Philadelphian Food Deserts

Philadelphian Food Deserts

Hi! During my last two posts, I talked about the food access in Philly. In my first one,I explained how social this issue was and how hard it was for someone who lived in a disfavored area or someone who didn’t enough money to get healthy food. In my second blog post, I commented the survey that I sent to people. All in all, I was nicely surprised by what the people told me because I actually thought the situation was even worst.

While doing more researches, I discovered really positive changes and actions in Philadelphia during the last couple years. The most relevant for me was a man named Jeff Brown who built big food stores in food deserts, like North Philly. For more information, you can click on that link which will lead you to a very interesting video that is describing this process. For me, this way to change is just the best, the most accurate and also the more logical: how to fix food deserts problem? Just build a food store! This helps a really big amount of people and is one of the best solution to this problem.

At the beginning, I didn’t know what I was able to do for my Agent of Change, but Ms.Giknis gave me a good option: giving a map in a Philly food desert with all the grocery stores near them on it.

This is the kind of spots that were present in this area

I went to a North Philly area with literally nothing around. I gave my papers to people in the streets while smiling. Most of them accepted my paper and asked me more about it. Although, I had an issue: nobody wanted me to take them in picture, I don’t even know why, they probably thought I was doing tourism because I have a pretty strong accent and I don’t live here. I still took picture of the place. Besides this problem, I really felt helpful and I knew that I was making a change happens, so this is probably the most positive fact about this entire project: we are useful!

I think that I made a change because while giving them this map, smiling and explaining what was my project about, I’m pretty sure that some of the people remembered me and were aware of my issue. Also, they knew if they didn’t already where were all the healthy grocery stores near them.

Me in the area with my maps in the hand, looking if the person is coming to me...

I thought that this project was very good and I am very happy to have completed it, even if this is late! It was the first time of my life where I knew that something related to school was actually useful in a way and was making a difference. I learned that I love helping people, even if I kinda knew it already. I also learned that the people in food deserts are actually just waiting for more help and feel unlistened (even if I expected that too!). I think something I could have done better would be to meet the timelines on time, as always!