Growing up, accessing nutritious food was sometimes a hefty obstacle for my family. This was the unfortunate, everyday reality for our community, just as it is for many minority communities across the country.
For millions of Americans, the issue of food access is complicated by multiple factors, such as race, ethnicity, location, and income. Nutrition insecurity—that is, a lack of access to nutritious food options—heavily affects marginalized groups. It’s a concept that can be understood a little more clearly if we look at the history of redlining in the United States.
Now, what exactly is redlining? If you haven’t heard the term before, it refers to a segregative and discriminatory housing practice first performed in the 1970s, where loans and credit were withheld from predominantly non-white neighborhoods.
Let's take it back to the beginning with a little history lesson. In the 1930s, during the New Deal Era, the federal government insured mortgages as a means of protecting homeowners and throwing them a lifeline amid the economic turmoil of the Great Depression. The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) was established for this purpose, and the federal government commissioned the creation of color-coded maps to dictate which areas within cities and towns would be more ‘worthy’ of loans.
Four colors were used to indicate this ‘value,’ which ranged from excellent prospects for investment to not desirable at all. Green represented the most desirable, blue for ‘still desirable,’ yellow for declining, and red for ‘hazardous.’
Many of the communities lined in red were predominantly Black and low-income neighborhoods. This rendered these communities unworthy of homeownership benefits, so residents were barred from receiving loans and mortgages. This prompted a steep economic decline within minority communities, as the government’s intentional disinvestment in their infrastructure led to a lack of critical services like healthcare facilities, banks, and grocery stores. Both in intent and in practice, this color-coding technique kept minority neighborhoods from accessing quality loans because those in power saw them as unreliable recipients.
To be clear, it was a deliberate policy choice by our government to further entrench poverty in these communities. But how do we know this wasn’t merely unintentional?
In 1938, the Federal Housing Administration published the “Underwriting Manual” that clearly stated their intentions when color-coding certain communities. They claimed that infiltration by “inharmonious racial groups” would lead to low location value ratings in white neighborhoods; they advised that this be avoided to preserve the economic value of the area and to encourage businesses to continue investing in these communities.
Redlining is the term scholars have given to this intentional and discriminatory practice of keeping people of color in poverty and residentially segregated from white communities. The blatantly racist language in the very documents laying out the color-coded investment system strongly suggests that the architects of redlining understood the practice would lead to a paucity of healthcare and food retail infrastructure within predominantly Black and minority communities.
The legacy of redlining has had harmful ripple effects that persist today, including those of food and nutrition insecurity within minority neighborhoods.
The longstanding neglect of low-income minority communities shaped their food environments in harmful ways. Historically, redlined communities have suffered malnutrition due to a lack of economic investment and development. Supermarket chains, which offer a variety of nutritionally dense foods, often abandon low-income minority areas. Instead, they oversaturate more affluent, suburban, predominantly-white neighborhoods where there are higher-paying customers.
I have personal experience with the fallout of redlining. For me, I would have to take a bus, a train, and then another train to get to my nearest Whole Foods, which is about a 40-minute commute on New York City transit. It's the same distance to my nearest Trader Joes. In other places like Baltimore, New York City, and Winston-Salem, the location of supermarkets corresponds with race, with Black communities having the lowest access to these stores.
On the flip side, minority neighborhoods are more attractive to fast-food chains and local delis since they can rely on low-wage labor. And because of the quick, cheap nature of their products, they secure low-income consumers. These environments are regarded as ‘food deserts’ due to their lack of nutritional and affordable food options.
What other evidence is there that redlining is connected to food deserts? In 2022, over one hundred urban areas across the continental United States were surveyed using census tracts to measure the relationship between the healthiness of food environments and a history of discriminatory housing segregation. The research showed that there was a direct correlation between the healthiness of a food environment and the record of redlining in a given area.
In areas that were regarded as less healthy (i.e., near fast-food restaurants, smaller grocery stores, and convenience stores within census tracts or one-half mile from the census tract boundary), data showed that these neighborhoods were more likely to be graded as “declining or hazardous by the HOLC, compared with neighborhoods graded as desirable.”
Racial residential segregation has led to a lack of wealth, power, and property in predominantly minority communities, resulting in unhealthy food environments and difficult access to grocery stores. When talking about communities accessing nutritious food options, it is important that we pay attention to the history of the racist, segregative housing policies that have shaped the lives of people of color to this day.
Fixing these wrongs will require investment in a food system-wide change. It will require support in the form of food banks, the work of food advocacy organizations, and even simply talking about this history with friends and family. Improving food choices for low-income people of color requires a communal effort to understand, learn, and listen to those most affected by this issue. Nutritious food is a human right that everyone deserves to enjoy, and the barriers to obtaining it need to be addressed by policymakers.