When we think of food deserts, we think of inner cities with
overpriced mini marts, located a hundred miles and a world away from any usable
farmland. We don’t think of rural America.
I live in a part of the world better known for its forests
than its agricultural potential. I grew up on a hillside farm with topsoil so
thin that it took a decade to grow decent pasture—since loggers apparently didn’t
realize that clearing land with a bulldozer and pushing mounds of topsoil over
cliffs was a bad idea. However, the broad Chehalis river valley and its
tributaries were logged before bulldozers and its deep, rich topsoil once
supported crops and countless dairy farms.
Now, most of the farms are sitting empty. Some of the dairy
farms have been turned into subdivisions, only half the homes sold and sitting
empty since the financial crash of ’08.
And much of Aberdeen, the largest town in the region, could
be considered a food desert. A fruit stand just moved into downtown, a hopeful
sign. Otherwise, in a very poor city, most of us shop at Wal Mart, McDonalds,
and the local mini mart, because we can’t afford otherwise.
I find it shocking, in a region with enough agricultural
land to feed itself and feed itself very well, our people eat processed
hamburgers shipped from the south and canned goods shipped from China. Or can’t
afford food at all. After all, seventy percent of kids in Aberdeen eat free and
reduced price lunches and one teacher I spoke with wondered aloud if some of
them ate lunch at all when they were not at school.
It all boils down to this: to be poor in this country is to
lack access. Access to
land in a region rich with natural resources. Access to housing in a region
that once supplied most of the material for building homes in this country. Access to basic needs, like healthy food—or food at all.
We think of the Middle Ages and its feudal system as
barbaric in part because people starved on fertile land, people were executed
for harvesting or hunting on their lord’s land, because people had no access to
land or space in order to thrive—or even survive.
Today, in rural America, people who cut the timber that
build your home don’t have a roof over their heads. Today, no trespassing signs
guard the vast tracks of land that could provide resources to thousands of poor. Banks own hundreds of empty homes foreclosed during the housing crisis.
Today, farmland lies fallow because state regulation and a corporate economy
make it impossible for small scale farmers to survive. Today, immigrant
families who work harvesting or fishing can’t feed their kids. We think that capitalism is all about money—and it is. Some people—a few—make a killing off this arrangement. But it is also about land, about space, about access to space. In late capitalism, money buys access.
In Brazil, in India, in France, in Mexico,
poor people with no access to land have demanded access. This is why landless
farmers in Brazil take over unused farmland. Why communities in Chiapas decide
that they will control their own land and build local economies.
In this place, in a forgotten corner of the U.S., where children go hungry surrounded by fertile land, what will we do?
