“There is something deadly in the American experience of urban poverty itself,” explains Helen Epstein in “Ghetto Miasma: Enough to Make you Sick”. The article is a visceral, horrifying exposition of the scandalous living conditions and life-threatening health problems that destroy families and devastate entire communities across poor, urban, minority America. She writes about southwest Yonkers, central and East Harlem, central Brooklyn and South Bronx, which have some of the highest mortality rates in the country. Although the media and public tend to attribute this death to violence and drug abuse, it is becoming increasingly obvious that chronic illness is to blame. The combined living conditions that lead to stroke, diabetes, kidney disease, high blood pressure and cancer are also evident in beginning life stages, starting with the disproportionately high death rate of Black infants. Serious and debilitating health problems stalk children into their preteens, and throughout the accelerated aging process of young teenagers increasingly afflicted with diseases that were previously only seen at significant rates among adult populations. According to the article, “a third of poor black 16-year-old girls in urban areas will not reach their 65th birthdays.” Even more shocking is how the histories of individual neighborhoods have been proven to determine their contemporary pattern of illness and death, with rates of childhood asthma, obesity and diabetes most severely affecting the neighborhoods that were hardest hit by the crime waves of the 70s, 80s and 90s. Epstein exposes the mysterious and largely unstudied role of stress in creating and exacerbating cycles of illness that trap poor families and communities into intergenerational cycles of poverty, disease, and premature death. The problems of stress and material deprivation, she wrote, are “inseparable parts of the contemporary miasma of poverty.” The legacy of death and disease within in America’s segregated metropolitan areas is incomplete, of course, without a social understanding of food. People talk a lot about death, disease, and murder. Students in the liberal bubble of Claremont are no exception, but we like to consider ourselves as more aware than the general public about the context of these issues; Pitzer students have an area requirement in social responsibility, and Scripps students are required to take classes about race and gender. So we talk about race, we talk about gender, and we concern ourselves with the many evils of race and gender-based discrimination. But how does food fit in? Do we learn that our corporatized food industry is silently killing the most vulnerable of our population, wasting billions of dollars subsidizing a preventable epidemic while diverting our attention with sensationalized media? We are taught to fat-