week too good, no complaints

This summer I am working for Fresh Corner Café on their food-access initiatives. We work in the Green Garage (GG), which in and of itself is incredible. It’s a communal work space in which private businesses, non-profits, and individual employees rent space for their day-to-day work. Each business that works at the GG has to align with its values, which creates a more intimate, respectful community. The GG works to be as environmentally friendly as possible–there is a compost, precise recycling methods, and the trash output is much smaller than the average for businesses across the country. Also the building is beautiful! It’s all about open space and the wood has all been reused and refinished, making it a modern building with a lot of history. Not only is the building great, but because there are so many people with similar values working in the same space, there is a lot of overlap between the work being done there. Fresh Corner Café is one of the three food-focused organizations in the building–there’s also Detroit Food Academy and FoodLab Detroit. These organizations work on issues similar to those we work on, however their methods vary. Overall, I’ve found that I am able to learn about the work I’m doing by hearing about the similar work other people are doing, and with that many people working so close together, we are bound to figure some things out!
So, back to Fresh Corner (we’ll call it FCC now). We are a business working to increase food access in Detroit and the surrounding counties (Wayne, Monroe, Macomb, and Oakland) by running “pop-up” markets and selling produce and our healthy products in gas stations and convenience stores. We do this by selling the food at subsidized prices, trying to eliminate the financial barrier between community members and nutritious food. Meanwhile, FCC also runs a catering company that helps to subsidize the costs of their other projects. Lastly, we run “workplace cafes” where we sell our products in different business buildings as another method to subsidize the low-cost options we are providing. All of this work goes toward FCC’s mission to provide healthy, affordable, and convenient food to the people of Detroit and the greater Detroit area.
My summer research project is going to be about food-access and nutritional barriers throughout Detroit. I want to use my internship to learn about food disparities in Detroit, MI because I want to find out what is preventing people in the local community from eating well. I feel that once I understand this I will be able to help people have access to healthy foods and work towards fighting the obesity epidemic and other related health conditions. In addition to looking at transportation to and from the grocery store, I want to understand how socioeconomic status and cultural background influence people’s food choices. I hope to understand the role that geographic location plays in the food equation, but I also hope to discover how culture and upbringing help people navigate through the infinite possibilities of what to eat. Furthermore, I want to understand the economic incentive behind people’s food choices and if it’s possible to solely use financial motives to change people’s eating habits–if the produce is the same price as the processed shelf-foods, would that be enough for people to buy the produce? I hope that through this internship I will be able to understand what factors lead people in Detroit, MI to make unhealthy food choices.
So far, this program has been great because I’ve been doing the work I want to be doing, while learning to navigate through a new city–one much bigger than any I have ever lived in. I’ve made great friends and overall, I truly think I am benefitting from this experience. I am also really excited to start reading The Origins of the Urban Crisis because I want to learn more about the history so I can contextualize all that I am learning in my day-to-day life here.