Free, inventive ways to combat Food Deserts

I was lucky enough today to come across www.instructables.com where hundreds of users have posted their creative ways to do....just about anything. I was browsing through the garden section and discovered several cheap ways to create your own home garden from the materials around you. With a little modification, that tubaware container that you had no use for could be growing tomatoes in no time!

1) The TeraHydro Box (Earth Box hack) http://www.instructables.com/id/Ultimate-Vegtable-quotEarthBoxquot-For-CHEAP/



2) Start your seedlings in that 2 liter bottle that you were going to recycle http://www.instructables.com/id/Ghetto-Greenhouse%3aSeed-Starter/step4/The-end-result/

3) Or start your seedlings the eco-friendly way using newspaper pouches
http://www.instructables.com/id/Biodegradable-Seed-Starters-From-Newspaper-anothe/

4) Hang up some plants with this nifty shoe organizer planter
http://www.instructables.com/id/VERTICAL-VEGETABLES-quotGrow-upquot-in-a-smal/

Inventive and accessible ideas like these and others are helping people take the fight over Food Deserts into their own hands. The creation of farmer's markets by communities takes time and a great deal of facilitation to coordinate. By producing food in your backyard you have consistent access to free produce and have limited your ecological footprint by cutting out the use of petroleum to transport your food. Some things are just more convenient if they come from your own back yard.

When I was researching 'Food Deserts' two years ago...

Two years ago, when I was writing my paper on Food Deserts, information was scattered. You had to search keywords like 'food accessibility,' and 'urban food issues.' Now when I search for it, look what I find:

Top 6 results
1) http://www.fooddesert.net/
A site that brings together the top articles and sources regarding food deserts, along with highlighting Mari Gallagher breakthrough research done in Chicago. It hasn't been updated since November, but it is still a solid starting point.


2) http://www.cdc.gov/Features/FoodDeserts/
Yay for the Center of Disease Control for recognizing Food Deserts as being a problem. They are not necessarily a disease....more of a circumstance that has been caused my external socio-economic factors and the issues pertaining to the food system structure in the United States....but at least the site contributes to awareness and features the United States 2009 report on Food Deserts.

3) http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1900947,00.html
The 2009 Time Magazine article by Steven Gray that does a great job of contextualizing the Chicago deserts and then looking at the issue from a national standpoint.

4) http://www.marketmakeovers.org/node/147
A media intensive look at the Food Deserts in Southern Los Angeles. Plenty of videos to go around. Market Makeovers is a great website for the local South LA population and can shows how a group of people can go about fighting food accessibility problems at a grass root level. This site also is a hot link for connecting into the online Food Deserts blog and site network.

5) http://www.ers.usda.gov/Publications/AP/AP036/
The 2009 report on Food Deserts by the United States Department of Agriculture. A dense report for those rainy nights.

6) http://www.yaleruddcenter.org/resources/upload/docs/what/policy/ChicagoFoodDesertReport.pdf
My favorite, Mari Gallagher's groundbreaking report on Chicago Food Deserts. It is important to make a distinction between the United States and European research, as Europe has been aware and doing research on food accessibility problems many years before the US. A must read!