I was so tempted to call to WJBO 1150am’s Morning with Clay and Kevin Show earlier this month when the duo talked about actor Wendell Pierce’s Sterling Farms supermarkets. The groceries are slated to open in New Orleans’ food deserts: the Ninth Ward, Harvey, MidCity, and New Orleans East.
Contrary to comments that this may not be a “smart thing”. Sterling Farms will be a great thing for a community that has gone decades without a grocery store. This isn’t about being without a Wally World; these are fresh meat, fresh vegetable grocers that others enjoy i.e. Albertson’s, Associated Groceries, Calandros, etc.
A food dessert in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward (and in Scotlandville likewise) is not based on imagined, assumed, or realized crime impact on business.
It’s decades of White business flight from these areas as they become Browned. It is that flight –intentionally or not intentionally– taking away what’s good for people and leaving behind all that is “sin taxed”.
North Baton Rouge has nine food desserts identified by the United States Department of Agriculture.
It is soooo not about crime here or in the Ninth Ward.
It’s that four-letter word no one in Baton Rouge likes to say publicly, but we all hear the pink Elephant roaring, and we all quickly duck when its tusk and trunk sweep the room.