Harvard Square is an iconic place to grab a meal, play chess, or walk around and people-watch. For Harvard students, it is a great place to go to get away from the campus “bubble”. Restaurants such as El Jefe’s and Felipe’s are nightlife staples, while Grafton Street and Toscano are classic places to bring parents to take the tab. Harvard Square does a nice job of catering to the demands of wealthy Cambridge residents and college students, but leaves out accessible options for families of lower socioeconomic status and graduate students to find healthy food, creating a grocery store-free neighborhood more conducive to tourism than residence.
Living in the Food Desert
Harvard Square caters to the college and higher-income Cambridge crowd. Almost all undergraduate students are on unlimited meal plans for the entirety of their time at Harvard, disbursing them to dining halls instead of nearby grocery stores. Middle- and low-income families living in Harvard Square are left out of this equation, as are Harvard’s graduate students. This often incites the need for alternative places to acquire food, such as food pantries. Tara Lauriat runs the St. Paul Parish Food Pantry located on Mt. Auburn Street along with a team of volunteers. At the pantry, customers pay $2 for a ticket that they can then use to get produce, bread, and two non-perishable items. They receive their bread and desserts, which otherwise would have been discarded, from Hi-Rise Bread Company and Whole Foods. “Similar to a farm share, we determine how many of each item people can take based on how many we receive,” Lauriat told the HPR.
Finding a meal in Harvard Square isn’t too difficult, but it’s finding the provisions to prepare a meal that often proves challenging. The Center for Disease Control defines food deserts as “areas that lack access to affordable fruits, vegetables, whole grains, low-fat milk, and other foods that make up the full range of a healthy diet.” Harvard Square has few options for residents who are seeking fresh, affordable food. Aside from creating an unsustainable living environment, Harvard Square becomes literally uninhabitable for hoards of residents. “Among our regular customers are some Harvard graduate students and postdoctoral fellows,” Lauriat told the HPR. “Even if you are receiving a stipend as a grad student or postdoc, it doesn’t go very far in Cambridge when you are supporting a family.” Nadirah Farah Foley, a doctoral student in Culture, Institutions, and Society at Harvard, currently lives north of Harvard Yard and has to drive to get groceries. “The relative inaccessibility of regular grocery stores was a big surprise to me when I started at Harvard,” Foley told the HPR. She initially lived in Peabody Terrace, which is near both Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods. “When I moved out of [Peabody Terrace], I wound up signing a lease on an apartment near Cambridge Public Library, and I realized there were no grocery stores within a 10-minute walk.” In the winter, this problem is only magnified, especially for Cambridge residents without cars.
Making Harvard Square Livable
Understanding the uniqueness of Cambridge with regard to its outrageous cost of living is pivotal in understanding the lack of grocery options. Skyrocketing rent prices and gentrification in the Square, outlined in an HPR Red Line project, express the dramatic changes the area has experienced. Cambridge, including Harvard Square, is simply an unrealistic place to live without the finances to match. According to NeighborhoodScout, “Cambridge has experienced some of the highest home appreciation rates of any community in the nation . . . putting Cambridge in the top 10 percent nationally for real estate appreciation.”
Stacy Blondin is a Harvard College alumna and current postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where her work focuses on dietary sustainability and food security-related research. “Harvard Square is like the airport to me,” Blondin told the HPR. “I’m going to pay twice as much for an apple just because I’m in the Square. Food shouldn’t cost more just because it’s in one place.”
With Harvard Square being the tourist attraction that it is, real estate began to sell to large investors, many of whom are more interested in the profitability than the livability of the Square. “The Square is kind of a unique place when it comes to food. They’re very much catering toward working professionals and tourists,” Blondin told the HPR. “If you fall into any of those categories, you’re lost.”
Giving Back
Harvard Square is far from representative of the rest of the world. The pricey food options and retailers that line the streets cater to one of the most expensive places to live in the nation, which alienates middle and low-income populations from settling comfortably here. It is not necessarily the “fault” of Harvard that its tourism and publicity raise the cost of living in the Square, but it is now the responsibility of Harvard to make sure it’s doing what it can to give back to the surrounding community — and to alleviate the stressors that plague many of its students.
Harvard currently aides the community through a program in which leftovers from dining halls are donated to Food for Free. They donate on average 40,000 pounds of food a year and have expanded the program to begin creating pre-packaged meals from leftovers, which are not covered by food stamps. This program has saved Harvard money, and given Harvard University Dining Services the data needed to see how much food they should be producing.
By acknowledging the unfortunate reality of its surroundings, Harvard can begin implementing more ways to help both the Cambridge community and its own students that struggle to find accessible and fresh food. The great equalizer, food is just one of those things that can’t be ignored. It must be ensured that everyone residing in the Harvard Square area has the ability to say, like many Harvard students do, “we should grab a meal.”
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