{"id":1171,"date":"2026-08-01T13:08:33","date_gmt":"2026-08-01T13:08:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1171"},"modified":"2026-08-01T13:08:33","modified_gmt":"2026-08-01T13:08:33","slug":"the-myth-of-the-food-desert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1171","title":{"rendered":"The Myth of the Food Desert"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Earlier this year, on Fox News, Laura Ingraham sat down with a pair of Cabinet secretaries to talk about the Trump Administration\u2019s plans to improve the way Americans eat. Robert\u00a0F. Kennedy, Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, unveiled an updated, inverted food pyramid, with meat at the top and whole grains at the bottom, and he explained that \u201chighly refined carbohydrates\u201d were \u201cliterally poisoning\u201d America\u2019s children. (He also confessed, or maybe bragged, that he hadn\u2019t had a doughnut in more than a decade.) Brooke Rollins, the Secretary of Agriculture, said that the Administration wanted to enlist supermarkets in its campaign to change how Americans eat. Rollins said, \u201cWhat we\u2019re working on, also, is those underserved communities that don\u2019t have access to a Whole Foods\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n

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Ingraham cut her off. \u201cMichelle Obama called them \u2018food deserts,\u2019\u00a0\u201d she said. \u201cI kind of used to poke fun at her for that. But maybe\u2014is she right?\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u201cIn fact, there\u2019s part of that that\u2019s correct,\u201d Rollins said, and she outlined her efforts to use the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP<\/em>, to require participating retailers to increase the amount of \u201chealthy\u201d food on their shelves. Last summer, Jared Polis, the Democratic governor of Colorado, had said that the new SNAP<\/em> rules, signed by Rollins, would \u201chelp reduce food deserts in Colorado.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The term was less familiar in 2008, when Congress passed a farm bill defining a \u201cfood desert\u201d as an area \u201cwith limited access to affordable and nutritious food.\u201d Yet Ingraham was right to associate it with the Obama era, which began a few months later. Michelle Obama sounded an alarm in a speech from 2010: \u201cRight now, there are 23.5 million Americans, including 6.5 million children, who live in what we call food deserts, in the inner city and in rural communities.\u201d The next year, the Obama Administration released an interactive map that identified food deserts and that outlasted many of Barack Obama\u2019s other initiatives: it lives on today as the Food Access Research Atlas. In New York, every mayor elected in this century has joined the fight: Michael Bloomberg launched a program to encourage supermarkets to open in needy areas; Bill de Blasio funded urban farms and farmers\u2019 markets; Eric Adams, celebrating hydroponic farming tanks at a Brooklyn high school, promised, \u201cWe can solve our food-desert crisis while educating our youth for the urban-agriculture careers that will drive our future.\u201d The current mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has taken a more direct approach, promising to open five city-owned grocery stores, one per borough. In April, at a press conference in East Harlem, Brad Hoylman-Sigal, the Manhattan borough president, suggested that local residents lacked \u201caccess to high-quality food\u201d and linked this \u201cnutrition desert\u201d to higher rates of heart disease and diabetes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Even as politicians from both parties have taken up the cause, though, some scholars have had second thoughts. Like many terms that migrate from academia to mainstream discourse, this one is slipperier than it seems. Food deserts are generally defined by how far residents must travel to reach a supermarket, which leads to debates about how \u201csuper\u201d a market must be, and about which distances qualify, especially in dense cities like New York. (According to one federal metric, New York has no food deserts at all, which may be why Mamdani avoids the term.) The goal of identifying food deserts was to eliminate them, increasing residents\u2019 retail options as a way of improving their diets. But there is little evidence to support the idea that bringing supermarkets to neighborhoods that lack them has a measurable effect on what residents eat.<\/p>\n

Five years ago, a sociologist named Kenneth Kolb published \u201cRetail Inequality: Reframing the Food Desert Debate,\u201d an insightful book that traced his journey from food-desert activist to food-desert skeptic. Kolb was teaching at Furman University, in Greenville, South Carolina, and did his field work in West Greenville and Southernside, two nearby neighborhoods that were predominantly Black and disproportionately low-income. Kolb tried to explain to residents that they lived in a food desert. They responded with a wide range of complaints about local retailers, many of which had little to do with fresh produce\u2014one woman mentioned that it was difficult to get a pizza delivered. Kolb eventually came to see the food-desert movement as a useful fiction: a way for outsiders like him to center their own \u201cwhite, middle-class\u201d tastes, and for community leaders to get attention and secure the investments or programs that they actually want. All the same, he seemed to mourn the food-desert narrative he once believed in. \u201cIn many ways, I still wish it were true,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n

