In the wake of urban renewal and the building of NC Highway 147, a continued cycle of disinvestment afflicted the central city from the 1970s through the 1990s. Many people who could leave, did. The result was a pattern of both white flight and substantial Black middle-class flight to the quickly expanding suburbs. In their wake, community institutions and businesses such as banks and grocery stores also disappeared. These closures left significant parts of the city underbanked and lacking access to food. At the same time, a huge economic shift was taking place in Durham, whereby the unionized, well-paying factory jobs that had employed Durham’s working class for generations began to leave town for good. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Erwin Mill (J.P. Stevens), American Tobacco, Golden Belt, and Liggett & Myers and all shuttered their doors, leaving millions of square feet of empty factory space and thousands in need of new jobs. In a few short years, 1,000 jobs were lost at American Tobacco, 650 at Erwin Mill, and 1,500 at Ligget & Myers. Hourly wages at these factories (in 2020 dollars) ranged from $15 an hour at Erwin Mill to $33 an hour at American Tobacco. Upon hearing of American Tobacco’s plans to close their Durham plant in 1986, machinist Melvin Alston remarked “It’s just like dropping a bomb in Durham and clearing everyone out.” These transitions of homes, institutions, and workplaces disrupted much of the infrastructure of community life.236-238

![ This chart shows the labor force participation of women in Durham County and the United Sates, 1940-2010. Durham women’s employment outside of the home had always outpaced the national average and continued to grow steadily from the 1970s through the 1990s. Source: US Census 1940, 1960, 1980, 2000This chart shows the labor force participation of women in Durham County and the United Sates, 1940-2010. Durham women’s employment outside of the home had always outpaced the national average and continued to grow steadily from the 1970s through the 1990s. Source: US Census 1940, 1960, 1980, 2000 [Click and drag to move] ](/sites/wfpc.sanford.duke.edu/files/site-images/UDI_supermarket1.jpg)
Uneven investment across the growing urbanized landscape along with increasing industrialization and corporate control of the food system greatly impacted how people accessed their food, the types of food people ate, and public health. Across Durham, and across the United States, neighborhood grocers gave way to progressively larger, consolidated corporate grocery stores with big parking lots for shopper’s vehicles. The majority of these stores were located in the new suburban growth areas. Home refrigeration, on the rise since the end of WWII, was now nearly universal, allowing households to extend the time periods between shopping. Home microwaves, almost nonexistent at the beginning of the 1970s, were in more than a quarter of homes by1980 and kept growing in popularity. Changes in how food was stored and cooked were accompanied by increasing numbers of women working outside the home and a rise in single parent households. This transition encouraged a demand for convenience foods, food from restaurants, prepared meals at grocery stores, or microwaved from the freezer.239-241
Many of the new convenience foods were processed, meaning mechanical or chemical operations were performed to change or preserve it. Processed foods are typically found in a box or a bag in the inner aisles of the grocery store and at fast food outlets and convenience stores. These foods, never before known in the millions of years of human evolution, became a central part of the American diet, with some estimates claiming that they now make up as much as 70% of our calories. Processed foods were seen as a beneficial way to keep raw material costs low and extend the shelf life of food. However, they are often lower in nutritional value than unprocessed foods and are high in sugar, fat and empty calories. Such foods may contain unhealthy food additives. Consuming significant amounts of processed foods has been linked to increased risk of health problems such as heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol, cancer and depression. Processed foods are also cheaper, more accessible, and more heavily marketed to food insecure households than whole, unprocessed foods. These factors have been linked to the racial and economic disparities in diet-related illnesses.242-246
Since the 1960s Durham County has become increasingly less agricultural, and now is one of the least agricultural counties in the state. Today, only a small fraction of our food is produced locally. Instead, like most U.S. cities, Durham’s food comes from all around the world. Industrial agriculture is now the dominant food production system in the United States. It is characterized by large-scale monoculture, heavy use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and meat and milk production in confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs). Under this model, farms have come to resemble factories more than nature, with “inputs” such as pesticides, feed, fertilizer, and fuel, and “outputs” such as soybeans, pork, etc. Yet, the goals to increase yields and decrease costs of production through economies of scale have been incredibly successful, as world food production nearly doubled from 1961-1996, with only a 1.1 fold increase in cultivated lands.247-248
In nearly every way, industrial farming is far removed from the interdependence and biodiversity of natural ecosystems as possible, and is a vast departure from historically diversified farms. Each year, billions of pounds of pesticides are applied to crops. Farmworkers and communities adjacent to industrial farming operations are often exposed to high levels of these toxic chemicals, with both short-term and chronic health impacts. These chemicals then enter the food system and are consumed by people and animals- although science is still catching up on how this affects our bodies. In the industrial agriculture model, a few crops reign supreme. In particular, some limited varieties of corn and soybeans that overwhelmingly end up as animal feed, biofuels, and processed food ingredients.
