It’s been a couple good days here in the AWE offices. (Note: by “office,” I do mean “laptop perched on lap in apartment I’m settling back into after 3 years of reporting from, more or less, my ’94 Ford Escort”).
First, the trenchant Stacy Mitchell published a piece on Walmart’s increasing control of our food system for Grist—and relied on an interview with yours truly for some of the lead grafs. Even better, she smartly reminds us that the problem for poor families isn’t necessarily a lack of supermarkets, but the price differential between fresh and processed foods.
Second, the wonderful Louis Aguilar of Detroit News fame posted a very nice profile of me and my work on the front page of the Business section this morning, including a partial slide show of a couple of my favorite groceries in Detroit. As I write in the book—and as Detroit commentators like James Griffioen, Kelli Kavanaugh, and Robert Linn have observed—Detroit’s rep as a food desert’s a bit of a misnomer. There are a number of excellent groceries in the city, and it’s an unusually robust food hub. Detroit actually has quite a lot of food. It just doesn’t have much infrastructure to get it into neighborhoods—and that’s a problem of leaving the distribution of a vital public resource entirely to the private market.