Now Hanna Garth, an anthropologist, wants to see if some of these ideas might be salvaged. Her new book, \u201cFood Justice Undone: Lessons for Building a Better Movement\u201d (University of California), draws from her research in low-income neighborhoods in Los Angeles, where she encounters plenty of food activists but nothing she would describe as a food desert. (Early on, she quotes an activist named Andr\u00e9s, who suggests that \u201csome white liberal came up with that term while they were making some vegan organic food.\u201d) Garth is a thoroughgoing critic of \u201cracial capitalism,\u201d but many of the activists she meets have more modest aims: they want to help a corner store sell vegetables, or they\u2019re trying to interest city residents in working on a local farm. At one point, Garth concludes that some of these efforts \u201ccould actually be worse than charity,\u201d a phrase she intends as denunciation. Despite the support of politicians, the fight against food deserts seems to have ended in disappointment. What went wrong?<\/p>\n

Supermarkets are a fairly recent invention: before the nineteen-fifties, most Americans bought food from specialized shops or from markets full of independent venders. The rise of supermarkets helped standardize the way we shop, and perhaps popularized the idea of high-quality retail as a civil right. In 1966, the Wall Street<\/em> Journal<\/em> reported that high supermarket prices were \u201ca major gripe of ghetto Negroes,\u201d and quoted an economist who suggested that the government should subsidize supermarket chains willing to open in poor Black neighborhoods. The next year, Congress held hearings on \u201csupermarket operations in low-income areas,\u201d during which one congressman warned that some supermarkets might be practicing \u201cprice discrimination against the economically disadvantaged.\u201d (A witness from St. Louis testified that fruits and vegetables in an inner-city store seemed \u201colder and dirtier\u201d than those for sale in the suburbs.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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These investigations were partly spurred by the riots of the nineteen-sixties, which directed public attention toward interventions that might \u201cmake further riots less likely,\u201d as the Journal<\/em> put it. After the 1992 riots in L.A., a nonprofit called Rebuild Los Angeles encouraged corporations to invest in some of the city\u2019s poorest neighborhoods; the chairman of Vons, then the region\u2019s largest supermarket chain, promised to build new stores in \u201cneglected areas\u201d that the company had previously avoided.<\/p>\n

The idea of a \u201cfood desert,\u201d though, emerged not from the politics of urban America but from the U.K.; some accounts trace it to a comment made by a Scottish public-housing tenant in the early nineteen-nineties. By the decade\u2019s end, the concept was enshrined in official British policy: a government-commissioned study from 1998 warned that an exodus of supermarkets from city centers had \u201cled to the creation of \u2018food deserts.\u2019\u201d As the term \u201cfood desert\u201d took root in America, the imported diagnosis sometimes inspired imported solutions. In 2007, after the British grocery chain Tesco announced a plan to expand across the Atlantic, an executive, Tim Mason, told an interviewer, \u201cOne of the reasons we appeal to American politicians is because we have said we will go back into neighborhoods that have become food deserts.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kolb finds that residents are, in fact, concerned about the lack of local supermarkets. But he came to believe that the call for a supermarket was less a demand for greater nutritional variety than a way to highlight the various indignities of living in a low-income neighborhood: not enough amenities, not enough investment, not enough respect; too many liquor stores and pawnshops. Similarly, Garth finds that the people she talks to want \u201cnewer, nicer stores,\u201d even though they don\u2019t particularly want to change what they buy or eat. Some informants tell her they like the unpretentious local markets that cater to Black or Hispanic communities.<\/p>\n

