User:Cciotti22/sandbox

Selecting Possible Articles
Area: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakland,_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Oakland,_Oakland,_California

Sector: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Bureau_of_Prisons

Sectors: FOOD DESERT
The article is fairly neutral giving only facts and specific definitions to what a food desert is. One place that might need clarity is after the first part of the definition section, it says “fueled controversy over the existence of food deserts” but doesn’t give any further details of the controversy surrounding food deserts so seems semi irrelevant without further explanation. Under the fresh food availability section there is a mention of food deserts in other countries and the different standards of nutrition making it hard to accurately define a food desert. It could be good to either link to the page “food desert by country” or go into a little more detail about defining nutrition either across the world or even just in the US. The rural food desert section should have a different label because it talks slightly about the difference between rural and urban food deserts, it goes more into the income and lifestyles of people which should be a separate section. The beyond physical access section mentions the need for access to be paired with education which could be a good avenue to do research and expand the article since it leaves it at that. This could also be paired with the mention of what different places consider nutritious and the standards of that. Potentially I could look into health education programs already in place surrounding food and which have been successful or not. The safety and store appearance section is small and mentions the nearness of liquor stores but doesn’t say anything more about what affects that has on people heath. This could be extended more to talk about the different types of stores in certain areas and the implications on health of these different stores. Maybe link to another wiki page about high crime areas that is also mentioned if there is any correlation. The transportation and geography uses the phrase “it is critical” which seems biased and not neutral because it’s not something that can be sited. There is a section in decision making that discusses safety as a factor that should be moved to the safety section or the safety section should be removed and melded with this part because it flows better in explaining how safety is a factor in food purchases. The final paragraph of this section partially repeats what is mentioned in the fast food section so should be removed to not repeat. There is mention of health literacy which is important but for my PE it could be good to go a little more specifically into the importance of healthy eating from a medical view. To talk about the excess amounts of sugars and processed foods is a problem for many people rather than just not having the access to any food. The article is a “start-class” and at the top it says it may require cleanup which means it is a good article for me to work on and add to. The talk page says there should be more discussion of the higher cost of healthy food calorie for calorie and the difference in a fresh cooked meal vs tv dinner style. There is also a lot of debate around furthering the article specifically about supermarkets so that is a section I should stay away from since there are some particularly passionate editors. At the bottom of the talk page someone said that it could be good to extend the history section from talking about the term to how “food deserts” came to be which could be another interesting area for research to help learn about regional influences and see what factors played a role in only certain places having access to food. There is mention on the talk page and the top bar of the article of stray or cluttered references so it could be good to go over those and clean them up a bit.

Area: East Oakland, Oakland, California
This article is rated as a start article and the banner at the top says it has multiple issues with citations and information so would be good for me to try and work on seeing as it is the specific area I will be working in and the article on Oakland as a whole might be too large to try and change. The opening section is repeated right away in the geography section. There could be a better way to start talking about East Oakland that’s different than a brief summary of geography and demographic. The history section in general doesn’t have very many citations and could be edited to sound better structurally. It could also be interesting to research how East Oakland specifically has been affected by gentrification. The culture section has a single citation for all the information it gives so definitely needs to be rewritten or backed up with sources. There is mention of the hip hop scene which could be a good area to link to another page about hip hop in Oakland or the music scene in general. At the bottom it says “mainstream hip-hop continues to lyrically and musically incorporate much of what was pioneered in East Oakland” but doesn’t mention specifically what used by different artists so it is very vague and it wasn’t cited. This article in general is very lacking in content and references. Because this is specifically where I am going to do my PE it could be good to do research that looks into the culture of the people living in this area, potentially the influences that had them move to the area, or generally the quality of living in the area. Because there is so little information, there are so many different directions I could take, I just need to start with researching East Oakland and see what would be important to add. The talk page mentions additions to the regions of East Oakland specific to the heritage of people who live there which I will probably leave to people who are more closely connected to those topics. There is also a topic of “East Oakland after WWII” where someone mentions the changing demographic but doesn’t seem to explain further whether or not they are perusing the topic so I could pick up on research of the changing demographics around that time period and add it to the space history section. The rest of the talk page focuses more specifically on neighborhoods in the area which I could do research on but I think focusing on the history of the area and the people would be more beneficial for my PE.

HISTORY
East Oakland is a section of Oakland that has experienced many changes to their population as the West attracted immigrants in search of employment. Oakland was declared a city in 1852 where it was prominently populated by people who made it to the west during the Gold Rush. The dominant races that had relocated to the East Bay during the late 1840s were Caucasian, Chinese, Mexican, and African American.

