The Myth of the Food Desert
Earlier this year, on Fox News, Laura Ingraham sat down with a pair of Cabinet secretaries to talk about the Trump Administration’s plans to improve the way Americans eat. Robert F. 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 “highly refined carbohydrates” were “literally poisoning” America’s children. (He also confessed, or maybe bragged, that he hadn’t 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, “What we’re working on, also, is those underserved communities that don’t have access to a Whole Foods—”
Ingraham cut her off. “Michelle Obama called them ‘food deserts,’ ” she said. “I kind of used to poke fun at her for that. But maybe—is she right?”
“In fact, there’s part of that that’s correct,” Rollins said, and she outlined her efforts to use the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, to require participating retailers to increase the amount of “healthy” food on their shelves. Last summer, Jared Polis, the Democratic governor of Colorado, had said that the new SNAP rules, signed by Rollins, would “help reduce food deserts in Colorado.”
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The term was less familiar in 2008, when Congress passed a farm bill defining a “food desert” as an area “with limited access to affordable and nutritious food.” 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: “Right 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.” The next year, the Obama Administration released an interactive map that identified food deserts and that outlasted many of Barack Obama’s 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’ markets; Eric Adams, celebrating hydroponic farming tanks at a Brooklyn high school, promised, “We can solve our food-desert crisis while educating our youth for the urban-agriculture careers that will drive our future.” 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 “access to high-quality food” and linked this “nutrition desert” to higher rates of heart disease and diabetes.
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 “super” 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’ 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.
Five years ago, a sociologist named Kenneth Kolb published “Retail Inequality: Reframing the Food Desert Debate,” 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—one 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 “white, middle-class” 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. “In many ways, I still wish it were true,” he wrote.
Now Hanna Garth, an anthropologist, wants to see if some of these ideas might be salvaged. Her new book, “Food Justice Undone: Lessons for Building a Better Movement” (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 Andrés, who suggests that “some white liberal came up with that term while they were making some vegan organic food.”) Garth is a thoroughgoing critic of “racial capitalism,” but many of the activists she meets have more modest aims: they want to help a corner store sell vegetables, or they’re trying to interest city residents in working on a local farm. At one point, Garth concludes that some of these efforts “could actually be worse than charity,” 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?
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 Journal reported that high supermarket prices were “a major gripe of ghetto Negroes,” 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 “supermarket operations in low-income areas,” during which one congressman warned that some supermarkets might be practicing “price discrimination against the economically disadvantaged.” (A witness from St. Louis testified that fruits and vegetables in an inner-city store seemed “older and dirtier” than those for sale in the suburbs.)
These investigations were partly spurred by the riots of the nineteen-sixties, which directed public attention toward interventions that might “make further riots less likely,” as the Journal put it. After the 1992 riots in L.A., a nonprofit called Rebuild Los Angeles encouraged corporations to invest in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods; the chairman of Vons, then the region’s largest supermarket chain, promised to build new stores in “neglected areas” that the company had previously avoided.
The idea of a “food desert,” 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’s 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 “led to the creation of ‘food deserts.’ ” As the term “food desert” 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, “One of the reasons we appeal to American politicians is because we have said we will go back into neighborhoods that have become food deserts.”
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 “newer, nicer stores,” even though they don’t 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.
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. “Food hinterlands” are places where food is affordable but not nearby. “Food mirages” occur when food is nearby but not affordable. “Food swamps” have plenty of cheap food, but not the healthy kind. “Food apartheid” indicts the government for perpetuating a divide between the diets of the rich and the poor. “Food justice,” 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.
Often, these overlapping movements focus on supermarkets, seen as either scourges or saviors, depending on who’s 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 “eliminating food deserts” by opening eighty-six new stores in “underserved communities.” 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’s 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’s 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 “rapid development and displacement.” In New York, Mamdani’s 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’s policy of subsidizing for-profit grocery stores in high-need areas, a remnant of Bloomberg’s campaign against food deserts. Mamdani’s vision of food justice means fighting the supermarket industry rather than helping it.
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 “The Road to Wigan Pier,” the unsparing book he published about his experiences, Orwell observed that it was “usually impossible to buy wholemeal bread in a working-class district.” He was happy to make the kinds of judgments that contemporary sociologists forswear, describing the meals in one lodging house as “uniformly disgusting,” and writing that “the English palate, especially the working-class palate, now rejects good food almost automatically.” He noted that the people he met didn’t tend to eat the vegetables and fruits that nutritionists of the time recommended, and he argued that these choices didn’t merely reflect what food was available, or affordable:
The point of this description was not to demean these working-class people but, rather, to show the severity of “the class problem,” 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—and eat—so poorly.
