Ephrame Kassaye frequently sees the same families and children shop at his store in the Washington Highlands neighborhood in Ward 8. He stocks the aisles of Chesapeake Big Market, located next to an elementary school and a child care center, with the usual grab-and-go fare of any corner market, like candies, cakes and cookies.
Yet beyond those aisles is an unusual sight for an otherwise typical corner market: a refrigerator mostly dedicated to unshucked corn, peppers, tomatoes and even a bucketful of ginger roots. Usually that same refrigerator teems with plastic packages of pre-cut melons and other fruits. But on a recent Thursday, that week’s pre-cut fruits had already flown off the shelves.
“The reason why is because it’s ready to go and no need for [customers] to take it home and cut it — it’s just ‘open the containers and start eating it,’” explains Kassaye. “I mean, sometime six pineapples will be sitting there … but the pineapple that’s already cut, it’s already gone.”
Certainly, the square footage dedicated to fresh produce at Chesapeake Big Market is minimal compared to the volume of space in the front of the store occupied by alcohol and tobacco products. But by offering any amount of fresh fruit and vegetables at all as a participant in DC Central Kitchen’s Healthy Corners program, the market serves an essential role in bringing healthy food to Washington Highlands, which lacks a big-name, full-service grocery store.
“A lot of families come down here in the morning, they buy fruits for the kids when they go to school, so they don’t have to travel far away just for the fruits,“ says Kassaye. “When they can just get it right in the neighborhood, you know, that’s just going to eliminate [needing to] travel far away just to get fruit.”
Finding fresh produce isn’t a problem restricted to residents of Washington Highlands. Across wards 7 and 8, only three grocery stores are available for the roughly 165,000 residents, according to Mike Curtin, CEO of the nonprofit DC Central Kitchen. Yet on the other side of the Anacostia River, Curtin says, there are over 50 grocery stores for around 525,000 Washingtonians.
“For most of DC, there’s about a grocery store for every 5,000 people; east of the Anacostia River, there’s one for every 50,000,” says Curtin. “That’s a pretty glaring disparity. There are neighborhoods in Northwest [DC] where you can walk to more grocery stores than exist in the entirety of Ward 7.”
Although the phrase ‘food desert’ has been around since the 1990s to describe places with little access to reasonably priced, healthy foods, Curtin says the “much more accurate term” is ‘food apartheid area.’
“When we say ‘food desert,’ we’re sanitizing these harsh disparities that exist in communities across the country — from indigenous reservations to rural areas into urban areas like DC,” explains Curtin. “Whereas a desert, it’s part of a natural ecosystem. It’s a harsh place to be, but it’s important for everything else to exist. The deserts need to exist. … It’s part of the cycle of life.
“There is nothing natural or important or good or beneficial about an area that has been excluded from an economic conversation and does not have adequate access to healthy fresh food,” he continues.
Healthy food inaccessibility in Washington’s food apartheid areas is compounded, Curtin says, by a lower level of automobile ownership and a lack of convenient public transportation options. Residents of such neighborhoods are “getting kids to school using public transportation, taxis, Ubers and then trying to fit grocery shopping in there somehow,” explains Curtin, calling corner stores like Chesapeake Big Market “important lifelines for folks” whose day-to-day schedules are overburdened juggling multiple jobs and child care arrangements.
But why aren’t there more grocery store options in these neighborhoods? According to Curtin, these neighborhoods have been turned into food apartheid areas after decades of being “purposely excluded from what what we would consider normal commerce or … access to fresh, healthy food that has significant impact on health outcomes.”
The lack of healthy produce east of the Anacostia River has never been “a problem of supply and demand” but a problem of convincing grocery wholesalers to distribute food to less profitable small corner stores, says Curtin. The limit of how much stock a small market can handle at a time blocks those store owners from providing healthier foods at a reasonable price.
