aisle of a dollar convenience store

Medicine’s Darcy Freedman discussed food access inequality in America

As vacant grocery property is sold, Dave’s Collinwood customers give feedback on shuttle service 

Photo of Darcy Freedman

The Land: Darcy Freedman, the Swetland Professor of Environmental Health Sciences at the School of Medicine, commented for a story examining the fallout when a grocery store closes and a community with already limited access to healthy foods becomes a so-called “food desert.” Freedman instead  prefers the term “food apartheid, in which poorer communities and communities of color have vastly reduced access to quality, healthy food…This term (food desert) assumes the problem is not having a grocery store rather than looking at all of the reasons why investment in grocery stores is not happening in certain communities,” she said.