It was good to have the legislative Black Caucus in town this week. They met at UAPB and talked about — among other things — food deserts, defined as an urban area where it is difficult to buy affordable groceries or fresh food. Like the “market” one can run into in certain areas to grab some… uh, well, not any fresh meat or produce, as it happens.
When the subject comes up, we immediately think of the Brookshire-owned Super 1 Foods that closed on East Harding Avenue a couple of years ago. That was the go-to grocery store for the east side of Pine Bluff, where people had been shopping for years, sometimes walking to the store for their needs. No more.
To get to a grocery store, those folks have to travel west on Harding, past Main Street, where a grocery store closed years ago, past 16th and Cherry, where another full-service grocery store closed years ago, down to Hazel and then over to 28th Avenue. We’re taking a journey here, and not a really walkable one — not carrying a bunch of groceries, anyway. So we get the aggravation and inconvenience.
The students at UAPB, as the caucus discovered and pointed out, have it worse in terms of distance between them and a grocery store. They have a few options, but when the cafeteria is closed, there are very limited ways to turn when the search is for healthy food, especially when many students don’t have transportation.
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Answers or potential answers were floated. There’s an on-campus food pantry, but it sounds more like the market where healthy alternatives are scarce. One lawmaker suggested that the campus Student Government Association write a grant for a refrigerator — we’re picturing something huge-ish and not the one in your kitchen — where fresh food could be stored.
And some grocery sellers deliver, so maybe that could be expanded… although there are likely limits on how far even they will go to drop off food. And those services come with an additional cost — not something that everyone can shoulder.
Pine Bluff doesn’t have it as bad as some smaller towns where the closure of a grocery store could be the closure of the only grocery store. But with fewer places to go and the locations of those places being inconveniently far away, it’s an issue. Good that the Black Caucus leaned into the subject. Maybe they can keep their eye out for a solution when the legislature meets in January.