The Myth of the Food Desert

 

 
     Many think that a key cause of nutritional inequality is food deserts – or neighborhoods without supermarkets, mostly in low-income areas. The narrative is that folks who live in food deserts are forced to shop at local convenience stores, where it's hard to find healthy groceries. If we could just get a supermarket to open in those neighborhoods, the thinking goes, then people would be able to eat healthy.

     The food desert narrative suggests the lack of supply of healthy foods is what causes reduced demand for them.  But in the modern economy, stores have become amazingly good at selling us exactly the kinds of things we want to buy. Lower demand for healthy food is what causes the lack of supply.  In other words, people don't suddenly go from shopping at an unhealthy convenience store to shopping at the new, healthy supermarket.  The trouble is that it is impossible to truly see a causal relationship between inner-city obesity and the distance of the supermarket when you live, for example, in New York.

      Fairway has been thriving in West Harlem for 15 years, with gorgeous, accessibly priced produce practically spilling out onto the sidewalk. Plenty of local black people shop in it. It's a walk away for many, and for others, there is even a shuttle service. It is not inaccessible to poor blacks and Latinos in any way.

      Yet obesity is still rife in West Harlem, including among teenagers raised on food bought there, in a way that it is not in Greenwich Village. Throughout the city, there are supermarkets amply stocked with fresh produce priced modestly, in struggling neighborhoods where the average weight of people is distinctly higher than on the Upper East Side.  The U.S. Department of Agriculture's food desert locator — unveiled in 2011 — found almost no food deserts in New York City except in some of the wide-open spaces near Kennedy airport.  As far back as 2006, there was sunny coverage in these parts of the Healthy Bodegas Initiative, stocking bodegas in Harlem, the Bronx and Brooklyn with fresh produce and lowfat milk. The media have been less interested in the uninspiring outcome. By 2010, people were buying more vegetables in only one in four bodegas, for example.

 

       The key point is that supermarkets have never been inaccessible to poor people in the way that we have been told.  Overall, these results indicate that the nutritional quality of household purchases responds very little, if at all, to changes in retail environments. This suggests that policies which either encourage the entry of new stores offering healthy foods or encourage existing retailers to offer more healthful products will do little on their own to resolve socioeconomic disparities in nutritional consumption.

 

 

      I personally have found the food deserts argument dubious and think the problem stems from poor eating habits formed at home, and not addressed in school. Certainly the prevalence of cheap sugar and our method of food production is an issue; however the wide blame placed on food deserts, almost entirely by liberal, is even possibly wrong.