Walmart's Fresh Food Makeover

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http://www.thenation.com/article/163396/walmarts-fresh-food-makeover

On a map of “food deserts” in Chicago, a red bow-tie-shaped splotch covers parts of Englewood, a historically working-class neighborhood on the South Side.
 
I’m driving through that zone with the man leading the city’s efforts to bring fresh food to communities that need it—Mike Simmons, the policy director for Mayor Rahm Emanuel. We pass brick houses, many decent and neat, but others boarded-up casualties of the foreclosure crisis. On a side street, two men push a shopping cart piled with heating ducts and other metal fixtures, likely stripped from vacant buildings. Empty lots dot blocks lined with storefront churches and chicken-wing stands. We pass a couple with a cooler and a half-dozen pump bottles for snow-cone flavoring. We pass many corner stores with signs that read Food and Liquor.

We don’t pass any supermarkets.

The residents here are just a fraction of the 23.5 million Americans living in areas with no easy access to fresh food, according to government estimates. As cities like Chicago try to expand food access, vanquishing such areas—now labeled food deserts—has also become a matter of national policy. The Obama administration has pledged to eradicate food deserts by 2017, in the hopes that increasing access to healthy food will stem the country’s obesity and diet-related-disease epidemics and create new jobs in the process.