access produce, meat, dairy, all of that,” Perry said. “You’ll have a lot of corner stores, but most of them carry highly processed foods. You’re not really going to see things that maybe help someone make a meal, so much as kind of like a snack.”
Erin Bishop, Youngstown’s health commissioner, said for what corner stores and dollar stores the city does have, they don’t have features like a butcher, a bakery or fresh produce.
Bishop said this lack of full service stores forces residents to go elsewhere to find groceries, which can be difficult for those without personal transportation.
“We’re very blessed to have the [Western Reserve Transit Authority] station, but it’s not an easy travel for someone who needs to get on, go down, switch to the other bus,” Bishop said. “So, a lot of times our people have to go into the suburbs for groceries. It’s not easy sometimes to get there, especially when you’re carrying all the bags — I mean just imagine.”
Jessica Romeo, community health educator for the Bon Secours Mercy Health Foundation and a registered licensed dietitian, said those with transportation or mobility constraints are often more affected by the food desert. She explained that these issues can limit not only where someone shops, but also what they buy.
“There’s only four hours between purchasing a fresh product and getting it refrigerated for its food safety … So meats and things, if you have a whole three-hour bus ride home, you’re getting [that] right there. You’re more susceptible to foodborne illness … or you choose different things,” Romeo said. “It’s just so much of a bigger burden to do the right thing by yourself and access this when you’re facing monetary and transportation barriers than it is when that’s not even something you have to think about as much.”
The severity and effects of the food desert have evolved over time. Bishop attributed the food desert to the city’s grocery stores shutting down.
“I used to live over on the Southside when I first got married, and right where the library is now, the Newport Library, when we first moved in, it was a Phar-Mor and then it went into a Giant Eagle, and then it was a Sparkle,” Bishop said. “We had three grocery stores in that building, and none of them made it.”
Perry said the HCP-MV ascribed the food desert to systemic issues, which led it to change its language. About two years ago, a committee for the partnership decided to begin using the phrase “food apartheid” in an effort to better describe the problem.
“[The committee wanted] to note that this is something that has been intentionally done to the community, that there’s been intentional disinvestment, due to various conditions like economic and policy, that makes it so that stores do pull out of communities that look like ours,” Perry said.
Romeo was a part of the HCP-MV committee. She credited the lack of stores to legislation and policy-making, including the federal government’s decision to stop enforcing the Robinson-Patman Act in the 1980s. The act was a national antitrust law that kept suppliers from charging different prices to various retailers, which allowed independent stores to stay open.
“To say ‘a food desert’ … makes it sound like it’s a natural occurrence or something, that it’s just part of the landscape or that the people that live there and don’t have access like others do are somehow at fault,” Romeo said.
Romeo explained that this shared language is an important tool when approaching the government, charities and other organizations for help with the food desert.
“The [phrase] ‘food desert’ is a really big buzzword for grant writing because it sounds very dire, and it is. It is very dire [for] health outcomes and everything else, to not have food access or be able to avoid healthy foods, both of those things,” Romeo said. “But at the same time, it’s not the people’s fault, and it’s not a natural part of the landscape. It’s systemic.”