The phrase “Food Desert” conjures a clear, heart wrenching image in our minds – a starving child in a vast expanse of sand, perhaps. Next, our rational mind moves to placing this child in an urban environment, rife with poverty, crime, and
This is the story of the health of our city, as seen from both a great distance and up-close and personal. We go about our days reacting to the forces around us, being shaped by them as we in turn influence the world, and understanding these interactions is vitally important to our understanding of ourselves and our place on this planet.
There is no shortage of evidence that we are living in a more interconnected world and that this has tangible impacts on the health of our community. Look no further than headlines from the past few weeks, with news of the expanding impact of West Nile disease on our most vulnerable neighbors, or changes in fuel prices resulting from decreased or reallocated grain harvests, to recognize that global health and environmental factors are critically important to our day-to-day lives. The choices we make regarding what we eat, whether or what we drive, how we treat one another, and the policies we put in place through elected officials feed back into this same global/local system.