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 “food desert” was that it redirected attention to diet while recasting some of Orwell’s old concerns in new, less judgmental terms. Scholars and policymakers did not have to fulminate against “disgusting” food, or make derisive comments about the public “palate,” in order to express alarm about what poor people were eating. A 1990 study in the Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics, which helped lay the groundwork for the U.K. food-desert movement, asserted that, for low-income consumers, “the extra cost of a healthy diet is likely to be a serious obstacle to healthy eating.” 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. “Many urban community dwellers would love to have better eating habits,” one public-health expert told the New York Times, in 2002—if only there were more grocery stores nearby. The article cited a study finding that Black residents who lived close to supermarkets had “healthier diets in terms of fruits and vegetables, total fat, and saturated fat,” and researchers have often found a connection between people’s diets and their retail environment. But it seems just as likely that the causation runs the other way—that these so-called deserts, with few places to buy food that experts deem “healthy” or “high-quality,” reflect local tastes, rather than explain them.
In the food-desert literature, concerns about diet become concerns about access, a problem that’s easier to measure, and to fix. If the aim is simply to make certain foods more available, 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’ 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 “healthy” options let the station brand itself as a food oasis in the desert and qualify as a store where SNAP recipients could spend their benefits on whatever they wanted. “Everybody says they want healthier food, but nobody buys it,” the representative said, at a community meeting. Garth writes about enthusiastic volunteers who failed to interest local residents in kale, which isn’t popular in the neighborhoods she studies; for her, this is evidence that the food-justice movement is often a “white racial project,” which might mean simply that the movement has been shaped by the appetites of the people in charge of it.
What about the appetites of the local residents? Do they, like the unemployed miners Orwell met, prefer the “tasty” over the “wholesome”? Garth is surprisingly coy on this question. She takes notes as high-school students in a nutrition class list their favorite foods: “tamales, BBQ ribs, pozole, pizza, carne asada, and tortillas with butter.” But she doesn’t write much about fast food and junk food as such, perhaps because she values what she calls “culturally significant” foods, and distrusts outsiders who would tell the locals that they are eating wrong. Where Orwell saw the rejection of “good food” as a side effect of poverty, more recent observers offer other explanations. In “Food Justice,” 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—which was, they wrote, “particularly pronounced among vulnerable populations such as children and low-income food consumers and people of color.” (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 “taste for convenience,” which he found understandable in light of their “daunting circumstances.” 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.
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’t, 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’s diets reflects the objectives of the government-enabled businesses that profit from our hunger—the “grocery-industrial complex,” 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. “If you wanted to set up our kids for failure, you would feed them the absolute goyslop in our cafeterias,” 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—and comforting—idea: that no one with good options would ever make bad choices.
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, “We can’t keep on feeding our children junk all day long,” adding, “I know some of y’all, you got that cold Popeyes out for breakfast.” Audiences typically cheered him on, but some scholars have been more critical. In “White Burgers, Black Cash,” a 2023 book about race and the fast-food industry, Naa Oyo A. Kwate faulted Obama for making it seem as if there was “something intrinsic” about Black people’s taste for fast food. “Obama’s critique,” Kwate wrote, “did not consider that eating fried chicken for breakfast might in fact suggest a resourceful family making the most out of meager means.” 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 “food desert” have “created a sense that there is a ‘crisis’ that demands immediate intervention.” What if there isn’t?
Anyone who pays close attention to our evolving conversations about food will notice that “healthy” 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 F. Kennedy, Jr.,’s new food pyramid reflects changing wisdom about the relative virtues of fats and carbohydrates, and one needn’t 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’t say I’ve 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 “tasty.” It’s 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—it could turn out that our chemical cravings are easier to reprogram than our cultural traditions.
Even the term “food desert” 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’s 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’t promise to transform diets, just to indirectly subsidize grocery bills. These days, stern denunciations of “junk food” 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 “disgusting” 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’s diets—and be drawn toward plans, however unrealistic, for changing them. One sensible but deflating result of recent food-desert research is that distance doesn’t actually matter much. People will go to great lengths to eat what they want. ♦