Widespread monoculture reduces soil fertility, requires costly applications of chemical fertilizers, and intensive irrigation. In industrial meat, milk, and egg operations, animals receive massive doses of hormones to promote fast growth and antibiotics to ward off the infections and diseases that thrive in the unsanitary and crowded conditions of CAFOs. High concentrations of confined animals also produce substantial amounts of bio-waste. While historically, animal waste has been a useful fertilizer for crops, factory farms produce far more than can be assimilated by nearby land, and so this waste ends up in large treatment areas that cause water and air pollution and emit high levels of greenhouse gasses. Cumulatively, industrialized agriculture is having global environmental repercussions, including massive deforestation, habitat loss for a wide variety of species, and a shortage of ecosystem services, such as pollination, that a more diverse landscape offers. Scientists have estimated that the industrial food system is responsible for somewhere between one-fifth to one-half of the human actions that are causing climate change. This impact is driven by dependence on fossil fuels to produce pesticides and fertilizers, to process food, and to transport it across the globe, as well by the methane released from massive livestock operations.249-252
Shifting policy priorities in the Farm Bill in the last quarter of the 20th century steadily increased corporate control and consolidation within the food system. Corporate control refers to control of political and economic systems by corporations in order to influence trade regulations, tax rates, and wealth distribution, among other measures, and to produce favorable environments for further corporate growth. Corporate consolidation refers to a concentration of corporate ownership within each part of the food system, including production, processing, and distribution. Since its beginnings in 1933, the Farm Bill has been the keystone agricultural policy in the US. It is an omnibus bill enacted approximately every five years and is shaped by a variety of for-profit and nonprofit interest groups and corporations by way of lobbying, campaign donations, and other such efforts. Leading up to a new farm bill, a broad range of interests line up to advocate and form alliances in order to best meet the needs of their constituents. These include groups focused on farm policy, commodity and industry interests, the environment, rural development, hunger-relief, public health, and sustainable agriculture.253-254
After several decades of few major changes, the 1973 Farm Bill opened up a new era of drastic deregulation. It was influenced by an economic recession, high fuel prices, and failed harvests abroad which all led to a worldwide grain shortage for the first time in many years. Wanting to increase agricultural production, President Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, called for farmers to plant “fencerow to fencerow” and “get big or get out!” These directives were reinforced by a Farm Bill that moved away from the long-held policy of farmer loans and incentives to periodically rest their land towards direct farmer subsidies. But after the recession passed and the world grain supply went back up, the intense overproduction of commodity crops, subsidized by the federal government, primarily benefited corporate buyers while farmers continued to lose their lands and income to larger consolidated operations.255-256
Beyond favorable buying conditions, corporations have increasingly come to control the food system including the manufacturing and distribution of seed, fertilizers, pesticides and machinery, as well as food processing, distribution, marketing, and retail. This control puts wealth, influence, and decision-making concerning the entire food system in the hands of very few. Moreover, starting in the 1980s, legal rulings extended the notion of private property beyond land and water to include the fundamental components of life itself by allowing seed genetics to be patented.257
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Examples of consolidation within the food system today. Courtesy “Behind the Brands: Food Justice and the ‘Big 10’ Food and Beverage Companies” (Oxford: Oxfam, 2013). |
