Austin Eats: Community Takes Action to End 'Food Apartheid' There

by Michelle Meyer

A Beyond Hunger volunteer delivers food during the pandemic

Beyond Hunger photo

Vegan egg rolls simmer on a portable stove in a school gym. The aromas of sweet potato pie and cooked collard greens fill the room. People sample these and other dishes before collecting print-outs of the recipes and pamphlets with information about local food resources. Then they file into a nearby room to watch a documentary about food deserts in their neighborhood.

On Oct. 7, 2022, over 100 neighbors and community organizers gathered for a free film and food showcase in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago’s West Side. Vegan World Cafe offered free food, and Beyond Hunger gave cooking demonstrations. This is how a neighborhood tries to create a food oasis out of a food desert.

Austin is the largest Chicago neighborhood geographically and the second-most populous in the city, with nearly 100,000 residents. But it has limited grocery store options that sell fresh produce, all over one mile apart from each other. Austin’s population is over 75% Black, and the median household income was $35,500 a year prior to the pandemic. The pandemic made a bad situation worse in Austin, and one of the few grocery stores, Save A Lot, closed in 2020.

The food and film showcase was hosted by Austin Eats, a collaboration of 22 organizations working on promoting healthier food options in the neighborhood by providing emergency food access, grocery stores, food education, community gardens, and marketing so that residents knew about these efforts.

Austin Eats built on existing efforts to promote healthier food options in Austin. “A lot of these organizations were starting to work together,” said Grace Cooper, project coordinator at parent organization Austin Coming Together. But the pandemic made the work of Austin Eats more urgent, driving the need for emergency food access. “During COVID, it became clear that, all right, let's formalize this group,” Cooper said.

Austin Coming Together, founded in 2010, coordinates dozens of organizations around a “quality of life plan” for Austin that includes stable housing, improved education, and a safer neighborhood. Austin Eats specifically focuses on providing access to food through a combination of food pantries, groceries, and gardens. Fresh produce access is the main goal since the majority of food options in Austin come from liquor stores and corner stores that carry little or no fresh produce.

Austin Coming Together rejects the term “food desert,” however, preferring to call Austin a victim of "food apartheid" to more accurately describe the systemic racism and neglect the neighborhood has experienced.

“We're trying to build community and talk about food access and build collective power over trying to improve food access,” says Ethan Ramsay, Austin Coming Together lead organizer.

The Jehovah Jireh #1 Outreach Ministry

Michelle Meyer photo

Pastor Jody Bady (in red) distributes food in Austin

photo provided by Jody Bady

The New Fast Food

Food pantries are a vital link in the Austin Eats chain. Some are home grown; others are based in neighboring communities.

One Austin Eats pantry, Jehovah Jireh #1 Outreach Ministry, is run by Pastor Jody Bady. It offers free pantry items like canned food and pasta on weekdays out of a food truck that Bady drives to areas with high levels of crime, based on information from the 15th District Chicago Police Department. The pantry offers nonperishable foods and fresh produce, and meats on Wednesdays. Bady believes that bringing fresh food to these areas will help turn them into “safe havens.”

Last year, Austin Eats helped expand Jehovah Jireh’s reach by providing another food truck and funding to build a permanent pantry.

The permanent pantry is located at 5116 W. Chicago Ave. and is open Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. The pantry offers nonperishable foods and fresh produce and meats are offered on Wednesdays. AustinTalks.org reported that Bady supplies the pantry from other pantries and donations. He hopes to create a partnership with a large organization so he can supply fresh produce more than once a week.

In neighboring Oak Park, Austin residents can drive up to a parking lot lined with orange flags directing them to the entrance of a food pantry run by Beyond Hunger, an Austin Eats partner. There, pre-packed boxes of food are loaded into their trunks. To ensure that the food suits the needs and diets of recipients, Beyond Hunger relies on a client advisory council made up of people who have used its services in the past.

“That voice is really important to have as part of every aspect of our organization,” said Sarah Abboreno Corbin, Beyond Hunger’s communication manager. “And I think that's probably the biggest piece of advice I might have for any other pantry.”

Inflation is making it harder for Austin Eats to keep up with the demand for food, which has been increasing. The organization has seen 40% increase in people requesting its services in 2022 compared to past years.

“We're experiencing this exponential impact because everyone's experiencing that increase in cost of food. And we are spending more money on food at the same time we are needing to serve more people,” Abboreno Corbin says.

Beyond Hunger provided food to over 40,000 people last year, demonstrating the value of partnerships with more affluent communities. It also launched a health ambassador program that trains Austin residents to teach neighbors about healthy eating and diabetes management.

Michelle Meyer photo

Michelle Meyer photo

40 Acres Fresh Market

The 40 Acres Fresh Market does not have a set date for construction since there have been multiple development setbacks. Liz Abunaw said she started on creating store designs in April 2021. After switching designers and going through over eight redesigns, Abunaw said her team submitted a final design for permit approval.

