Using Advocacy to Combat Corner Stores and Fast Food
Program Date: May 10, 2023

Healthy, quality foods including fresh fruits and produce, are crucial for child development and family stability. But in many cities and towns, the availability of fresh food depends on things like your ZIP code, your income, or your access to transportation. And municipal policies that benefit wealthy developers more than local grocery store owners make it harder for families to find options. Advocates like Morgan Taggart, the director of the FARE Project, (Food Access Raises Everyone) told NPF fellows how her organization is strategically combating food insecurity in Cleveland. [Transcript | Video]

5 takeaways:

The four main dimensions of food security, and other key terms to know.

Availability, access, stability and utilization are the four key aspects of food security, Taggart said. Is the food physically available? Can people get to the grocery store? Can you use SNAP benefits or other support programs to purchase the food? These are all questions surrounding food security.

Food deserts are communities that have poor access to healthy, affordable foods. “These are often concentrated in low-income and historically marginalized areas,” she said. And food deserts aren’t just in urban areas. “I think a lot of the reporting has focused on urban, high population density, high amount of people impacted, but the rural issues around food access are just as stark,” she said.

Food swamps refer to urban environments with few grocery stores but several non-nutritious food options, like corner stores or fast-food restaurants.

The term food apartheid is an emerging term meant to address the root causes of poor access to healthy, nutrient-dense foods by communities of color and low-income white people. “It’s really about power,” she said. “It’s about systemic racism, and it’s about these health inequities that are a result of a corporate and market-driven food access system.”

Food justice is the acknowledgment that eating, growing and selling nutritious food is a right for all people. “So, when we talk about food justice, it’s also community-led. It’s participatory, meaning, the people that are most effect affected by this issue are driving the change, and it’s also locally grown.”

Food sovereignty The U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance describe it as “the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.” The definition emphasizes centering the needs of people who produce, distribute and consume food in our food systems and policies, as opposed to markets and corporations.

Nutrition equity, according to Taggart, is a state of having freedom, agency and dignity in food traditions resulting in people and communities healthy in body, mind and spirit. Being able to have foods that you’re used to and having that choice. “So having that agency and dignity to be able to choose the foods that you want for your family is a part of that definition and nutrition equity.”

GIS – geographic information systems – can help with food access if used strategically.

Typically, Taggart said food security is analyzed by looking at where stores are located, the income level of that community and the transportation access. This information comes from local public health departments, she said. “We also have an amazing like ArcGIS user-friendly website called Fresh Finder that Case Western University uses,” she said. They go into every single food retailer in Cleveland every two years to update the map.

But just because it says there’s a grocery store close, it doesn’t mean it’s quality food, or a respectful environment. So, it’s vital to learn about the actual experience of community members. She said Cleveland residents are developing their own maps around food access in their community – showing where the fast-food restaurants are, where the home meals are, where kids can access healthy food for after-school programs, summer feeding programs and how they are treated in those spaces. “So, it’s not just dots on a map, it’s how you use those spaces.”

School meals are available, but is that good enough? 

Many kids in Cleveland are getting their meals outside the home, she said. And while some Cleveland schools have expanded to now offer dinner and supper programs in addition to free breakfasts and lunches in school, the quality of these offerings is questionable. When the FARE team did food waste audits by standing by the trash containers to see what kids threw away, they found that 75% of that food went into the waste basket, she said. “But it was a whole wheat waffle in a cellophane bag with nothing to put on it.” Taggart encourages reporters to do more youth-focused stories around how they’re accessing healthy foods, and just asking young people what they want and what they would like to see.

Corner and convenience stores lack produce and other healthy, affordable options.

 At least half of youth who live in urban areas make at least one trip per week to a corner or convenience store, according to a study Taggart cited. But these children are purchasing a cheap snack for $1 that averages 350 calories. Healthy foods aren’t made accessible, Taggart said. While the Frito-Lay person, Pepsi person, etc., come into the store to stock their products, the corner store owner or employee is responsible for the fresh produce, making them less stocked. The lack of refrigeration available makes it harder, too.

And while some grocery stores do have the bandwidth for produce, prices are rising. In some of Cleveland’s grocery stores, about 85% of purchases are made with SNAP – the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. But with increased prices and SNAP benefits going back to what they were before the COVID-19 pandemic, “it really creates a difficult environment,” Taggart said. “You’ll often see grocery store partners really advocating for SNAP as well because any changes to those really affect their bottom line.”

Structural racism exists within urban agriculture, says Taggart.

Urban farmers, especially Black, Latin, Hispanic and Asian and indigenous farmers, have had difficulty getting access to capital. Their access to water, land, and even the ability to sell produce is also less assured. “So, we changed all of those regulations,” Taggart said. “We completely revised our zoning and land use regulations to support urban agriculture, everything from chickens and bees to setting up farm stands on residential districts,” she said. To help address the policy barriers urban growers face, FARE held an urban farmers and gardeners town hall.

“We had about 75 urban growers there, as well as folks from USDA, both Farm Service Agency and National Resource Conservation Service, to really figure out how do urban growers and limited resource farmers access their programs where they have been historically shut out from those programs.”


This fellowship is funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Heising-Simons Foundation. NPF is solely responsible for programming and content.

Morgan Taggart
Director, Food Access Raises Everyone (FARE)
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Food Apartheid: Covering How Equitable Access to Healthy Food Impacts Children’s Futures
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