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

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

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