Food Justice
In the United States, we aspire to “liberty and justice for all,” but in our food system, as elsewhere, reality too often falls far short of that aspiration.
Unequal access and its consequences
Multiple studies have confirmed that African American, Native American, and Latinx people in the United States are significantly less likely to live near a retailer selling fresh, healthy food. This difference is deadly: rates of diabetes and other metabolic diseases are also higher in communities of color, and these two phenomena are related. A 2016 UCS analysis found that increasing the number of fresh food sources in communities of color would significantly lower diabetes rates.
But geographic proximity isn’t the whole story. That same UCS study found that when communities were viewed through the lens of income rather than race, adding more fresh food outlets to the mix had no effect on diabetes rates. (It doesn’t matter how close the farmers market is if you can’t afford to shop there, or if you work two jobs and have no time to cook dinner from scratch.)
In short, unequal healthy food access is a problem with multiple dimensions. Effective solutions will need to address all of them—and to ensure that these solutions are as just and reality-based as possible, it’s important that community voices play a leading role in framing them.
El artículo hace referencia a las necesidades político-sociales en torno al acceso desigual de la alimentación y sus consecuencias. Los estudios realizados por distintos organismos y analizados por el UCS en 2016, muestran la dependencia de los organismos responsables de la política de la ciencia con el entorno.
Ya que los países menos desarrollados no tienen las mismas oportunidades para producir y gestionar políticas alimentarias, tampoco pueden acceder a una alimentación saludable con las mismas oportunidades, y como consecuencia, estas políticas son en gran medida responsables de la repercusión en la salud de la sociedad según el ámbito geográfico.
De esta forma, para solventar esta desigualdad y paliar los problemas de salud de grupos vulnerables, sería necesaria una implicación global, multisectorial, donde la política de la ciencia tuviera un papel relevante.
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