GROCERIES AND GARDENS: RACE, PLACE, AND FOOD ACCESS IN WASHINGTON, D.C.

This dissertation draws on eighteen months of ethnographic research conducted in the Deanwood neighborhood in Washington, D.C. to explore how residents in a USDA-defined "food desert" navigated not only the barriers associated with low food access but also ideological, historical, and relational components of food consumption. In defining and addressing food access, locations of grocery stores and supermarkets have been a primary focus, partially because they are the preeminent ways people acquire food in the United States. Recently, scholars have turned to understanding how race and class are inscribed in the failures of the contemporary food system in which access to food in unevenly distributed, highlighting grocery store access as a product of capitalist markets that intersects with forms of discrimination that affect communities of color in urban neighborhoods. This dissertation is rooted in a similar analysis of the political economy of food access by connecting residents' strategies for navigating low food access to the historical and systematic changes in food production and grocery store access in the neighborhood. My research participants were concerned with grocery store access, but those concerns were nestled within a historical consciousness of self-reliance, constructions of community, and ideological orientations that guided their understandings of healthiness. Through ethnographic exploration of Deanwood the place and residents' strategies for navigating it, I contribute to anthropological work on the political economy of food access, highlighting not only the systemic changes in food access overtime but also how residents understand their food consumption within their geographical landscape.