In a shopping center known as the Northwest Junction sits a KFC, a wings restaurant, Rose’s, a discount shopping store, and a medical cannabis dispensary. What’s noticeably missing? A grocery store.

The Junction used to be home to Food Depot, but in 2023, the store shuttered its doors, leaving this part of Northwest Jackson in a food swamp – that is, an area that’s lacking fresh produce and vegetables but has a plethora of fast food restaurants and gas station dives. 

When Senator John Horhn campaigned outside of Food Depot during his third mayoral bid in 2017, he touted it as one of his achievements for the city. Horhn, a candidate in the upcoming mayoral race, had a major hand in getting the Food Depot on Northside Drive as well as a McDade’s in Westland Plaza.

“Back in 2005, Jackson experienced the closure of 13 Winn-Dixies, and overnight, [it] created a bunch of food deserts in our city,” said Horhn. “Working with a colleague, I was able to recruit two grocery stores back into areas that were deserts.”

But Food Depot on Northside fell victim to theft and problems with security, Ward 3 Councilman Kenneth Stokes told WAPT in 2023. In May of that year, the grocery store closed. 

”Folks are very disappointed because in that part of the city of Northwest Jackson, there is a lack of opportunity for fresh fruits and vegetables and food that’s healthy for you,” Horhn told Mississippi Today. “People want the convenience of having food that they can purchase and consume nearby to where they live.”

Now, as he embarks on his fourth mayoral campaign, he said it’s important to get grocery stores back into communities around Jackson. He points to programs such as Hope Enterprise Corporation’s Mid South Healthy Food Financing Initiative, which offers financing for grocery stores in food deserts, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture as potential partners in bringing fresh food to families.

“We’ve been able to attract grocery stores in the past. I think we can do it again,” he said. “I believe that there are incentives that are available. I think that we need to be aggressive about our attempts to get those resources so that we can subsidize it.”

But not all grocery stores are alike. Even when there are grocery stores within walking distance, residents find themselves heading to other neighborhoods to find better quality goods.

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Sheila O’Flaherty lives in the Jayne Avenue neighborhood in West Jackson, about a mile away from the Grocery Depot. She prefers to go to Kroger on Interstate 55 or the Save-A-Lot by the Jackson Medical Mall. Like one-in-five households in her area, O’Flaherty doesn’t own a car. To buy groceries, she’ll have to take a total of four buses per trip, turning what should be a quick trip to the store into an hours-long trek on public transportation. 

“I don’t think the groceries that we have access to here in Westland Plaza, specifically here in the neighborhood, are of the quality that you get in other places,” said O’Flaherty. “The produce is better at Save-A-Lot, and everything’s much better at Kroger.”

She said she wishes that there were more options for her that wouldn’t require her to travel the nearly 8 miles to Kroger. 

“I would love to have a grocery store here that I can walk to. I get what I can there, but there’s not much there. We just need better quality groceries in all sections of Jackson,” she said. 

Jesse Huffman agrees. He’s lived in West Jackson for more than 20 years. 

“Kroger has bad food, too. Don’t get me wrong. But I could buy a banana and it may last five days,” compared to the nearby Grocery Depot, Huffman said, where “it’ll last a day.”

Huffman frequently travels to neighboring Clinton to Kroger to buy groceries, which he said adds to his expenses in buying fuel for his car. 

“I’m not frustrated by staying in a community without a grocery store, but I would love to have one. If you don’t have a ride – I have a way to get there, but it costs me more gas to go to Clinton than to go right here.”

In an emailed statement, Joel Edwards, Chief Operating Officer for The Roberts Company, which owns Grocery Depot and other grocery stores in Jackson, said the store is “deeply committed to providing a full-service supermarket that is safe, clean, and stocked with fresh meat and produce—particularly in an area of Jackson that has limited access to such resources. 

“We take customer feedback very seriously and strive to address any concerns with urgency.” 

Edwards also said they’re upgrading the dairy and frozen food cases.

“This investment reflects our ongoing commitment to providing a high-quality shopping experience for the community, both now and in the years to come,” Edwards said via email.

Food Depot on Northside Drive isn’t the only grocery store that’s closed in Jackson in recent years. Jackson Cash and Carry, another grocery store that Horhn championed for the city, closed in 2020. Now, Grocery Depot on Fortification Street, owned by The Roberts Company, is set to close, though no closure date has been set. 

With 13 grocery stores, Jackson is home to about one grocery store for every 11,000 of its residents, compared to nearby Clinton, which has one store for every 8,900 residents, or Bryam with one store per 4,200 people. 

Food insecurity, or the lack of access to enough healthy food options to meet a family’s needs, impacts nearly one in five people in Hinds county, where Jackson is located.

There are multiple factors that determine whether a community is food insecure, such as location of the nearest grocery store, access to transportation and food availability. It’s measured via a survey of families to determine their difficulty in finding food, such as if they couldn’t afford to buy more meals, or if they were worried about food running out and had to skip meals.

One in four children find themselves without access to food, especially during the summer when they don’t have school lunches to rely on. Organizations are working to keep children fed during the summer, with one offering families supplemental income to buy groceries. 

Mississippi declined to opt into the SUN bucks, or Summer EBT, program for the second year in a row, which would have provided families who qualify an extra $120 per child during the summer. A refusal to expand SUN bucks will leave an estimated 324,000 children across Mississippi without many options. 

Dr. Joseph C. Ewoodzie Jr. authored ‘Getting Something to Eat in Jackson,’ a book which examines how race and class factors into the Black food experience. He said that while food justice work is important, it’s key to present people with solutions that deal with poverty, not just food insecurity. 