One of the logistical challenges was finding a route for truck deliveries. The store, located at 5713 W. Chicago Ave., sits at the intersection of North Waller and West Chicago avenues. Waller Avenue is a residential street that does not allow for trucks to pass through, so Abunaw took time to find a design that made sense for the external parking lot and internal receiving and back-of-house operations.

Now with a final design submitted, it could be possible for the store to open sometime this year. Abunaw speculates that it will take about six months for construction once permits are approved.

Setting Up Shop

Food pantries play an essential role in addressing emergency access to food. But ultimately, neighborhoods need grocery stores so people can have consistent access to fresh produce and other food. That means something other than corner stores that emphasize the sale of liquor and lottery tickets, where there might be an onion and a rotting tomato for sale, says Austin Eats member Liz Abunaw.

“I wouldn't buy produce out here. It smells bad here. I think the smell of weed knocked me over when I first came in to one store,” Abunaw says.

Abunaw owns Forty Acres Fresh Market, which is a fresh produce delivery service, and she is working on opening a brickand-mortar grocery store in Austin under the same name in a former Salvation Army store at 5713 W. Chicago Ave. She was awarded over $20,000 through Austin Eats, which helped her secure a $2.5 million grant from the City of Chicago Neighborhood Opportunity Fund.

“You can't solve [food deserts] with groceries and it shouldn't be solved by grocery retail. But grocery retail is a big piece of it because grocery retail is structural. And it's far more than food. It's jobs. It's neighborhood infrastructure. It is neighborhood walkability. Grocery stores tend to be anchors,” Abunaw said.

They also keep money in the neighborhood. Currently, many Austin residents drive to nearby Oak Park to shop at its many well-stocked supermarkets. That’s inconvenient for shoppers and siphons dollars out of Austin.

“It's important that we really invest in these local initiatives because there's competition. A lot of the competition around food is coming from Oak Park,” Ramsay said. “That’s a dynamic we have to be cognizant of.”

But Abunaw faces challenges in creating her store, from permits to budgets and redesigns. She still doesn’t have a date when construction will start. “I would say however much you think it's going to cost, triple it,” Abunaw says. “However long you think it's going to take, just don't estimate a timeline.” She previously managed the Austin Town Hall City Market, a weekly outdoor food market where local vendors sell produce and other food during the summer.

A youth-led fresh produce store, Austin Harvest, will be opening this spring at 423 N. Laramie, providing fresh produce and groceries in Austin year-round. Austin Harvest, which started as a pop-up market in the summer of 2020, is led by high-school students from By the Hand Club for Kids. In the summer of 2020, they gave out 75,000 pounds of fresh food, which was provided by the Greater Chicago Food Depository and funded by Chicago’s COVID-19 Racial Equity Response Program.

Designed to last for one season, it was able to continue due to high demand and funding from Austin Eats.

The Harambee Gardens

Michelle Meyer photo

The Harambee Gardens sign

Michelle Meyer photo

The Paradise Gardens sign

Michelle Meyer photo

The construction site Austin Harvest

Michelle Meyer photo

Tilling the Soil

Community gardens can play a unique role in neighborhoods like Austin, providing not only food but also camaraderie among gardeners.

Austin Eats supports 24 community gardens in the neighborhood. “These are really spaces that are used to serve the community in a number of ways beyond just planting vegetables and harvesting them,” says Cindy Schneider of Austin Garden Collective. They host events, like summer cookouts and pop-up food pantries. One garden, Harambee Community Garden, is using Austin Eats funding to install a pizza oven so it can host pizza parties.

Schneider said their biggest challenge is securing enough volunteers to work in the gardens each week during the summer season. “We really want to involve as many community members that live near each garden as possible,” Schneider says. “I mean, outside groups coming in for a day is great, but it's not as long-term sustainable as when you can get people who live close by you.”

Still, the gardens have brought people together and brought food to the neighborhood, along with awareness of how to grow and prepare fresh produce.

Money and Marketing

Grants are essential in Austin Eats’ work to make this food desert green. Much of the funding for Austin Eats comes from foundation support. Also important is getting the word out, which has been a challenge during the pandemic. Austin Eats spent $20,000 on marketing efforts in 2021 to increase community awareness.

“There's always improvement for communication [and] knowledge about what exists,” Ramsay says.

The goal is to set in place long-term improvements in food access in Austin, not just quick fixes. As a result, progress may not be immediately obvious on a large scale. “That's something that I really appreciate about our processes,” Ramsay says. “We're not just go, go, go. Just plan and then go, go, go. We're constantly planning.”

That planning includes welcoming a variety of stakeholders, including residents and businesses, to share their needs and ideas. Only then can a problem as long-standing and deeply rooted as food scarcity be addressed.

“Strategize together; understand how people are approaching the work,” Ramsay says. “Because it can lead to fruitful collaborations.”