Great music on the radio may be increasingly rare these
days, but there is still some very good song-length pieces on talk radio.
Here's a recent one I found worthy of transcribing (to sublimate my own
personal crisis, once again, in the wider cultural one!)
A Farm stand opens in South LA to fill a grocery store void.
Which Way LA? A
3:32 piece produced by Anna Scott
http://soundcloud.com/kcrw/a-farm-stand-opens-in-south-la
Starts with crowd noise,
& the sound of a typical farmer’s market exchange—
Someone asking for fruit, and
being told the price.
Enter voice of commentator:
A liquor store parking lot in South LA isn’t the typical setting for a
farmer’s market, but that’s where a
new Friday produce stand started last week. It may just be a single booth with a modest supply of lettuce, grapes,
berries, and other fruits and
vegetables, but some see it as a major victory:
O: 22: “we’re all here together having a fruit
stand, partially because the big grocery chains have just decided to abandon
south LA and so we’re gonna yell at them and bang on their windows about that,
but at the same time, we’re not gonna go hungry”
O: 36: Marquis Harris Dawson is President of the Non-Profit
Community Coalition, one of the organizers of the new produce stand. According
to the group South LA has roughly one grocery store for every 6,000 people. By
comparison, West LA has approximately one store for every 4,000 residents. South LA also has far
fewer farmers’ markets, and a higher concentration of fast food and liquor
stores.
For years it’s, been
referred to as a food desert, with little or no access to fresh affordable
foods. The Community Coalition draws a direct link between the neighborhood’s
limited food options and its higher rate of health problems like obesity and
diabetes, so they partnered with another non-profit, Community Unlimited, which
provides the produce for the new farm stand.
Dean Pascal, from
Community Unlimited, also lives in South LA:
“There’s maybe one
grocery story within—I would say—a mile radius that I can even walk to, so it’s
super hard, basically. Like you have try to eat healthy, and as opposed to if I
walk out of my door, there’s a Kenyon Normandy, a Taco Bell, A Jack in The
Box—so this is why this is needed because we need to make eating healthy just
as convenient as eating fast food.”
1:54 Many shoppers
who turned out for the farm stand last Friday were definitely happy to have a
convenient healthy option, but can a small produce stand that’s only open 3
hours a week really make a difference in how people eat? Isaac White has lived
in the neighborhood for 54 years:
“Right now, it’s a band-aid over our wound—of not being able
to purchase organic foods, fresh fruits and vegetables. Here in the _?___ space
neighborhood, if we had a market here locally for the seniors such as myself,
we could walk to the store, as it is now we have to be depend on someone coming
to get us transportation, etc. etc, just to get there to meet our needs, and we
need fresh fruits and vegetables just as much as other neighborhoods, as anybody else
does.”
2:24 Anne Kim recently returned to South LA after finishing graduate school. She doesn’t have
her own car, and recently travelled over 6 miles on foot to bring home food
from another farmer’s market across town:
“We really need more
food resources and ways of preventing us from just becoming, um, fat and unable
to enjoy life, and I’d rather be able to walk to my grocery store, walk to my
church, walk to do whatever it is I need to live, and I think it’s very very
unfortunate, but atrocious that I cannot do that.”
3:20. For some people
walking isn’t just a luxury. It’s really hard to take a bus to a grocery store
and really carry home enough groceries for a family, so we’ll see if the South
LA farm stand catches on. For KCRW, I’m Anna Scott.
3:32
++++ (commentary by Chris Stroffolino)
As a radio piece (the length of many pop-songs), Anna Scott is
to be commended for her muckraking on this exemplary David-and-Goliath story. Usually
stories like that spend so much time trying to give the corporations equal
time--interviewing a CEO explaining their rationale for having to close the supermarket,
and was pleasantly surprised this one didn't.
It’s definitely an issue that needs to be addressed and
publicized more, in hopes of creating a coordinated grass roots network of
similar stands. The Food Crisis and The Obesity Epidemic was certainly a big
issue that came up when I taught at Laney Community College in Oakland, as well
as in my own personal life when I lost my car, and had to rely on what
convenience stores were available. It’s also an issue some innovative
“conscious hip hop” songs like “Rich” by Beme-The Rapper:
Thus, I was especially happy that the related issue of
car-dependency (which may even be more pronounced in Los Angeles than it is in
the Bay Area, especially for an ex-New Yorker like myself) comes up in the
piece, and how it effects both seniors like Isaac White, and young people like
Ann Kemp. Walking is not only the only form of transportation available to some
people, it is also a way to become healthier—if you’re able to walk. Thus, the
Farm Stand serves a dual purpose; not only does it provide healthy affordable
food, it also suggests ways to create alternatives to car-based culture. I crave such neighborhood pieces community
activism. As a disabled person (who in a way is doubly disabled, because I
neither have a car nor a place to cook), I feel tremendous solidarity with
these people.
No comments:
Post a Comment