Food Deserts: A Crash-Course in Systemic Racism
This post was originally published for Komeeda.
When you hear “food desert,” what do you think of? A small western town along a long stretch of open road with nothing but a gas station and a post office? Sure, that is a food desert in it’s own right, but is also a myopic image of what food deserts actually are. The truth is, a sprawling urban neighborhood can be just as much of a food desert as that small town.
Technically speaking, 17.7% of the entire US population qualifies as living in a food desert. This translates to 54.4 million people — a hefty number indicating there’s more at play than just a collection of small towns.
Before we begin picking apart the system issues which have led to the disproportionate existence of food deserts in minority neighborhoods, let’s get started with some definitions to see where these numbers come from, and understand what it is we’ll be talking about, exactly.
Photo by Tim Umphreys
What is a Food Desert, Really?
The USDA defines food deserts as areas that are both low-income and have low-access to healthy food from supermarkets or large grocery stores. There are a few criteria for identifying what qualifies as low-income and low-access, so let’s quickly run through them.
Low-Income
For an area to qualify as low-income, either the poverty rate needs to be at least 20%, or the medium family income of the neighborhood needs to be less than or equal to 80% of that state’s median family income. Fairly straight-forward, let’s move on.
Low-Access
An area is considered to have low-access if supermarkets or large grocery stores are geographically far from a significant portion of the area’s residents. The USDA breaks this down further, separating qualifications between urban areas and rural areas. Specifically, at least one-third of an urban area’s population has to live at least ½ mile away from the nearest supermarket or large grocery store, or 10 miles away for a rural area.
It is important to note that in order for an area to qualify as a food desert, low-accessibility to healthy food must exist, even if there is high-access to food. Essentially, a food desert isn’t present in areas with an absence of food, it is present in the absence of healthy food, which we can gather from the USDA’s criteria. If you’re in NYC and thinking about the thousands of bodegas lining the streets, sorry to break it to you, but they don’t count towards accessibility. How about urban neighborhoods with fast food restaurants on every corner? Nice try, but no.
Let’s rewrite the definition of a food desert to make it a bit clearer: a food desert is a low-income area with a geographically low-access to healthy food.
Definition and Language Considerations
Admittedly, defining food deserts comes with problems. Drilling down what qualifies as “healthy” food isn’t quite an exact science, and looking at the availability of supermarkets or large grocery stores alone can be misleading, as there are other sources of healthy food in the form of fresh produce, such as small farm stands. As such, the numbers reflected in the USDA report may not be entirely accurate, but does not indicate the problem doesn’t exist, either.
Additionally, there is push-back against the language of “food desert,” as it is an oversimplification of a complicated web of interconnected issues, as laid out below. Some food justice activists call for a change in language by using “food apartheid” instead to illuminate the disproportionate existence of food deserts in Black neighborhoods, and nod to their relationship with overarching systemic racism, as we’ll get to in just a moment.
For all intents and purposes, we’ll roll with the current definition and language, while acknowledging that it isn’t perfect.
How Did Food Deserts Come to Be?
This is a loaded question, and rightfully so. Talking about food deserts without addressing food insecurity, food justice, culture, economics, capitalism, race, education, public policy, and business practices is a disservice to those dealing with the implications of living in a food desert. There is a lot to digest, so we’ll try to strike a balance between nodding to the tangled web of contributing factors and simplifying that web.
Food deserts lie at the intersection between poverty, food inaccessibility, systemic racism, and health. Due to the complex nature of the factors involved, there is no single cause to point to, but rather it is necessary to zoom out and see the larger picture to truly understand what leads to their formation.
As a side note, there is a tendency to reject the validity of the existence of food deserts on the basis that the US wastes 30-40% of the food supply, but doing so misses the point. The phrase “comparing apples to oranges”? This argument falls victim to that phrase — the logical fallacy of false equivalence. Food waste in the US is a tremendous problem, but when we talk about food deserts, we are talking about access to the food within the supply system, not the system itself, or how much food is available.
With that said, let’s look at some of what is at play in influencing this level of access.
