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.
You can 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 Dolores Bateman.
I have five children.
I stay in South Memphis.
I work for 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 a 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's noodles, I have our canned vegetables, the basic meats …
Right here, chicken, pork chops …
Basic food.
And over here, I have the kind of 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 four-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-litre sodas and snack foods, so cookies and chips and candy and Kool-Aid.
Whole aisles of chips.
Even more soda.
Sugary American breakfast food, cereals.
Mechanically separated chicken which is already kind of 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 neighbourhood.
So the ingredients in grape drink …
I don't know what anything is other than water.
My name is Michelle Williams. I live in South Memphis.
I've been here in all my life.
They used to have grocery stores in South Memphis, now they don't.
So, I had to go to the bus stop and I had to wait on the 4 Walker.
and I rode it to the North Terminal.
And then I transfer 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 need.
Having to take two buses is stressful and it's frustrating
but I still had 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 is a national grocery store chain.
That same chain has a very upscale store on the other side of the movie theatre
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 south-west of here in South Memphis
in the most distressed neighbourhoods.
The irony is that as integration of neighbourhoods became more prevalent,
a lot of folks moved out of those neighbourhoods.
So, the people that remained where we now have these 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 an economically viable opportunity.
So over time it’s 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.
It 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 policy makers 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 look 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 the grains or starches?
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 eight, nine and 10 and fourth grade and middle school.
Zucchini, that's a weird word .
Zucchini. - Zucchini.
Sounds like bikini.
Bikini? Yeah!
That's what we are chopping today.
Every corner you turn, there's 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 in 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.
South Memphis farmers market is in its 10th season.
It came about because of a neighbourhood plan
called the South Memphis revitalisation action plan.
We wanted to come up with priorities, what were the needs in the neighbourhood
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.
So when works brought this to us, this was a godsend.
We should have more of these.
I'm loving it.
The gatekeeper of income, lower poverty, house in my home is a feared giant in the seven kingdoms.
The next time my dad gotta pay for our food with stamps your mouths 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
Isn't this American flag looking at me ain't enough?
Imagine.