East Oakland Culture-Early 1900's
By 1910, Oakland had the largest African American population in the East Bay because it tripled in the previous decade as a result of fires and earthquakes in the surrounding areas. Despite the new influx of African Americans, the East Oakland hills were known as “the Bible Belt” because of the white, protestant community that occupied those houses. This area supported the Ku Klux Klan which shows that even in the East Bay there was racial tension and segregation. In the 1920’s, East Oakland was restricted from ethnic minorities unless they worked as servants for the white. Those who didn’t work as servants were hit by the Great Depression in the late 1920s and early 1930s which causes employment to drop by 41 percent in three years.

Surrounding Roads
In the 19th century, the Oakland-San Leandro Road was a county road connecting Oakland with San Leandro. Along this road, small settlements developed such as Melrose, Elmhurst and Fitchburg. All these were annexed by the city of Oakland after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. After annexation, the Oakland-San Leandro Road was renamed East 14th Street which lasted for most of the 20th century, until it was renamed International Blvd. Both Foothill Boulevard and MacArthur Boulevard, which run through the heart of East Oakland, were a part of the Lincoln Highway, the first transcontinental highway, from 1913 until 1927.

Post WWII
In the spring of 1943, there was an increase of immigrants to the Bay Area as a result of World War II; this time is called “the Second Gold Rush”. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the US government invested large sums of money on defense which created new jobs and opportunities on the coast and in the bay specifically. Because this was shortly after the great depression, many people were unemployed and looking for work, which was in abundance in the Oakland shipyard. Rather than an influx of whites, the new rush caused a surge of racial minorities which caused a restructuring of the demographics in the area. With the increase of workers, a housing crisis soon followed. In the city, there was push back from the Apartment House Owners Association and the Real Estate Board to build more housing so there were only five hundred public housing units built which also resulted in the destruction of other temporary housing units which displaced a large number of immigrants who had been living in them. Immigrants were forced to live in overcrowded quarters and even started sleeping on the streets because the housing that was being built was reserved for whites so minorities were pushed out of the city and forced to relocate to the outskirts of East Oakland. With the redistribution of living, this area, known as Brooklyn (until it was also annexed by the city in 1909) became the backbone of Oakland's African American community and caused an exodus of more prosperous whites to suburbs south and east of the city, such as San Leandro, Hayward and Walnut Creek.

Creation of the Freeway
In the 1950s and 1960s, many areas of East Oakland still remained predominantly white. After the war, MacArthur Blvd., which was the main route from San Francisco, replaced by the MacArthur Freeway (580) which displaced many more African Americans living in the city and forced them to relocate to surrounding areas such as East Oakland where the African American population was now the predominant community in East Oakland.

Lack of Property Taxes
In 1969 the Economic Development Administration (EDA) declared that they would no longer fund large businesses or facilities but rather focus on creating jobs for the unemployed and poor, which in Oakland meant the ethnic minorities. A few years later, in 1978, California passes Proposition 13 which prevented African Americans from expanding their public zone with the property taxes, which caused the value of the area to significantly decline as the whites moved out. The mayor at the time, Lionel Wilson, who was the first African American mayor, elected the year prior in 1977, combatted the regulation on property taxes by using many public resources to create investment in downtown Oakland which increased the cost of living in the city and pushed more poor and marginalized populations to surrounding areas such as East Oakland. This is one example of gentrification that has occurred in the city and makes the cost of living higher in the city so the original residents are forced to relocate to the poor, underserved surrounding areas.

With the new availability of jobs created by the EDA, between 1990 and 2000 more Latino and Asian (primarily Cambodian, Lao, and Chinese) immigrants moved to Oakland and specifically Central East Oakland because of how cheap the cost of living was compared to the city. A census on overcrowding showed an increase from 17 to 27 percent because of the new people who moved there. The majority of the new immigrants were Chicano/Latino who had a growth between 150 and 400 percent in that decade. That same time saw a decline in the African American population between 17 to 31 percent.