Race, Economics, and Public Policy
There is a correlation between food deserts and race resulting from interactions between economic practices and public policy that go back to the 1930’s. Okay, you could argue that systemic racism and oppressive policies extend to a time well before the 1930’s (think sharecropping), and you would be correct, but for the purpose of ease, let’s look at the more immediate catalyst for the onset of today’s food deserts, the New Deal — the well-intentioned, but wrought-with-problems set of policies and legislation which compounded preexisting systemic racism.
Following the Great Depression, the introduction of the New Deal in 1933 was intended to address the severe economic hardship the US was facing, and to positively impact the extensive problem of food insecurity by implementing sweeping changes to the agriculture and farming industry in the form of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, imposing production limits on certain crops and livestock such as corn, cotton, and pigs, resulting in artificially raised prices for these products. In exchange for reducing production, a subsidy was paid to farm owners. Black farmers, still working within sharecropping practices on white-owned farms, were greatly affected by the AAA, as the farm owners would halt production and pocket the government subsidy, leaving the farmers with no source of income. Simultaneously, the increased prices made food accessibility even harder for consumers already struggling financially due to high unemployment.
A few other changes brought on by the New Deal included the birth of the USDA, the original iteration of SNAP: Food Stamps, and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA).
The introduction of the FHA influenced the migration of white middle- and lower-class residents into suburbs, leaving minority families to cram into urban housing projects, and gave rise to ‘redlining’ policies, which prevented Black residents from securing mortgages in metropolitan neighborhoods. The collection of policies from the New Deal brought about a segregation of minority populations in urban settings and in the newly created white neighborhoods in the suburbs, and with that came a new set of systemic challenges faced by racial minorities in the form of poverty, capitalism and business practices.
Poverty, Capitalism and Business
Let’s get a misconception out of the way right off the bat: opening supermarkets in food deserts does not fix the problem, it is a band-aid fix at best. A major piece of the food desert and systemic racism puzzle is affordability, and the belief that putting up a few supermarkets in a food desert will solve the issue ignores this piece. Having increased geographical access does not necessarily guarantee a higher level of access overall because the food may very well be unaffordable for the residents in the area.
Race aside, inequalities in wealth and income between the lower-class and upper-class have exponentially increased since the 1960’s, creating massive disparities between the two groups. Make no mistake, we aren’t done talking about race. Racial minority populations experience this gap to an even greater degree than white counterparts. In 2016, the average wealth of white families was 7x higher than that of Black families. Poverty presents the additional challenge of having adequate access to transportation to get to and from local stores (low-income residents likely do not own a car), which the USDA does acknowledge in its report on food deserts.
The New Deal laid the groundwork for the formation of food deserts; capitalism and business built upon it. As white middle-class residents migrated to the suburbs, so too did supermarkets, being that it is best practice in business to open new stores in areas where there will be a return on investment. The issue is not so much that supermarkets seek out areas with demand, it’s that they seek out areas with a demand which can be acted upon by consumers and will lead to monetary return for the business. That’s par for the course in a capitalist system where the goal of a business is to make money, but it happens to contribute to the formation of food deserts. Whereas white middle-class residents continued to benefit from ease of access to healthy food with a relatively greater ability to afford it, minority residents began to fall behind in both regards because of increasingly limited availability of supermarkets and disproportionately lower incomes which put the ability to afford healthy food out of reach. Residents living in food deserts have a biological need for healthy food, but ongoing income disparities have led to the disappearance of supermarkets from low-income areas over time, being replaced instead by smaller grocery stores and fast-food restaurants filled with unhealthy, processed food.
A lot to unpack, right? Being a brief overview, there is still so much more involved than what we covered, but let’s shift gears a bit and look at the effects of food deserts on the residing population. Take a quick breath, and let’s go.
Photo by Max van den Oetelaar
So, You Like Circles?
No? Well, buckle up because we’re about to dive into a few overlapping circles that make up one giant circle. The series of connected and incredibly damaging cycles in food deserts we’ll be quickly running through are: the unavailability of supermarkets, demand, health, employment, and poverty.