Because most so-called food deserts are not entirely barren, sociologists have tried other terms to describe how a neighborhood might fail to properly feed its low-income residents. \u201cFood hinterlands\u201d are places where food is affordable but not nearby. \u201cFood mirages\u201d occur when food is nearby but not affordable. \u201cFood swamps\u201d have plenty of cheap food, but not the healthy kind. \u201cFood apartheid\u201d indicts the government for perpetuating a divide between the diets of the rich and the poor. \u201cFood justice,\u201d the term Garth uses in her title, is notably ambiguous, bringing together a wide range of activists with vague or contradictory ideas about what a more just food system would look like.<\/p>\n

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Often, these overlapping movements focus on supermarkets, seen as either scourges or saviors, depending on who\u2019s telling the story. In 2013, twenty-one years after Vons pledged to return to South Central, Michelle Obama visited a Walmart in Springfield, Missouri, to thank the company for moving the country closer to \u201celiminating food deserts\u201d by opening eighty-six new stores in \u201cunderserved communities.\u201d Garth is more likely to focus on the ways that big supermarkets disappoint local advocates, including in Los Angeles, where the post-riot supermarket renaissance was short-lived; at the time of her research, she counted only one Vons in the area she was studying. (Likewise, Tesco\u2019s crusade against American food deserts ended in 2013, when the company announced that it was pulling out of the United States.) Although one of Garth\u2019s interviewees mourns the closure of the Walmart on Crenshaw Boulevard, Garth herself seems more concerned that the arrival, within easy driving distance, of both a Whole Foods and an Amazon Fresh might result in \u201crapid development and displacement.\u201d In New York, Mamdani\u2019s city-owned grocery stores are designed to compete with existing supermarkets, by using government funding or tax breaks to sell food more cheaply. (The proposed East Harlem store is just around the corner from a Fine Fare supermarket, part of a regional chain of independently owned and operated grocery stores.) Defending his approach, Mamdani has criticized the city\u2019s policy of subsidizing for-profit grocery stores in high-need areas, a remnant of Bloomberg\u2019s campaign against food deserts. Mamdani\u2019s vision of food justice means fighting the supermarket industry rather than helping it.<\/p>\n

In 1936, before supermarkets conquered the world, George Orwell spent a few months living in coal-mining communities in northern England. What he found there was apparently a kind of food desert. In \u201cThe Road to Wigan Pier,\u201d the unsparing book he published about his experiences, Orwell observed that it was \u201cusually impossible to buy wholemeal bread in a working-class district.\u201d He was happy to make the kinds of judgments that contemporary sociologists forswear, describing the meals in one lodging house as \u201cuniformly disgusting,\u201d and writing that \u201cthe English palate, especially the working-class palate, now rejects good food almost automatically.\u201d He noted that the people he met didn\u2019t tend to eat the vegetables and fruits that nutritionists of the time recommended, and he argued that these choices didn\u2019t merely reflect what food was available, or affordable:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn\u2019t.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. You want something a little bit \u201ctasty.\u201d There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let\u2019s have three pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the kettle on and we\u2019ll all have a nice cup of tea!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The point of this description was not to demean these working-class people but, rather, to show the severity of \u201cthe class problem,\u201d and the need for socialism as a way to address it. As disgusted as Orwell was by the diets he encountered, he was more disgusted by a society that condemned some of its members to live\u2014and eat\u2014so poorly.<\/p>\n

In the nineteen-sixties, when Congress was investigating supermarkets, economic concerns outweighed nutritional ones: the main worry was that supermarkets in poor neighborhoods were offering low quality at high prices. The real innovation of the term \u201cfood desert\u201d was that it redirected attention to diet while recasting some of Orwell\u2019s old concerns in new, less judgmental terms. Scholars and policymakers did not have to fulminate against \u201cdisgusting\u201d food, or make derisive comments about the public \u201cpalate,\u201d in order to express alarm about what poor people were eating. A 1990 study in the Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics<\/em>, which helped lay the groundwork for the U.K. food-desert movement, asserted that, for low-income consumers, \u201cthe extra cost of a healthy diet is likely to be a serious obstacle to healthy eating.\u201d Yet although research showed that in one low-income London neighborhood healthy food was sometimes more expensive, it contained no evidence that eating habits would change significantly if prices did. \u201cMany urban community dwellers would love to have better eating habits,\u201d one public-health expert told the New York Times<\/em>, in 2002\u2014if only there were more grocery stores nearby. The article cited a study finding that Black residents who lived close to supermarkets had \u201chealthier diets in terms of fruits and vegetables, total fat, and saturated fat,\u201d and researchers have often found a connection between people\u2019s diets and their retail environment. But it seems just as likely that the causation runs the other way\u2014that these so-called deserts, with few places to buy food that experts deem \u201chealthy\u201d or \u201chigh-quality,\u201d reflect local tastes, rather than explain them.<\/p>\n

