Noliwe Rooks on Food Justice and Michelle Obama
Cornell Chronicle
By Sascha Hernández
At first glance, obesity and hunger are the complete opposite of each other. One involves an excess of food; the other, a lack.
However, in the talk “Michelle Obama, Food Justice and the Big Business of Poverty in the South Bronx” on April 10 on campus, Noliwe Rooks, associate professor of Africana studies and director of graduate studies, explained that these two issues are “two sides of the same coin.”
Rooks said obesity and hunger are both related to food justice – or rather, the lack of it. “Healthy food and access to it is a matter of both equity and justice,” she said. A lack of readily available healthy food is a major issue for low-income urban areas with large minority populations, such as the south Bronx, she explained. Many of these areas are “food deserts” where there are no supermarkets.
The lack of healthy food, combined with other factors such as high rates of pollution in low-income minority areas, are part of the reason why “chronic health conditions are overrepresented in the poor,” she said.