“Sometimes when we think about helping folks, we’re trying to teach them how to cook. We’re trying to teach them how to shop properly at the grocery store. All of that is kind of misplaced energy,” said Ewoodzie. “What we need to be doing is trying to help them secure housing or trying to help them secure employment, and once we help them secure those things, they will have a larger bandwidth to consider food and how food matters in their lives.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Highly pathogenic avian influenza – commonly known as bird flu – has been detected in a commercial chicken flock in Noxubee County. 

Birds from the infected flock, which were being raised for meat, have not entered the food system. 

This is the third case of avian influenza uncovered in commercial poultry in Mississippi since the spring of 2023. The virus, which is widespread in wild birds worldwide, has also been detected in migratory waterfowl in multiple areas of Mississippi since November 2024. 

The public health risk associated with avian influenza in birds remains low, and poultry and eggs are safe to eat when they are handled and cooked properly, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Poultry and eggs should be cooked to an internal temperature of 165°F to kill bacteria and viruses. 

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Veterinary Services Laboratory notified the Mississippi Board of Animal Health that the poultry tested positive for avian influenza after testing samples from the flock at a laboratory in Mississippi and confirming the samples at a national laboratory in Iowa. 

The area has been quarantined and birds on the property have been killed to prevent spread of the virus.

The Mississippi Board of Animal Health is working with the poultry industry to heighten monitoring of chicken flocks statewide.

There has been one death associated with avian influenza in Louisiana and 70 human cases reported in the United States since 2024. There have been no reported cases in humans in Mississippi. 

Most reported cases have been mild, and cases generally last from a few days to less than two weeks. Symptoms include eye redness and irritation, fever, cough and a sore throat, though some symptoms can be more severe. 

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

by Rick Cleveland, Mississippi Today
March 13, 2025

They play the SEC Basketball Tournament this week in Nashville. The weather calls for pleasant springtime weather until Saturday when there is a 100 percent chance of rain and the forecast calls for thunderstorms that are likely to be severe.

And you ask: Why the hell does that matter? They play basketball indoors.

Well, let me tell you, there was one March when it really did matter. Boy, did it matter. 

We’re talking Atlanta and the Georgia Dome. 2008. It was a Friday night, March 14, although Friday the 13th should have been much appropriate. This was the quarterfinal round, last game of the night. Mississippi State vs. Alabama. Hell of a game. I was covering for the Clarion Ledger with my sidekick Kyle Veazey. We were on a fairly tight deadline, which is to say the newspaper was going to hold the presses until we filed our stories.

Of course, Alabama hit a desperation three-pointer to send the game into overtime. And now, State led 64-61 with two minutes, 11 seconds remaining. Just steps away from us, Bama’s Mykal Riley, who had hit the game-tying shot at the buzzer, dribbled the ball near the sideline with State’s Ben Hansbrough guarding him closely. Suddenly, we all heard this incredible roaring sound, really, like a freight train coming straight through the building, which began to shake. 

I looked at Veazey, and managed this: “Tornado?”

Kyle replied, wide-eyed, “Earthquake?”

Riley stopped dribbling. Hansbrough quit guarding. Both looked up at the ceiling. They were so close to us, we heard Hansbrough say to Riley, “Sounds like a tornado.”

It was.

Astonished and frightened fans all stood and looked all around, trying to figure out what was happening. Some rushed for the exits. A catwalk, hanging far above us, menacingly swung back and forth as if it might fall any second. Veazey and I didn’t know whether we should hide under the press table, check our britches, or run like hell. Suddenly, deadline pressure was the least of our worries.

As it turned out, the winds had torn off a huge section of fabric siding, leaving a gaping hole near the ceiling on one end of the building. Rain blew through that. The Georgia Dome cooled considerably in just minutes. Nature provided a lot more air conditioning than needed.

On the State bench, Coach Rick Stansbury looked into the stands and finally spotted his wife, Meo, and one of their three sons. He texted her and asked where the other two sons were. She texted back that they were sitting down on the bench with him.

“I had a little lapse there,” Stansbury later told us.

We all did.

The delay lasted about an hour. The Bulldogs – Hail State and all that – eventually claimed a two-point victory. Alabama’s Riley launched a 3-pointer at the buzzer from nearly the same spot where he had been dribbling when Mother Nature so rudely interrupted. The ball went in the basket, then rattled out.

What came next was a waiting game. SEC officials and athletic directors met behind closed doors for a couple hours before a decision was made the tournament would be continued the next day at Georgia Tech. The Georgia Dome was declared unsafe.

Several of us reporters already knew before the announcement came. How? We were walking around near the loading docks when we saw workers loading up all the cameras and production equipment on the TV trucks.

“Where y’all headed?” we asked.

“Georgia Tech’s gym,” one of them answered.

To make a long, long story short, the tournament was finished on Saturday and Sunday in the much smaller Georgia Tech arena. The SEC lost hundreds of thousands of dollars – if not more – on ticket refunds. As fate did have it, Georgia, one of the two lowest seeds, shocked everyone but perhaps themselves by winning the whole thing. Dennis Felton’s Bulldogs, who had upset Ole Miss by two points in the first round, defeated Kentucky, Mississippi State and then Arkansas. They heroically won those last three games over two days (30 hours). Georgia had entered the tournament with a 13-16 record. The Bulldogs entered the NCAA Tournament with the SEC’s automatic bid at 17-16.

It was weird, by far the weirdest SEC Tournament on record.

Thankfully, nobody died. In retrospect, many might have perished or been badly injured if not for Mykal Riley’s shot that sent the Alabama-Mississippi State game into overtime. Had Riley not made that shot, thousands of fans would have been exiting the arena – or already out on the sidewalks and streets – when the tornado roared through downtown Atlanta.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.