In the food-desert literature, concerns about diet become concerns about access, a problem that\u2019s easier to measure, and to fix. If the aim is simply to make certain foods more available<\/em>, a government-subsidized market counts as a success merely by existing, regardless of how many people shop there or what they buy. A 2019 study found that new supermarkets often siphon business from established ones, reducing shoppers\u2019 commutes without significantly changing what they buy. Kolb talked to a representative from a gas-station chain that offered sandwiches and prepared salads seemingly as a loss leader: these \u201chealthy\u201d options let the station brand itself as a food oasis in the desert and qualify as a store where SNAP<\/em> recipients could spend their benefits on whatever they wanted. \u201cEverybody says they want healthier food, but nobody buys it,\u201d the representative said, at a community meeting. Garth writes about enthusiastic volunteers who failed to interest local residents in kale, which isn\u2019t popular in the neighborhoods she studies; for her, this is evidence that the food-justice movement is often a \u201cwhite racial project,\u201d which might mean simply that the movement has been shaped by the appetites of the people in charge of it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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What about the appetites of the local residents? Do they, like the unemployed miners Orwell met, prefer the \u201ctasty\u201d over the \u201cwholesome\u201d? Garth is surprisingly coy on this question. She takes notes as high-school students in a nutrition class list their favorite foods: \u201ctamales, BBQ ribs, pozole, pizza, carne asada, and tortillas with butter.\u201d But she doesn\u2019t write much about fast food and junk food as such, perhaps because she values what she calls \u201cculturally significant\u201d foods, and distrusts outsiders who would tell the locals that they are eating wrong. Where Orwell saw the rejection of \u201cgood food\u201d as a side effect of poverty, more recent observers offer other explanations. In \u201cFood Justice,\u201d from 2010, the urban-policy experts Robert Gottlieb and Anupama Joshi attribute the popularity of fast food in poor neighborhoods to the influence of advertising\u2014which was, they wrote, \u201cparticularly pronounced among vulnerable populations such as children and low-income food consumers and people of color.\u201d (If this is an attempt to avoid being patronizing, it seems ineffective; why is it less insulting to say that poor people have a childlike susceptibility to advertising than to say that they have a childlike fondness for French fries?) Kolb wrote that the people he talked to had a \u201ctaste for convenience,\u201d which he found understandable in light of their \u201cdaunting circumstances.\u201d The analysis is plausible, but it similarly brackets consumer preferences, allowing readers to imagine that the people in his book, unlike the rest of us, have no strong feelings about what they want for dinner.<\/p>\n

A movement has strategic reasons to focus on the built environment, which can be changed through public policy, rather than on individual choices, which can\u2019t, at least not easily. But sometimes the food-desert movement sounds conspiratorial, insisting that shadowy forces are scheming to feed hamburgers to poor people. On the left, a frequent claim is that any problem in people\u2019s diets reflects the objectives of the government-enabled businesses that profit from our hunger\u2014the \u201cgrocery-industrial complex,\u201d as Garth puts it. But the Trump Administration has shown that this kind of criticism is not exclusively a left-wing tradition. And in February a Republican gubernatorial candidate in Florida, James Fishback, said that the presence of Pop-Tarts in school cafeterias suggested a nefarious scheme. \u201cIf you wanted to set up our kids for failure, you would feed them the absolute goyslop<\/em> in our cafeterias,\u201d he said, using a recently coined term that portrays contemporary diets as the result of a Jewish plot. This is a particularly absurd version of a common\u2014and comforting\u2014idea: that no one with good options would ever make bad choices.<\/p>\n

