Inner City Food Program Enriches Communities, Spares the Environment

Pennsylvania has launched the Fresh Food Financing Initiative (FFFI) to get healthier foods into neighborhoods that lack grocery options. This fund provides bridge financing for grocers to establish their businesses where fresh food is absent and where the only local options are fast food joints and corner stores.

The bridge program has provided money to grocers who can open stores that cater to the ethnic makeup where they are located. The grocer interviewed for an article I read about FFFI specifically caters to the African, Jamaican and Muslim customers. This helps preserve the cultural diversity of the whole city by facilitating ongoing food-based cultural traditions.

The FFFI program also makes good environmental sense. Not only is it one way to deliver healthier, higher quality and organic foods to inner city markets, it saves fuel on a commute to an alternative and it helps people avoid a wasteful food source -- fast food. Fast food is detrimental to the environment due to the excessive packaging required, fuel wasted shipping to nationally located franchises and low-quality mass production. The scale and limited offerings of fast food companies tend to drive the type of cost-benefit choices that result in monoculture, shameful animal husbandry and slaughterhouse practices.

I also like this program because it promotes equality. Social science is replete with statistics about “food access” inequity based on income. It’s an unfair negative externality of food markets that only the wealthy can eat healthy foods. Eating high quality food has been shown to result in higher test scores, better focus at work, fewer health complications, lower rates of obesity, and longer attention spans, among other things. Eating unhealthy food produces a negative-feedback loop where eating healthy foods does just the opposite.

In addition, I like that the program encourages grocers to locate where they may not be able to afford to otherwise. Financing allows enough money to include sufficient security in budgets if neighborhood safety is unstable. The groceries themselves assist the neighborhood by providing jobs, helping to defeat the broken window pattern and by creating community space in a neighborhood.

In the end, I like this because it is a particularly pragmatic mixed-use project. It’s not sustainable to have housing but nothing else in a neighborhood, whether that neighborhood is a suburb or a city block. Economically isolated islands within cities can be improved through projects like FFFI. When we think about sustainable urban planning, we should be thinking equally or with more emphasis on economic policy solutions as we should about building or infrastructure design. Ken Klothen (Pennsylvania Deputy Secretary) endorsed FFI, saying “When you get going, it really works.”