Right now there are 23.5 million Americans who live in what we call food deserts. We wanted to come up with priorities. What were the needs in the larger South Memphis area?
And one thing that came up over and over again was access to food. Easily get to a McDonald's and there's food on every block. It's just not high quality food. We blame the individual for so long and it's not the individual's fault. There's a lot of money in Memphis, and there's a lot of poverty.
You know, we have parts of South Memphis where whole streets and blocks are just vacant. It's like a war that people left due to some catastrophe, but it was just white flight and sprawl. And so what used to be a small family-owned grocery store is now a vacant building, and on one end of it they have a liquor store that's typical of South and North Memphis.
Nobody is going to be attracted in terms of grocery stores, retail, to an area that is sparsely populated and looks and feels dangerous. So a food desert, by basic definition, is a place where the majority of residents don't have access to what we call a supermarket and a large percentage of the residents don't have transportation. From our office in South Memphis, our closest supermarkets are 2.3 miles and 2.5 miles away respectively and one third of our residents don't have access to an automobile.
My name is Delois Bateman. I have five children. I stay in South Memphis.
I work for an elementary school as a janitor. A couple of years ago, it was a grocery store right up here across the street, but it's been shut down for over 10 years now. It's just an empty building. Without transportation, I have to call and ask someone to come and take me to the grocery store or maybe catch the bus and it takes like 45 minutes to an hour just to get to the grocery store.
So when I go to the grocery store, this is some of the basic food that I buy. I buy lasagna, spaghetti, rice, there are noodles. I have our canned vegetables, the basic meats. Right here, chicken, pork chops, I buy neck bones, turkey necks, basic foods.
And over here, I have, they're counting quick food. We have corn dogs, burritos, things like that. When I go to the convenience store, it's not much I can feed them there.
I have to feed them like something quick they're not going to get full off of. But if I go to the grocery store, I get a chance to cook a full course meal. Hey, how are you? This is a typical Memphis convenience store. They have a little produce, which I'm proud.
They have some potatoes and onions. But if you notice right behind, there are sodas. Two liter sodas and snack foods, so cookies and chips and candy and Kool-Aid.
Whole aisles of chips. Even more soda. Sugary American breakfast foods.
Cereals. Mechanically separated chicken, which is already kind of... That's scary sounding. Contains 2% or less of beef pork. And so those are the type of ingredients that you're getting.
This is pretty typical of what people have access to just walking up in their neighborhood. So the ingredients in grape drink, I don't know what anything is other than water. My name is Chelle William.
I live in South Memphis. I've been here all my life. They used to have grocery store in South Memphis, but now they don't.
So I had to go. I go to the bus stop and I have to wait on the 4 walker and I ride it to the north terminal. And then I transfer it to a 2. The journey to the grocery store takes I'd say an hour and a half if the bus comes on time. When I go to the grocery store, I get everything that I needed.
Having to take two buses is stressful and it's frustrating, but I still have to go, you know, to have food in the house. East Memphis is a majority white, upper middle class and wealthy area. Affluent people who own multiple automobiles have choices and much access to fresh food.
And so we're in a parking lot of a well-known brand, Whole Foods. And across the street, there's a national grocery store chain. That same chain has a very upscale store on the the other side of the movie theater.
And just a mile and a half away is a Sprouts grocery store. Not even a mile east of here is a Fresh Market. This is very different from the experience of Memphians. Four or five miles north of here, six miles southwest of here in South Memphis, in the most distressed neighborhoods. As integration of neighborhoods became more prevalent, a lot of folks moved out of those neighborhoods.
The people that remain in these, what we now have as food deserts, are people that simply did not have the resources to move. The challenges are multiple. When grocery store operators look at can they make money, the answer from their perspective is possibly but probably not. So this site is one of the sites that we identified as a potential location for a grocery store in South City.
This probably would have been the most ideal site for a grocery store operator. The property was on the market, it was at a price point. frankly that was just above our ability to pay as well as try to provide incentives to the grocery store operator to make it a economically viable opportunity. So over time it has now been acquired by one of our local craft brewery companies and they're building a brewery that hopefully will provide some jobs for the residents that will help them from an economic standpoint.
It'll be a great addition to the city but unfortunately it won't be available for a grocery store. Redlining is a federal policy from the 1930s. The Federal Housing Administration and policymakers decided to work with the lending institutions to draw maps to talk about where it was best to lend their money.
for residential mortgages. They talked about the high-risk areas where they did not want to make investments because the chance of them being repaid were low. And those areas and cities looked like areas where...
moderate and poor people lived and where black and minorities lived. When banks won't make investments in residential mortgages, they also don't make investments in small businesses. The sad part is that this redlining map is almost identical to how lenders make residential mortgages in 2019. Can you help me find all of the grains or starches in this?
I was trained to educate families on healthy eating. Common health issues we see with our patients range from pre-diabetes to full-blown type 2 diabetes, to hypertension, to elevated blood pressure. These are things that we commonly were thinking of with your middle-aged parents or even grandparents, and now we're seeing them in children that are 8, 9, and 10 in fourth grade and middle school.
Zucchini, that's a weird word. Zucchini? Zucchini?
Sounds like bikini. Bikini? Yeah. That's what we're chopping today.
Every corner you turn is always a fast food restaurant, but if we can get more restaurants in our city where you can eat healthy food, especially in certain communities and certain areas, we would actually love that. We blame the individual for so long, and we have to start seeing that that's not working. It's not the individual's fault. It is our entire environment and we're not going to see changes in health until we go out into the community and create change.
The South Memphis Farmers Market is in its tenth season. It came about because of a neighborhood plan called the South Memphis Revitalization Action Plan. We wanted to come up with priorities.
What were the needs in the neighborhood? And one thing that came up over and over again was access to food. I'm one of the seniors that over the years things have just moved away from us.
us. So when works brought this to us, this was a godsend. We should have more of these.
I'm loving it. Gatekeeper of income, lord poverty, house of my home is a feared giant in the seven kingdoms. The next time my dad gotta pay for our food with stamp show miles, better stay shut. Your eyes better stay glued to your grocery bag. To the woman who said my cousin was a burden.
To the man who said my EBT card is an eyesore. As if this American flag looking at me ain't enough. Imagine.