Photographer: H Fruchtman for the Health of Philadelphia Photo-Documentation Project.
About The Photograph
With supermarkets an expensive cab ride away, residents often turn to the only local food choices: corner markets and Asian takeouts. Both, according to residents, are purveyors of ill health, but not only because of the low-quality food sold inside. These outlets double as vendors of liquor, single cigarettes, and drug paraphernalia—a flammable combination when considered in the context of the race-based hostility our participants report as commonplace in these establishments. Accordingly, residents routinely describe local fast food shops as a site and source of violence in a city where homicide is literally a daily event.
This is typical of the kind of establishments where the community, they go there to get food....They're open late at night and the way they shutter these places is with steel fencing and when you go inside it's like a protective glass. It's like going into a prison or something. And so you shove your money in there and then they shove the food out to you...This is where they go—so that food comes to the house and children, little kids eat it. Everybody eats this food and—this is where they sell crack materials, drug paraphernalia....They can also buy cigarettes, one or two or three, which is against the law. But they will go in and so this is a whole underground economy here in terms of food, and it's pervasive.
-Health of Philadelphia Participant
