My Hometown "The Swamp"
Americans are being poisoned while our government gives aid to the world
It’s a diamond that lost one of its points to the State of Virgnia in 1846. A swampy marsh land where the Potomac River, Rock Creek and Anacostia River meet. Hot and humid in the summer and snow in the winter. Its oldest settlement in the neighbourhood of Georgetown was where ships docked their cargo of tobacco in the 1600s.
It was inhabited for thousands of years by the Nacotchtank, who were part of the Conoy tribe of Algonquians. Algonquian is a large language group of native Americans that stretch from Canada to the mid-Atlantic and west to the Great Lakes.
It’s named Washington, after President George Washington who chose its location and the District of Columbia, after Columbia, the female personification of the American continent. To me it’s DC, a diamond in the rough.
My hometown has a bad reputation. Politicos call it “the swamp” full of corrupt political elites. That is true, but two things can be true at the same time. It is also our nation’s capital loved by many including tourists who visit in the millions every year. I was just there this August, and I too love the city, whether I’m visiting old haunts like my elementary and high schools, my old metro bus routes or catching up with friends who are more like sisters. I like to visit DC tourist attractions as well like the Portrait Gallery, the waterfront in Georgetown, Rock Creek Park trails, or the National Cathedral Gardens. The beautiful circles and grand avenues designed by L’Enfant create a leafy green beautiful city. Of course, I can’t forget the most famous address—1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
It is a glorious city full of people and places I love. I grew up in the NW area with two educated, curious, politically conscious, hard-working parents. I had all I needed to be healthy from day one. I never had to unlearn.
Unlearn? Peter Santenello’s YouTube show from an episode called “Washington DC, the clash of the rich and the poor” uncovered a truth about DC and many other American cities.
Santenello is known for visiting cities and regions all over the world with an unassuming camera and a black T-shirt as he documents real people and places. In DC he was guided by Sagnik an Indian university-educated immigrant to the US who arrived with nothing and through hard work has made a good life for himself. An amazing story that I know well because of my father’s similar journey as an educated immigrant, as well as my maternal family’s experience of Italian immigrant success, and, I would add, the story of most of the friends I grew up with, who also have lived this American Dream. During the interview Santenello asked why there was such a divide among the residents of DC? Why do some communities after generations continue to degrade, and others prosper? Sagnik said something I found very prescient. He touched on something about my hometown which is a stark but revealing truth.
“They have to unlearn” Sagnik explains (minute 19:45) and then makes another important point (minute 23:11). I highly recommend this video.
Some of the most powerful people and the most marginalized people live next to each other in DC. Not exactly as neighbours. The city is very carefully divided into Wards, but also people use the broader designations, NW, NE, SW and SE. When I was a child 16th street was the dividing line, “The Gold Coast” as they called it. Through gentrification, it has started to change, but there is still a stark contrast between these two halves of the city. The Capitol and White House and monuments are centrally located with residential neighbourhoods surrounding them. Many who work in DC live outside the technical borders of the city in either Maryland or Virginia. The wealthiest neighbourhoods in the U.S. are found in Potomac, Chevy Chase and Bethesda in the state of Maryland and Alexandria, McLean and Falls Church in the state of Virginia. In DC proper the most expensive areas are Georgetown, Foxhall, Spring Valley, Dupont Circle and Kalorama. Houses, town houses and apartments go for millions of dollars. Lawyers, doctors, scientists, lobbyists, government and city government workers, academics, NGO and think tank workers, diplomats and international bureaucrats make for an interesting mix. There are also neighbourhoods with extreme poverty, more violent crimes, drug trafficking and high rates of unemployment. Wards 7 and 8 are mostly the SE neighbourhoods like Anacostia, Barry Farms or Ivy City. This is not to say there are no hard-working families doing well in those neighbourhoods. I fondly think of the majority African American work force who make the city run. Metro bus drivers and postal workers, cleaning crews and landscapers, store clerks and office managers are its backbone. Before the 1968 riots in the U street corridor it was an African American cultural hub called “Black Broadway.” The area had the necessary mix of professionals, working class, business owners, artist and musicians. Duke Ellington, a famous DC native as well as many other black elites, made DC their home. Today there is a thriving black middle and upper class, but they have moved into other areas of the city, truly integrated into the upward mobility that defines America. But something has gone terribly wrong, the wrong direction, the wrong expectation or hope for the future with those left behind in poor the communities.