DEMOGRAPHICS
Fruitvale has become the backbone of Oakland's Latino community, in which East Oakland had a rapid increase of 132% of Latinos between 1990 and 2000. Latinos make up 38% of the population of East Oakland. There is also a diverse Asian population, including Chinese, Vietnamese, Lao, and other southeast Asian ethnic groups generally inhabit the area of East Oakland closest to downtown, from Chinatown east to San Antonio. Asians make up a smatter percentage of only 4% of the population, but between 1990 and 2000 saw and increase of 13%. Between 1990 and 2000 both the white and black population of East Oakland saw a decrease in their populations by 24% and 16% respectively. Nonetheless, African Americans predominate in East Oakland, where they represent over 54% of East Oakland's residents. The deep east side has a population of roughly 15,000 residents and is 63% African American thus maintaining the highest concentration of African Americans in Northern California and the highest concentration of African Americans in California outside of Los Angeles. The Foothill Square neighborhood in East Oakland, located off of MacArthur Blvd., has the highest concentration of African American residents of any Oakland neighborhood, at 75.4%. Though the population of whites had decreased, they still made up 4% of the population.

With the increase of the population between 1990 and 2000 the number of households in the area increased by 3.4%. The residents work in all kinds of job areas including service, sales, transportation, construction, and even management and professional positions while 9.1% of the population is unemployed. For the whites who stayed, it was often because they were too poor to relocate and saw an unemployment rate of 30%. In dominantly African American neighborhoods, such as Central East Oakland, between 40-70% of the population was without high school diplomas. The Latino population had 50-70% without high school diplomas and 5% with college degrees. Asians saw a smaller amount of the population without education with 39.3% without high school diplomas and 22.8% with bachelor’s degrees.

FOOD AND LIQUOR STORES
Along with the socioeconomic disparities that people in East Oakland face, is the issue of food scarcity. East Oakland is considered a food desert because of the lack of access to affordable, healthy, fresh food. Some studies have found that food was considered one of the highest priorities and came second to shelter. The participants claim that they knew how to eat healthy and about the importance of a nutritious diet, but the availability and cost of the food outweighed potential health outcomes. The people were more concerned about getting enough food that they wouldn’t starve rather than focusing on the nutrition of what they were eating.

With the changes in state funding to housing and the movement of impoverished groups in the 1930s, East Oakland became an area where poorer people lived which also resulted in a major loss of industry as businesses and markets started to close down and relocate to more financially sustainable areas. As time went on, supermarkets and other businesses saw East Oakland as an “undesirable place for residential and commercial investment” so few new stores opened up in place of the ones that left. The smaller commercial stores that did stick around were forced to raise the prices of their food and focus more on selling alcohol and tobacco products to stay afloat. In the flatlands of East Oakland there are only four supermarkets and over 40 liquor stores. Alcohol was easy to sell and made the stores more money, but the number of liquor stores is proportional to the levels of crime in violence in the area. Additionally, the majority of the population of East Oakland are Latinos and African Americans, both groups who have higher predisposition to alcohol-related diseases.

As far as the stores that do sell food, a study by YPAR (Youth Participatory Action Research) 2.0 showed that the most available foods were chips, soda, and candy. Because it is cheap and available, these are the foods that people buy although they have little to no nutritional value and make people at a higher risk for diabetes, obesity, and other health problems. YPAR 2.0 is a method of conducting research done by the youth in the community to try and address the problems they and their families face. By going across East Oakland and classifying it as a food desert and critiquing the limited access to healthy food, they pushed for liquor and corner stores to have fresh produce and nutritious staple foods visible and affordable to the members of the community. As a result, stores responded and started to sell fresh produce from local farmers and receive deliveries twice a week for fresh produce.

NUTRITION
Even if a person is able to eat the recommended number of calories, if they aren’t eating foods rich with vitamins and nutrients, they are susceptible to diseases from malnourishment. Some of those diseases include scurvy which results from low vitamin C levels, rickets from low vitamin D levels, and pellagra from insufficient nicotinic acid. There are many ways that nutrient imbalance may affect a person, and specifically the development of a child. In the United States, since 2006 there have been an increase in cases of over nutrition and obesity. Since there aren’t accessible grocery stores in many food deserts, people don’t have the choice of eating fresh produce. Instead, they are presented with what is cheap, fast and easy, which is typically full of excess fats, sugars and carbohydrates. Those foods were commonly chips, candy, and sodas. There are diseases that can also result from over eating or exclusively eating these kinds of food: cardiovascular disease, hypertension, diabetes, osteoporosis and even cancer.

