The term “food desert” conjures up a distinct image: an urban area void of supermarkets, where gardens are rare and the only place to buy groceries is a gas station mini-mart. Poverty and food deserts are closely intertwined. Of the 23.5 million Americans living in food deserts, almost 50 percent live below the poverty line. To remedy food insecurity in low-income areas, the federal government has poured millions of dollars into programs that focus on bringing supermarkets to these areas. This campaign aims to fight the nutrition gap by providing low-income, food-desert neighborhoods with equal geographical access to supermarkets. However, simply opening grocery stores in these areas fails to address the structural causes of food insecurity. Even when healthy options exist in low-income areas, residents often can’t afford them. To address the problem at its roots, policies must put a greater focus on interventions that address socioeconomic disparities, rather than simply subsidizing grocery chains to open in areas where there currently aren’t any.
Many attribute poor eating choices to a lack of access to nearby supermarkets. This suggests that the geographic location of supermarkets plays a key role in the rise of obesity and other public health issues in low-income areas. Attempts by the federal government to eradicate food deserts follow this logic. In the 2014 Farm Bill, Congress approved a dedicated funding stream of $625 million over five years to “increase access to healthy food for underserved areas.” Further, former First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move!” campaign gave $400 million in tax breaks to supermarkets that open in food deserts. Such policies assume that opening any supermarket in an underserved neighborhood would cause residents to eat healthier foods given access to those products.
The evidence suggests otherwise. Philadelphia offers a crucial case study that underscores the limitations of this approach. As the epicenter of the food justice movement over the past decade, the city has invested millions in building new grocery stores with healthy food options in areas of concentrated poverty. But mere presence doesn’t lead to complete access: Only 26.7 percent of residents who “lived near the new grocery store began using the supermarket as their main food source.” Even those who shopped at the new grocery stores didn’t see a significant difference in their food choices—they were still buying the same cheap items they could have gotten at the old grocery store, rather than the healthier ones on the new store’s shelves. In fact, when an upscale supermarket opens up in an underserved neighborhood, it can actually undermine access to healthy food by forcing longtime residents out of low income neighborhoods through gentrification.
This phenomenon, dubbed the “Whole Foods Effect,” has been neglected by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), which has yet to fully come to terms with the effect of socioeconomic status on access to food. For example, the USDA refuses to differentiate income-based and geographical access to food in their online “food deserts map.” Hiding this distinction muddles the true nature of food insecurity in areas of concentrated poverty. A recent University of Chicago study that separates income from geographical distance finds that governmental initiatives focused on bringing supermarkets to areas deemed food deserts have only reduced nutritional inequality by 9 percent. The higher price of healthy food compared to unhealthy, high-calorie foods means that eating habits rarely change as a result of the construction of a new grocery store. People who live below the poverty line are 2.5 times more exposed to fast food than those in the middle class, further compounding the problem of affordable access to healthy choices.
This argument parallels that of Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen. On a global scale, Sen argues that the cause of starvation in famines is rarely a physical lack of sufficient food. Instead, it is “the collapse of the incomes of the poor.” So raising incomes, rather than stockpiling food for the poor, is the only sustainable way to eradicate nutritional disparities. Though it is tempting and simple to blame access to healthy food on the geographical distribution of supermarkets, that claim does not accord with reality. While food deserts exist in rural areas too, the issue falls most prominently in urban areas, where physical proximity is less likely to be the driving issue.
So how should we address the problem of food deserts from a socioeconomic perspective? Giving tax incentives to large supermarket chains is too blunt a path forward. In fact, there are many more inclusive, sustainable remedies to this problem. One such example is urban farming. While urban farms can rarely feed an entire city, they provide inexpensive fresh produce for the neighborhoods in which they’re located. They can also build community and provide some jobs and economic resources to residents. The African Alliance of Rhode Island, for example, produces culturally relevant crops and unites African immigrants in Lower South Providence. Simply paying local residents to set up and harvest nutritious food in urban gardens could make meaningful advances in addressing nutrition in low-income communities. Inmate farming programs, which teach incarcerated people sustainable agricultural practices, could also provide both fresh food and employment opportunities in urban gardens. Programs like these address interconnectivity of poverty and employment barriers to healthy food access.
Increasing Supplementary Nutrition Assitance Program (SNAP) benefits provides another solution to the issue of access to healthy food. SNAP offers nutritional assistance to millions of people, forming a domestic hunger safety net. However, the recent budget proposal from the Trump administration calls for more than $213 billion dollars in funding cuts to the program, endangering the already scarce resources impoverished families can devote to buying healthy foods. Further, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, which provides federal grants to support mothers and children who are at risk of food insecurity, has been threatened with cuts. Benefits funded by these grants can only be used towards nutritious foods, such as fresh fruits and infant formula, in an effort to promote healthy eating, but the program is also at risk of losing estimated $200 million in funding for the 2018 fiscal year. Fighting these cuts and challenging the narrative of waste, fraud, and abuse that is often associated with domestic social policy programs is essential in addressing hunger and the nutritional gap in the United States.
While food insecurity and the accompanying nutritional gap are tied to access to healthy foods in supermarkets, the problem is rooted in deep structural inequality, which limits access to healthy food regardless of geography. Healthy foods need to be both accessible and affordable to fight the proliferation of food deserts; a solution that addresses only one of these aspects will necessarily be incomplete. Government programs should focus on ensuring that every citizen has the ability to buy healthy food instead of subsidizing the construction of supermarkets in low-income areas. Focusing on this distinction will add hopeful oases to the currently bleak climate of food deserts in America.