So why are there native-born Americans in our nation’s capital who can’t seem to access the American Dream at all after generations in the city? I define the classic dream as having stable family units, strong vibrant neighbourhoods with all kinds of businesses and a majority home ownership. I’m sure we could debate for hours all the reasons, but since I think about food and health a lot, I move to that reason first. Fundamental to our ability to thrive is our health. We build our bodies and minds every day with what we consume. Food is that building block. According to a 2017 DC Policy Center report wards 7 and 8 are food deserts. A food desert is a community where there are an overwhelming number of liquor stores and fast-food chains and small corner stores or gas station convenience stores. Usually there is one lonely supermarket/grocery store to service a big area, which might not be in easy walking distance for those who do not have cars. This means fresh fruit and vegetables are extremely limited and when available are double or triple the price. If you’ve ever walked into a Seven Eleven or the corner store you know you’re lucky to find bananas or apples or salads and not much more in terms of fresh fruit and veggies. These stores predominantly have canned foods, frozen premade foods, chips, sugary sodas, ice cream, and packaged cakes and donuts—all the foods that make you sick because they contain more sugar, seed oils, chemical preservatives, colors, and salt than healthy whole food. So, if you buy a can of Campbells vegetable soup it is not as good as homemade tomato or potato or mushroom soup because it contains too much salt and cheap seed oil and not enough vegetables.
It is very hard to make one healthy homemade meal from the ingredients in these types of stores, let alone a week’s worth of healthy meals for a family. That is what keeps poor people from healthy living. This is the first barrier to the American Dream.
Availability in stores isn’t the main problem, it’s the education of the consumer. An informed consumer leads to high standards, which leads to higher demand, which in theory should drive stores to provide better choices. In other words, the free market! But there is chink in this argument. What Sagnik called a need to unlearn. Someone is telling these communities they don’t need high standards. That’s not for you… you are too poor and stupid to demand more. Virtue signallers won’t word it so blatantly, instead it’s couched in the language of health food is for the privileged, it’s institutional racism, and some people can’t be shamed by their food choices.
I reject those arguments as lazy thinking and I say the answer is not to give up. We do not have to continue down the path of poison food. Should we deny the obvious facts of what is healthy and what is not, who is healthy and who is not. There is no shame in the truth.
Progressive political movements need to insist cities create zoning laws about food, build a cities where every single neighbourhood has multiple grocery stores, vegetable shops, butchers and bread bakeries. If not laws, it could be government grants for small businesses that will open shops like these. Or massive tax incentives for big businesses to open shops like these. That is where the progressive political discourse should be if it cares about marginalized people. Not the discussions about health food as a privilege. Allowing companies to profit from feeding poor people poison is immoral.
I would remind people that healthy food in the past was poor people’s food. We would be returning to pre-1960s-era neighbourhoods where there were African American and Italian and Jewish and Irish and Chinese communities who were poor but abounded with self-sustaining healthy habits.
It is insulting to uneducated people, poor people, people of color or if you prefer marginalized people to say they are incapable of improving their food consumption toward more healthy choices. If you think the help they need is with easy processed food or emotional help because they can’t handle criticism, that is truly racist.
I wrote this when I heard about an August 2024 Time magazine article by J. Ducharme on the JRE podcast #2197 (time stamp 1.57.00). It is a sad article that tries to explain away ultra processed food consumption by beginning and ending the piece with an exception to healthy eating and all the studies that correlate good food with good health. It quotes a “dietitian” who serves marginalized people and suggest ultra processed food as a solution. So, the rules apply to everyone… unless you are poor? This is the only thing worth saving from the article. “These hotly debated questions come at a crucial moment. In 2025, the U.S. government will release an updated version of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which tell people what they should eat and policymakers how to shape things like school lunches and SNAP education programs. The new edition may include, for the first time, guidance on ultra-processed foods. Officials at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration are also reportedly weighing new regulatory approaches for these products.” We have a voice in this debate through our conggressional representatives.
What if we measured our national strength and security by how healthy, strong, creative and intelligent our citizens were? Not only the top 10% who live in coastal cities. But the vast majority of our people. What if we, as the richest country in the world, were number one in lifespan and health outcomes of our citizens.
A good start could be using the billions of taxpayer dollars we send abroad.
To Israel, a 3.7-billion-dollar yearly pledge until 2028 and an additional 8.7 billion for 2024 after October 7th. Source is the Council on Foreign Relations
To Ukraine, according to CBO numbers since 2022 with the passage of 5 bills in congress we sent 175 billion dollars. Read the Council on Foreign Relations
Under a Democratic party-controlled congress we sent 113.7 billion and under a Republican party-controlled congress we sent 61.3 billion for a total of 175 billion. That is BILLION!
I believe those billions should be sent to US cities to improve healthy food and education.
I believe the interest of Americans should come first.
Our people’s health is number one.
That is more important than the border between Ukraine and Russia or the conflict in the Middle East. Many American citizens agree. In a question about foreign aid to Ukraine a Pew Research Center poll from April 2024 finds 31% of Americans think the money we sent was too much and 20% are not sure. So, 51% are not on board with this agenda. Congress and the President of the United States must address this 51% and represent our views as it is the people who give them their mandate. At the very least if they feel they want to make foreign aid our primary focus, they must have a robust and public debate to make their case to the public before they send that kind of money overseas. That is our Republic’s representative democracy as described in our US Constitution. #rescuetherepublic