Fresh foods all supply the body with nutrients that help it function effectively. Vegetables are sources of fiber, potassium, folate, iron, manganese, choline, vitamins A, C, K, E, B6 and some others. Fruits also are sources of fiber, potassium and vitamin C but the USDA recommends that fruit should be eaten whole rather than juiced because they lose their fiber and often times have added sugars. Dairy products contribute nutrients such as calcium, phosphorus, riboflavin, protein, and vitamins A, D and B12. Protein foods can be in the form of plant or animal products and are sources of B vitamins and lasting energy. The USDA also suggests to limit percentage of daily calories for sugars (<10%), saturated fats (<10%) and sodium (<2300mg). Although necessary for the body in small amounts, in excess these three things might lead to some of the diseases listed above.

PROCESSED FOODS
Even knowing the importance of nutrition, an additional barrier people may face is whether they even having the choice. Corner stores often only carry processed food, eliminating the choice of eating fresh. Processed food encompasses any type of food that has been modified from its original state whether from washing, cooking, or adding preservative or other additives. Because it is such a general term, processed foods can be broken down into four more specific groups: “unprocessed or minimally processed foods, processed culinary ingredients, processed foods (PFs), and ultra-processed foods and drinks (UPFDs).”

The original motivation for processing foods was to preserve them so there would be less food waste and there would be enough food to feed the population. By canning or dying fruits and vegetables to try and preserve them, some of the nutrients are lost and often times sugar is added, making the produce less healthy than when it was fresh. Similarly, with meats that are dried, there is salt added to help preserve it but results in the consumer having a higher sodium intake. The ultra-processed foods were not made to be nutrient rich, but rather to satisfy cravings with high amounts of salts or sugars, so they result in people eating more than they should of food that has no nutritional value. Processed foods may also be made rich with nutrients that many people are lacking in their diets, making up for the lack of fresh food. Some nutritionists may recommend eliminating processed foods from diets, while others see it as a way to reduce food scarcity and malnutrition. In 1990 the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act required nutrition labels on food, making it so people could see what and how much of something they were consuming. With that labeling what some companies did was list things that weren’t added on the front, but rarely did they add information about nutrients they added. There are scientists and nutritionists looking into ways to create affordable, processed food high in essential nutrients and vitamins that also taste good so the consumer is inclined to buy them.

ALCOHOL
Many areas that are food deserts have disproportionately high numbers of liquor stores. For example, East Oakland has 4 supermarkets and 40 liquor stores in their community. These communities are also often predominantly populated by ethnic minorities. Both Latinos and African Americans are predisposed to getting a disease from alcohol consumption. Some alcohol-related illnesses include stroke, hypertension, diabetes, colon and GI cancer, and obesity. There are also studies that show that consuming alcohol in moderation can reduce one’s chance of getting cardiovascular disease and even extend one’s mental stability into old age.

BEHAVIORAL AND SOCIAL AND CULTURAL BARRIERS (recommend name change)
The likelihood of being food insecure for Latinos is 22.4%, for African Americans 26.1% and for whites, 10.5%. People who are food insecure often will find themselves having to cut back more at the end of the month when their money or food stamps run out. Month to month, there are other special occasions that may warrant higher spending on food such as birthdays, holidays, or other special treats. Because people who are food insecure are still fundamentally involved in society, so they are faced with the other stressors of life as well as the additional frustration or guilt that comes with not being able to feed themselves or their family.

FOOD EQUALS MEDICINE
In Mississippi in the 1960’s Dr. H. Jack Geiger stocked his pharmacy with food claiming that food was medicine in certain cases. The lack of food doesn’t only have implications on a person’s hunger, but can have negative effects on their health. By insisting that food is medicine, there would be a push on medical providers to educate their patients and supply them with food or nutritional supplements they may not otherwise be able to afford.

YOUTH EDUCATION
Food deserts are a result of lack of access to food and not enough money to afford the food that is available, which causes many people and especially children to not get enough nutrients their bodies require. Because there is a dominant concern of where the next meal will come from, people don’t always care what they are putting in their bodies as long as it will keep them alive. The Grow Hartford Program was implemented in a school in Connecticut to have students address an issue in their community and they chose to focus on food justice. The youth involved worked on farms in the area to learn about the processes of food production and the importance and variety of vegetables. The program even led kids to start a community garden at their school. This program allowed the students to engage in hands on learning to educate them about agriculture, food scarcity and nutrition while helping bridge the gap of food access for some of their peers who could now bring home food from the surrounding farms or the school garden.

My Contributions
I added the above sections to the wiki pages. I didn't edit the pages more than adding my contributions. The only change I made to what was currently on the wiki page was the East Oakland History section. I completely rewrote it and incorporated a couple facts from the current history section and completely replaced it. I decided not to add the food is medicine example to the food desert page because I didn't have enough examples or explanations to make that more concrete.