Travel and mom duties have kept me away for nearly a month and I’ve got a huge backlog of things to write about. But I found this article in my travels today and I just had to share it.

It contains some startling facts about the almost total food desert that exists in Detroit. One factoid: “About 80 percent of the residents of Detroit buy their food at the one thousand convenience stores, party stores, liquor stores, and gas stations in the city.” Walk into a convenience store today if you get the chance and imagine being restricted to the offerings there. Sobering, isn’t it?

However, unlike a lot of articles I’ve read in urban newspapers over the past few years, this one offers an equally startling, innovative solution. Turn the vast tracts of abandoned land in Detroit into cropland. From the article: “An American Institute of Architects panel concludes that all Detroit’s residents could fit comfortably in fifty square miles of land. Much of the remaining ninety square miles could be farmed.”

What an amazing thought. The entire article is highly worth reading and I encourage you all to take the time to do so. Peace out…

Unlike MO State Rep Cynthia Davis, Will Allen has a positive attitude and real-world solutions to the problem of urban food deserts. The world needs more people like this guy.

Rep. Davis would do well to read this article and remediate some of her ignorance. For example, Mr. Allen mentions that, for one housing project in Milwaukee, the nearest grocery store is *three miles* away. For someone making minimum wage without a car, that’s a trip of near wagon-train proportions. Yet there are numerous fast-food restaurants within easy walking distance of the project. There’s something deeply classist about that. Access to wholesome food should be a baseline human right for every person.

I realize I’ve been on a rip about Rep. Davis lately, but it’s because I think the problem of urban hunger is incredibly important. Rep. Davis is probably no more ignorant than most middle- and upper-class Americans about the problem of urban hunger. She just happened to speak up about what she thought she knew. I’m constitutionally incapable of allowing that kind of ignorance to propagate.