What Is Our Culture? I Don’t Even Know

This chapter turns to the role of nostalgia in placemaking, community building, and the ways residents evaluated their local food system. In it, residents discuss self-reliance as a foundational ethos in the neighborhood’s history and also offer critiques of themselves and each other for not embodying self-reliance in the present, reflecting on the question “who is responsible?” for unequal food access. This chapter makes a claim that nostalgia plays an important role in the stories that people tell about food in the neighbourhood.

Conclusion

This chapter summarizes the main arguments of the book, reprises the usefulness of centering the narratives of everday residents, and explores the limits of self-reliance through a reflection on the death of a research participant. This chapter also connects Deanwood to a larger food justice agenda by discussing the role of organizations in the pursuit of an equitable, justice food system.

Introduction

This chapter reviews the literature on racism in the food system and demonstrates how theories of anti-blackness help to further frame contemporary food access inequities in cities. Building on literature from scholars who have framed self-reliance in the Black experience, the chapter also outlines “geographies of self-reliance,” a framework for understanding how self-reliance is not simply ideological but also becomes a spatial mechanism. Lastly, the chapter offers “quiet food refusals”—the types of food work and decisions being made outside the public gaze—to make a case for paying attention to the everyday ways Black residents are navigating the unequal food system.

Come to Think of It, We Were Pretty Self-Sufficient

This chapter provides an historical overview of Deanwood, a predominantly Black neighborhood in Washington, D.C. It details several key periods in the neighborhood’s development and the role food played in each, arguing that self-reliance was integral to the early sustainability of the neighborhood, as it undergirded the development of schools, small businesses, and small grocery stores. Secondly, this chapter explores the systematic decline of supermarkets in the poorest and blackest areas of Washington, D.C., and examines what that decline meant for residents and the city.

We Will Not Perish; We Will Flourish

This chapter revisits self-reliance, examining it as a lens through which contemporary efforts to increase food access are framed. In it, a community garden at a public housing community is featured, focusing on the ways the gardeners attempted to build community, maintain the garden to meet food needs, and develop programming for youth development. The chapter also examines how this garden functions within a broader landscape of precarity: how they continued gardening despite displacement.

There Ain’t Nothing in Deanwood

Focusing on the nearest supermarket, a Safeway, this chapter explores how residents made decisions about where and when to shop. The chapter examines the many considerations at the heart of grocery shopping: time, money, stores’ reputation, and transportation. Secondly, the chapter examines how these considerations are connected to socioeconomic status and class, demonstrating the heterogeneity present in the neighborhood and the challenges this presents for food justice efforts in the neighborhood.

He’s Had That Store for Years

In this chapter, Community Market emerges as a hopeful symbol of racial progress and self-reliance. Placed within the historical and contemporary contexts outlined in the previous two chapters, this chapter examines the paradox of residents exhibiting pride in the store while at the same time not shopping there on a regular basis. It also explores the role the second generation owner, Mr. Jones, plays in the community at large, making the argument that the position of authority that many residents claim he has is in part due to the longevity of the store, even in the face of impending gentrification.