Michelle Obama was determinedly friendly and upbeat in her effort to help make Americans healthier, but her husband sometimes struck a more reproachful note. During the 2008 campaign, in front of a largely Black audience in Beaumont, Texas, Barack Obama said, \u201cWe can\u2019t keep on feeding our children junk all day long,\u201d adding, \u201cI know some of y\u2019all, you got that cold Popeyes out for breakfast.\u201d Audiences typically cheered him on, but some scholars have been more critical. In \u201cWhite Burgers, Black Cash,\u201d a 2023 book about race and the fast-food industry, Naa Oyo A. Kwate faulted Obama for making it seem as if there was \u201csomething intrinsic\u201d about Black people\u2019s taste for fast food. \u201cObama\u2019s critique,\u201d Kwate wrote, \u201cdid not consider that eating fried chicken for breakfast might in fact suggest a resourceful family making the most out of meager means.\u201d This is more or less where Garth lands, too. Despite her hostility to free markets, she is instinctively respectful of the choices that her subjects make, which obliges her to be respectful, too, of the shops and restaurants they patronize. At the end of her book, she argues that terms like \u201cfood desert\u201d have \u201ccreated a sense that there is a \u2018crisis\u2019 that demands immediate intervention.\u201d What if there isn\u2019t?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Anyone who pays close attention to our evolving conversations about food will notice that \u201chealthy\u201d is a moving target. Orwell assumed that orange juice was wholesome and that hot tea was not; contemporary readers might wish to reverse those assumptions, while arguing among themselves over the status of Diet Coke. Robert\u00a0F. Kennedy, Jr.,\u2019s new food pyramid reflects changing wisdom about the relative virtues of fats and carbohydrates, and one needn\u2019t be a conspiracy theorist to suspect that, for many people, cold fried chicken is not the worst thing you can eat for breakfast. (As it happens, my wife owns a fried-chicken restaurant, and I can\u2019t say I\u2019ve never breakfasted on leftover takeout.) The real question is not why most of us have a weakness for the sort of food that Orwell described as \u201ctasty.\u201d It\u2019s how other preferences might realistically emerge and be sustained, especially amid a food economy that delivers an abundance of cheap calories. In the Obama years, social scientists assumed that our biology was fixed and that our culture was malleable, but the rise of GLP-1s may reverse this thinking\u2014it could turn out that our chemical cravings are easier to reprogram than our cultural traditions.<\/p>\n

Even the term \u201cfood desert\u201d is a tribute to our success in mostly eradicating life-threatening hunger: the so-called deserts that experts surveyed may have had problems, but actual starvation was generally not among them. If the movement\u2019s energy is fading, it might be because the left-leaning experts and policymakers who once propelled it are now less willing to judge what others eat. When Mamdani announced his city-owned grocery stores in New York, he didn\u2019t promise to transform diets, just to indirectly subsidize grocery bills. These days, stern denunciations of \u201cjunk food\u201d are more likely to emerge from the right than from the left, but this is a relatively new state of affairs, and probably a temporary one. Our ideas about which foods are \u201cdisgusting\u201d are shaped by our cultural environments as well as our physical ones, which means that we will probably always find reasons to disparage other people\u2019s diets\u2014and be drawn toward plans, however unrealistic, for changing them. One sensible but deflating result of recent food-desert research is that distance doesn\u2019t actually matter much. People will go to great lengths to eat what they want.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more Why Is Europe Burning?<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kelefa Sanneh reviews \u201cFood Justice Undone: Lessons for Building a Better Movement,\u201d by Hanna Garth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1170,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Myth of the Food Desert - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1171\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Myth of the Food Desert - City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Kelefa Sanneh reviews \u201cFood Justice Undone: Lessons for Building a Better Movement,\u201d by Hanna Garth.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1171\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-08-01T13:08:33+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/media.newyorker.com\/photos\/698119ed6a56722b07c239d6\/1:1\/w_200%2Cc_limit\/bestbooks2026_headermobile_animation_callout1.gif\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"18 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=1171#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=1171\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3e7ce0c0c60d21e12a5ac61fb2b786d4\"},\"headline\":\"The Myth of the Food Desert\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-08-01T13:08:33+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=1171\"},\"wordCount\":3613,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=1171#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/08\\\/887014e6af908e5f7edc4075500d9c13.webp\",\"articleSection\":[\"Books\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=1171#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=1171\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=1171\",\"name\":\"The Myth of the Food Desert - 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