Like many Americans, Durham residents have become increasingly disconnected from the land and our food production, both physically and culturally. Without a clear guide map of how to eat, food corporations use marketing and media to shape ideas and perceptions about what we should eat and why. Although public health guidance has changed very little over the past 100 years, the public health and nutrition world’s fractional budget cannot create enough counter-marketing to change narratives created by food corporations. Not all foods are marketed equally. In the early 2000s, more than 70% of food advertising was for convenience foods, candy and snacks, alcoholic beverages, soft drinks, and desserts- whereas only a tiny fraction went toward promoting fruits, vegetables, grains, or beans. In this highly competitive food environment, no person is too young to become a consumer, and the food and beverage industry has developed savvy ways of influencing children’s product preferences, requests, and diet. There is a strong association between increases in advertising for non-nutritious foods and rates of childhood obesity and diabetes. Companies often target Black and Hispanic consumers with marketing for their least nutritious products, contributing to diet-related health disparities affecting communities of color.258-261
Since the early 1980s, the political environment has seen a decline in the robust mid-century social movements led by labor unions and people of color that yielded the expansion of the social safety net and major civil rights legislation. These social movements and progressive political reforms resulted in a period of decreased income and wealth inequality between the New Deal in the 1930s through the War on Poverty of the 1960s to the late 1970s. In its place has been rise of a political ideology known as “neoliberalism” that emphasizes the value of free market competition and the belief that free markets are the most efficient way to allocate resources. Neoliberalism prizes low taxes, privatization, deregulation, and free trade, and the dismantling of government entitlements and social programs in favor of market-based solutions. The past 40 years of neoliberal policies has led to historic levels of inequality across the globe.262-264
Upon taking office in 1981, President Ronald Reagan championed this neoliberal ideology by simultaneously cutting taxes for the wealthy and spending for the poor, slashing welfare benefits, funding for public housing, grants for mass transit, and food assistance. As a result, food insecurity spiked during his tenure and economic inequality widened to levels not seen since the end of the 1960s. To justify these austerity policies, Reagan invoked stereotypes and caricatures of the poor as undeserving welfare queens, freeloaders, and con artists whose food stamps and welfare benefits were a drain on the system and were costing undo taxpayer expenditures. Unlike the previous decades where the media’s stories of poverty had frequently included poor whites in Appalachia and other rural communities, the images promoted by Reagan focused on Black people living in urban poverty. In Durham in the 1980s, reductions in federal poverty and hunger programs were felt acutely. Despite the number of poor people remaining relatively constant between 1981-1987 the number of people receiving welfare benefits dropped by 20% and foodstamps by 25% due to tightening eligibility requirements. As a result, local health care providers reported a significant uptick in patients with malnutrition related illnesses such as anemia, low-birth weight, and protein deficiency.265-268
With a reduction in programs striking directly at the root causes poverty, downstream charity programs developed to help alleviate its symptoms. Having charity programs address the structural issues of racial and economic inequality were encouraged by President Reagan, who said “if every church and synagogue in the United States would average adopting 10 poor families beneath the poverty level… we could eliminate all government welfare in this country.” This focus on volunteerism and charity continued under President George H.W. Bush in his “thousand points of light” framing where he claimed “What government can do is limited, but the potential of the American people knows no limits.” Nonprofits, a tiny sliver of the US economy before 1970, mushroomed into a major sector of the economy. A number grew up in Durham in the 70s and 80s to address the issues of hunger and food insecurity. Meals on Wheels started in 1975, the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina in 1980, Urban Ministries of Durham in 1983, and the Interfaith Food Shuttle in 1989. Across the country, more than 80% of pantries and soup kitchens currently operating came into existence between 1980 and 2001. In Durham and elsewhere, many of these food charities focused on reducing food waste, which was increasingly recognized as an absurd reality in the face of chronic food insecurity for so many. A 1974 national survey estimated that approximately 20% of the food manufactured in the U.S. for human consumption was being thrown out. In 2020 that percentage is as high as 30-40%.269-274