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SOWING SEEDS AND FULFILLING NEEDS
Food Insecurity Distribution in the Piedmont Foodshed
This page explores food insecurity and distribution in Charlotte specifically and features clips from people dedicated to feeding those in need and their community partners, such as community gardens and local gleaners. This site features four organizations dedicated to alleviating hunger through food reclamation or distribution and one community garden partnered with a food distributor. The organizations featured on this site distribute food through different methods and serve different populations but all work to achieve the same goal: creating equitable access to healthy, nutritious foods to all people.
This site is part of a larger oral history project, The Queen's Garden: Oral Histories of the Piedmont Foodshed, created by UNC Charlotte Graduate Students in the Department of History. The Queen's Garden seeks to collect the stories of those who grow, cultivate, produce, and distribute fresh food in the greater Charlotte region. This project explores both the rewards and challenges of those who currently and historically have participated in and helped to create the region’s foodshed. By capturing and documenting the oral histories of farmers, gardeners, gleaners, and other organizations, The Queen's Garden portrays the sometimes unexpected and creative ways that local food production and distribution has occurred and changed over time. Additionally, it explores how participants sustain themselves and their operations in the face of changing economic, political, and environmental challenges, and seek their vision for how all of Charlotte’s populations can meet their food-needs in the future.
The long-term objectives of this project include archiving, transcribing, and disseminating these interviews to a local and wider audience. All interviews will be archived in the Goldmine Repository in Special Collections at the J. Murrey Atkins Library. This will ensure the preservation, contextualization, and continued availability of these resources to future scholars.
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FOOD SYSTEMS
A food system can be defined as an interconnected web of activities, resources, and people that extends across all aspects that involve providing human nourishment and sustaining health, including production, processing, packaging, distribution, marketing, consumption, and disposal of food. Food systems operate on individual, household, local, regional, national, and global levels and are all interconnected. The organization of food systems reflects and responds to social, cultural, political, economic, and health and environmental conditions.
FOOD INSECURITY
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) defines food insecurity as the lack of consistent access to enough food for an active and healthy life. Sometimes confused with hunger, food insecurity refers to the lack of available financial resources for food at the household level. Hunger refers to the physical sensation of discomfort. Food insecurity is a complex issue and is affected by many other factors such as affordable housing and employment. Food insecurity affects every demographic, from young children to seniors. The USDA estimates 1 in 8 Americans, or 40 million, were food insecure in 2017.
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Food Insecurity in North Carolina
604,000 households do not have enough food to eat
North Carolina ranks as the 10th hungriest state in the U.S.
Almost 1 in 5 children face hunger on a regular basis (24.6%)
Facts provided by Inter-Faith Food Shuttle.
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Food Insecurity in Charlotte
16% of Mecklenburg County's population is food insecure
19.5% of children live in food insecure homes
76 of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools' 170 schools provide free breakfast and lunch for all students
In 2015, 87,000+ Charlotteans did not have access to fresh, healthy foods
Food insecurity and the food deserts in Charlotte disproportionately affect low-income African American households
Please see the Charlotte Food Policy Council's 2015 "State of the Plate" for more information.
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LEVELS OF FOOD SECURITY
There are four levels of food security. The categories range from high food security to very low food security. Households that are food secure have no problems or anxieties about consistently accessing adequate food. Those who qualify as marginally food secure are households that have had problems or anxieties about accessing adequate food, but the variety and quality of the food were not substantially reduced or affected. Low food security encompasses households that have reduced quality, variety, and desirability of foods in their diets but the quantity of the food intake and normal eating patterns are not substantially disrupted. Households that experience disrupted or reduced food intake due to lack of money or resources for adequate food qualify as very low food secure.
CHARLOTTE'S AT-RISK NEIGHBORHOODS
Below are three areas in Charlotte considered a food desert by the Charlotte Food Policy. The corresponding pie charts reveal the lack of full-scale food stores that sell fresh fruits, vegetables, dairy, and other staples of a healthy diet. The graphs show the types of stores available to residents in these areas, most commonly gas stations, fast food, corner stores, and restaurants. Please click to enlarge images.
West Boulevard Corridor
Food Deserts in Charlotte and the Types of Food Stores Available. Images and graphs provided by the Charlotte Food Policy State of the Plate 2015 report.
West Boulevard Corridor
HOW IS CHARLOTTE COMBATING FOOD INSECURITY?
Charlotte has a long history of distributing and delivering food to those in need. Beginning around the 1970s, members from several local churches realized their elderly and infirm congregants' need of food. The members of Caldwell Memorial Presbyterian Church, Hawthorne Lane United Methodist Church, Our Lady of Assumption Catholic Church, and St. Martin's Episcopal Church began buying meals from Mercy Hospital and delivering it to those in need. In the fall of 1977, representatives from 30 Charlotte-area churches met to discuss expanding the meal delivery service, and thus Friendship Trays was established as an independent non-profit agency. Since then, Friendship Trays has grown and other organizations have appeared in the Charlotte area dedicated to distributing food to Charlotteans who need it most.
Second Harvest Food Bank of Metrolina was founded in 1981 as a project of the Charlotte Area Fund and became an independent organization in 1983. Similar to Friendship Trays, Loaves and Fishes was established in 1975 when members of the Holy Comforter Episcopal Church organized to feed the hungry. The pantry that began at Holy Comforter fed 1,000 people in its first year but today serves approximately 75,000 people a year through a network of 30 pantries in Mecklenburg County. Most recently, Food Connection was established in 2018 to rescue surplus food and has delivered over 1,000 pounds of food to the hungry.
Charlotte has a strong and interconnected food distribution network. In addition to the above agencies, other community gardens, Church pantries, and nonprofit organizations are dedicated to combating food insecurity in the area. While each organization might serve a different population through different means (community gardening, food reclamation, food pantry) they share a common goal: the elimination of food deserts and equal access to nutritious foods to improve the quality of life in Charlotte's underserved communities.
Source List
Please click here to view a list of sources used on this site.
