Neighbors and Food

Copp's Grocery, South Park Street, Madison, WI
Originally uploaded by Paul Grant.

I go back and forth on the issue of access to quality food in the inner cities. On the one hand, the grocery stores are a scandal. Copp's for instance: there's a filthy store on S. Park Street in Madison, with low-grade produce and flickering lights. Two miles to the south, there's a beautiful store full of high quality, low-pesticide food. The difference is the neighborhood. Copp's should be ashamed of themselves.

On the other hand, they have a business to run; why should they have to carry quality food that people don't buy? Food is more than a supply issue. If the south side demanded good food, it would materialize.

Here's a secret: the demand is there, and so is the supply. There are several small neighborhood grocery stores all along south Madison. But they are owned by - gasp - immigrant families. Yue Wah (below, bottom right) is a huge store, with great produce, albeit largely Asian and Latin American. Marimar (top right) is smaller, but much more familiar to mainstream American tastes. They've also got quality produce, including the best Avocados in town. Sundays they make their own corn tortillas from scratch. Then there's this other store - the name escapes me - on Fish Hatchery road (below, on the left). The owners are Vietnamese and the food is fresh.

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In all three cases, when I shop there, the owners are helpful and friendly, but there are no other whites or blacks in the stores. So whose fault is it if quality food is hard to come by?

It's the fault of the prejudiced shoppers, who won't condescend to crossing cultures when they shop. To be fair, there are occasional language barriers in the stores. But I chafe every time someone complains that there is no good food to be bought on the South side. It's anti-immigrant prejudice - the notion that there is nothing for me in a store with foreign-looking products - that is killing us.