In 2023, nearly 34 million Americans did not have access to adequate food. That is roughly 10% of the country struggling to secure reliable food access.

Due to the laundry list of urban planning policies, low-income communities are especially vulnerable to food insecurity and inaccessibility. When grocery stores shuttered or moved out, however, the community garden blossomed not only as a mitigative effort to food inaccessibility, but as an additional community space.

What is a food desert?

While a potentially contentious term within food justice organizations, “food deserts” are defined by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) as communities that “often feature large proportions of households with low incomes, inadequate access to transportation, and a limited number of food retailers providing fresh produce and healthy groceries for affordable prices.”

Calls to rename the designations to “food apartheid” or simply “underfunded communities” aim to address the underlying political and economic policies that yielded major disparities in food access. Namely, practices like redlining and biased lending led to a pattern of community divestment that resulted in Black families being twice as likely to live in food deserts compared to their white counterparts.

Other terms to consider are food swamps, or “areas with a high-density of establishments selling high-calorie fast food and junk food, relative to healthier food options.” Regarding food swamps, studies show a higher density of fast-food restaurants is positively correlated with the percentage of Black residents while chain “dollar store” retailers saturate majority Black urban neighborhoods.

Switch from growing food to growing healthy community

The popularity of community gardens around the country has boomed in the past ten years — within the 100 largest U.S. cities, community gardens in parks increased 44% between 2012 and 2022.

Karena Poke, founder of Lettuce Live community garden consultancy, witnessed firsthand this boom across Southern cities like Memphis and Houston. It’s not just about planting seeds and waiting for people to harvest them, she says, but actually engaging with the community on what is accessible and how to incorporate new produce into their diet.

“If you fail to engage the people that you’re serving on the front end, it’s impossible to get the people in that community to buy in, protect, and support it,” Poke said.

Often, community gardens around the country do fail. A pilot “agrihood” project in Macon County, Georgia received a $500,000 grant to transform a previously underfunded and food scarce community into one flourishing with locally-led gardens — after four years, the project’s only yield was two barren plots of land.

“Community gardens as a whole in the country last less than two and a half years,” Everett Verner, executive director of the Macon-Bibb County Land Bank Authority, told Georgia Public Broadcasting.

Lettuce Live has opened dozens of community gardens around the South, securing sponsorships from corporations including United Healthcare, Home Depot, and Aetna. These gardens host workshops and test kitchens for students and nearby families. Over the years, Poke said, these gardens become a place just for the community to get together.

“During COVID, we were getting 25 to 30 kids every Saturday, and they were driving about 45 minutes from where they live,” said Poke. “Parents were telling me this is the one place where the children can come and be safe.”

Studies show that community gardens could do more than just address food access issues — public health benefits and environmental protections from flooding and heat are associated with the impact of community gardens. While gardens have made a sizable effort in addressing food access inequality, gardeners still consider it a first step in providing institutional and enduring solutions to food scarcity.

“Each community has a different piece — you’ve got to tailor each garden for each community,” Poke said. “You will grow food, but as long as you’re growing healthy humans, then the food is the icing on the cake.”

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