He gives the example of a wholesaler dropping off one box of tomatoes at a small corner store compared to delivering 1,000 boxes of tomatoes at a huge grocery store, equally far from a distribution center. Even though the transportation cost may be the same to service both locations, the corner store isn’t as lucrative a customer as the large grocery store, which Curtin says leads many wholesalers to “not bother with” smaller retailers.
That problem makes it next to impossible for interested corner store owners to bring fresh produce to their neighbors and customers, forcing some to go to big-box retailers like Costco and BJ’s to pick up a handful of produce. That in turn raises the prices charged at the corner store, Curtin explains, because that small-business owner needs to make some profit when they sell the fruits and vegetables.
But over the past decade, a novel DC Central Kitchen program has sought to interrupt this situation, turning the community-based organization into a nonprofit middleman that acts as a secondary distributor from these larger wholesalers to the smaller corner stores already dotting food apartheid areas.
Mike Curtin and DC Central Kitchen founder Robert Egger dreamed up the idea that grew into the Healthy Corners program on the back of a cocktail napkin (“It could’ve been at The Dubliner — we cooked up a lot of ideas at The Dubliner,” says Curtin).
Essentially, the nonprofit leaders knew they had the space, the trucks, and the community connections to bring healthier food to the corner stores in wards 7 and 8, and decided to make it happen. So the nonprofit began connecting with corner store owners, launching the program in 2011.
The pair “maybe … took a little bit of a leap of faith” with the venture, Curtin acknowledges with the benefit of hindsight. Although they didn’t conduct a feasibility study, DC Central Kitchen was preparing around 4,000 meals a day at that point at their headquarters near Union Station and knew anecdotally what people wanted.
Curtin chides those who subscribe to the racist notion that people in “those neighborhoods” — areas that are predominantly Black — don’t want to eat healthier foods like fresh fruits and vegetables. Those perceptions become barriers to finding a practical solution to food apartheid areas, according to Curtin.
”No one, no time ever in the history of the world, has ever bought something that didn’t exist — so if you live in a neighborhood and there are no fresh fruits and vegetables, you will never buy fresh fruits and vegetables in that neighborhood,” Curtain explained.
While other programs, including most of those operated by DC Central Kitchen, give away food, Curtin says addressing the underlying systemic inequities that impede residents of food apartheid areas from accessing healthier food is what’s most important.
“Handing out groceries is not going to bridge a grocery gap; there has to be a system that’s created where everyone has access to what they want to buy,” says Curtin. “So in many ways, what Healthy Corners is intended to do is maybe not entirely bridge that gap but inspire other businesses to … invest in these communities that have been marginalized and … pushed aside so that people will actually want to see the value of putting the grocery store in Ward 7 and 8.”
Curtin recognizes that the conditions of poverty make hunger a problem that cannot be solved simply by increasing the availability of food; still, he says, there is plenty of work that can be done on that front. He wants to see his nonprofit’s program expanded into more corner stores, with more store owners who are actively involved. But getting more stores involved isn’t as simple as just convincing more owners to participate.
“For programs like this, incremental growth is not always possible,” he says, noting that having more participating stores means more trucks, more truck drivers, more storage and more administrative staff — all of which requires money. “We can either add in big chunks that would require significant capital investments or replace through attrition.”
Although just around 5% of the nonprofit’s overall budget comes from the DC government, about half of the Healthy Corners program’s $1.2 million budget comes from District funding. Other support comes from family foundations, business contributions and individual donations.
But at some point, Curtin wants the program to no longer be the mechanism for making fresh fruits and vegetables available on corners throughout Washington’s food apartheid areas. So far, three stores have “graduated” from the program, no longer needing the support of the program to procure healthier food for their customers.
“We measure success by building business, [but] we also measure by losing business,” says Curtin. “So when those stores go and they say, ‘Look, we hate to say this but we’ve been able to pool our resources and create our own little food hub,’ I think, ‘Awesome, rock on.”
This post has bee updated to correct a reference to the year of the program’s launch.
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