Detroit Food Sovereignty Essay

“The food you eat can either be the safest and most powerful form of medicine or the slowest form of poison”, Ann Wigmore. Food is a fundamental necessity in life, a critical aspect to the physical and mental development of an individual, and a basic right to which some people find themselves lacking. For the scope of this paper, our group will be looking at the core issues of food sovereignty, the overall challenges of creating a food sovereign city, the root causes of these problems, and some possible solutions within our city of Detroit. According to the U.S. Food Alliance, “food sovereignty can be defined as the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their

right to define their own food and agriculture systems” (US Food Alliance 1). Food sovereignty is something that affects every single person in the world, it is something everyone is entitled to, and no one can take away. However, this is not true, some people don’t have this basic right due to structural problems. Food sovereignty is one of the many problems that the city of Detroit is dealing with, due to structural problems such as lack of supermarkets that provide fruits and vegetables within the city, transportation and the ability for citizens to physically go and get the food, or other reasons. Some of the root causes of this problem include the city’s history as a food deserts, lack of knowledge and policy on the topic, and not enough support for an alternative way of farming or producing healthier foods.
First, it is important to identify what groups really affected by the problems of food sovereignty and why.

Since we are focusing on the city of Detroit, the citizens of Detroit are the ones most affected, however we must take it a step further and look at what group or groups of Detroit citizens are affected. More specifically, the people who are having issues with access to healthier foods and lack a way of defining how they’re getting these foods are the people who fall in the poverty class of Detroit, which majority is made up of African Americans. This is generally the group who suffers the most in the majority of U.S cities. Some of the root causes specifically in Detroit are due to the deindustrialization and the movement to the suburbs, corruption in the Detroit government that led to bankruptcy and an overall negative view on the city. These are some of the key causes to the poverty of the city which is important to state, as poverty levels correlate with people who lack access to healthy

foods.
As mentioned previously, an aspect on the issues with food sovereignty is that Detroit was a food desert.

In 2011, Data Driven Detroit debunked the common notion that Detroit, as a whole, is a “food desert”, defined as an area where residents do not have accessibility of nutritious food (Oosting). This is important as it shows that the city has made some progress and is no longer considered a food desert. The issue with this is that most residents turned to gas stations and fast food restaurants due to their convenience and cheap price. While the city may have 115 full-service grocery stores, access to these food providers is often a burden for residents. These burdens include lack of transportation to the grocery stores and affordability. These behaviors lead to poor choices in diet, which has been proven to be correlated with health

diseases.
Detroit ranks as one of the unhealthiest cities in the U.S. Ranking higher than the national average in obesity, diabetes, and smoking rates (Comen 1). These results show a correlation between food sovereignty, having access to healthy foods, and preventable health diseases. If food sovereignty was not a problem in the city of Detroit, then maybe those rates would decrease. In another study, comparing 174 U.S. cities, including 150 of the most populated, also concluded Detroit as one of the worst health wise. The study was based on 4 categories (health care, food, fitness and green space). Detroit ranked 168th overall, placing 172nd in the health care category, 146th in food, 171st in fitness, and 135th in green space (Bernardo 10). These two studies show that Detroit ranks as one of the unhealthiest cities in the United States and food sovereignty can make a drastic difference in the results by promoting a healthier lifestyle.