Interview with Samantha O'Harra

Natalie Rodgers (NR): Hi. My name is Natalie Rodgers, and today I will be talking with Sam O'Harra, a third year undergraduate student at UCLA, double majoring in Psychology and Gender Studies. Today I will be discussing with Sam their experience of living in a food desert. Sam spent six years living in Cherry Valley, a small unincorporated town in California in the heart of the Inland Empire, in which 16.8% of the population lives below the federal poverty line and grocery stores are few and far between (Data USA, n.d.) We will discuss the interventions our imagined consulting firm interventions and to improve food desert disparities, created for a research project for Society and Genetics 108. Sam, could you describe for our audience the experience you had in going to grocery stores or finding fresh, non-perishable foods?

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Samantha O'Harra (SO): Sure. So in order to get to the grocery store, we were looking at about a 10 or 15 minutes drive from my house. The farther ends of Cherry Valley, we're looking at a bit more than that, maybe up to 20 minutes to get to Stater Brothers or Walmart. In the respective seasons, we would have some fresh produce and fruit. Cherry Valley actually was started in a cherry orchard, but the prices and access wasn't consistent.

 

NR: Could you describe what your typical diet consisted of?

 

SO: Yeah. So I lived with my dad in high school, and what we ended up doing was a lot of meat and then some sort of like frozen side, usually like starch, some sort of potatoes or a frozen vegetable medley. It was a little bit more shelf stable and consistent to be able to have the frozen items since we didn't go to the store all that regularly.

 

NR: And how did your experience living in Cherry Valley and eating with these meat and starch combos compared to that and you're a new home in Temecula, California, about 50 miles away?

 

SO: It was definitely a different experience. Temecula has a different socioeconomic environment. It got a lot more developed neighborhoods and a more central, like downtown area. The store is about three minutes from my house now, versus the 10 or 15 minutes drive that I had in the past. And Temecula also has a number of agricultural sections where you can get fresh produce. The biggest unincorporated part of Temecula is actually wine country, which, as you may guess, has a lot of wineries that also offer other fruits in the correct seasons.

 

NR: In our project, we are studying how endocrine disrupting chemicals present in food packaging and introduced to food and food processing disproportionately affect populations who consume more packaged, processed food, such as those who live in food deserts. As a gender studies major and a person personally impacted by this situation, what are your opinions on this inequality and any health experience that you or your loved ones have had?

 

SO: Well, ultimately, I think it's hard to analyze these effects because it's a build up over years of experience, but there definitely is a detriment to having a lack of access to fresh nutrients and vegetables and fruits, whether that's a lack of growth within the community. A lot of kids in my hometown were not as developmentally advanced as they should be physically because of the lack of access to proper food and nutrients. We try to kind of address that with food banks in our city, but the city funding was also limited. And as someone with nieces and nephews that are in this developmental stage, I'm glad that we had schools that would try to directly support families by offering food, but they would also not do fresh produce. There's a ton of packaged foods that were easier to disseminate. And so I think that this has an impact not just on these lower economic status populations, but also, like in the Inland Empire. Specifically, we have a very high Latino population and a lot of immigrants and frontline workers during the pandemic and so this also contributes to the difficulty of the experience that these families have in trying to provide food.

 

NR: In our project, we propose the creation of a consulting firm that would work at many levels to help provide access to healthy food because we see these disparities and we see the current limitations on preventing EDCs and packaging and ineffective regulations. Some of these interventions would include catering healthy school lunches, kind of like you mentioned incorporating schools into the system, partnering with food delivery services to deliver healthy groceries in a sustainable manner, partnering with private companies, and also providing tax incentives for expanding grocery stores in the food deserts. Do you think that these solutions would have been beneficial to your time in Cherry Valley or to your nieces and nephews now, and is there any service that you would recommend we consider adding?

 

SO: Yes, I think that these expanded resources definitely would have an impact in our community. One thing about Cherry Valley is there's a lot of senior residents, and many of them may be unable to drive, which is also why the fact that the store is so far away is difficult, so some sort of delivery service would probably be able to reach those in need who live a little further into the town. Also, when it comes to the schools, I think that that is a tremendous opportunity for expansion in reaching families in the community. I know that over the pandemic that a lot of the schools in our area would prepare boxes and have them either delivered or set for pickup by our local student families so that they could have some sort of supplement to what the school meals would have normally been providing throughout the pandemic. So I think that those solutions would definitely add more resources is important, yeah.

 

NR: Thank you for your time and insight, Sam, really enjoyed talking to you. This is Natalie Rodgers, and thank you for listening.