An article on
Civil Eats interviews Samina Raja, professor of urban and regional planning in the UB School of Architecture and Planning, about her work on food access, trends in the field and potential solutions. “We have one neighborhood in Buffalo that by federal guidelines is described as a food desert, but it had a thriving mom-and-pop grocery store in it. So if you went to look for grant funding, it would bring in a competitive supermarket that wouldn’t hire local people,” she said. “So defining a neighborhood as a food desert would thwart an existing, functioning grocery store because it didn’t fit the idea of a supermarket. I’m much more in favor of letting residents decide how they want to define their neighborhood and getting to the precision of the issue whether it’s a problem or an asset.”