The General Gist
Supermarkets with healthy food phase out of an area, becoming replaced by stores with unhealthy food. A food desert is born, having an incredible affect on the eating habits of the residents in the area. What begins as a choice (eating healthy or not) gradually becomes the only option due to the two-headed beast that is the concurrent increasing wealth gap and increasing lack of access. Over time, diets and habits change so significantly that even when presented with a viable option to eat healthier, the choice is often taken towards unhealthy food. This is not to throw blame on anyone who makes this choice — it is a product of all of the socioeconomic influences above, and is really just human nature to lean towards what we know — but is meant to illustrate the every day implications of living in a food desert. Effectively, the removal of healthy food options eliminates demand for it over time as habits and decision-making shift. Being a losing proposition to open a supermarket in an area with no demand, a cycle of no supply and no demand forms. All the while, the health of residents in food deserts bears the brunt of the damage.
These diets of processed foods are filled with saturated fats, sugar, cholesterol and salt, leading to a slew of long-term health conditions, which become a challenge in their own right due to inadequate health care for minority communities (a topic deserving of its own space, but which falls outside of the scope of our breakdown. Here is one article on implicit bias in healthcare if you’d like to learn more about the topic). Now we come to the cycle that is health, employment, and poverty. Health conditions can create psychological and physical distress, which impairs an individual’s ability to fully function in an educational or work setting, and may result in instability in employment. Jumping backwards to business practices for a moment, consider how the lack of well-paying jobs because there is no financial incentive for businesses to open in low-income areas further compounds employment hardship faced by people in food deserts. A reduced employment level puts financial strain on residents in food deserts, keeping them in the low-income bracket, or pushing them into poverty. Only able to afford cheap food (if that ability even exists for the individual), unhealthy food continues to be the only accessible option.
Ultimately, we come to the giant circle. Poverty begets poverty. Systemic problems contribute to poverty; poverty to food insecurity; food insecurity to health and education struggles; health and education struggles to employment struggles; employment struggles to poverty. It is imperative to recognize that individuals are not necessarily at fault for falling into or getting trapped in the cycle of poverty, but that their situation may be a product of failures within larger systems.
Food deserts are just one manifestation of systemic racism. It’s why the phrase “food desert” stirs unrest amongst food justice activists — it doesn’t do what is actually going on justice; the phrase is too clean and too quantified, not pointing to the complexities involved. It makes saying “just move out,” or “just open up a supermarket.” easier on those who do not live in a food desert, because the phrase ignores the self-perpetuating nature of their presence in neighborhoods, rural or urban. Systemic racism, and hence food deserts, are overwhelmingly complex, multifaceted issues, which “food desert” doesn’t quite encapsulate.
The good news, there is quite a bit of discourse on what potential solutions there are for addressing food deserts, ones that go beyond haphazardly opening stores. Solutions include creating more community-run farmers markets and small not-for-profit grocery stores, developing community-based local farms, educating small stores on how to buy and safely store fresh produce, and crafting new methods for efficiently getting food to residents, such as through delivery programs. The scope of issues involved in food deserts is so vast and requires immense amounts of work to correct, but small solutions are a step in the right direction.
Further engagement:
An in-depth conversation about food deserts, food justice, systemic racism, and the case for changing our language surrounding food deserts. This roundtable discussion from Civil Eats is also a great conversation for understanding more about why food justice activists believe “food desert” is a misleading and detrimental term.
While not directly related to food deserts, this ultra-comprehensive (this is not an exaggeration) report on the social and economic impacts of the US food supply chain looks at the effects of the food industry on the health, wealth, and well-being among workers in the industry and consumers, as well as so much more. Fair warning, approach this one with an empty mind and plenty of time.
This opinion piece from the Atlanta Black Star gives a first-hand account of what it is like to live in a food apartheid.
For a more extensive examination of the New Deal and its contribution to food insecurity, this journal offers a deep dive into the topic.
We took a look at how the relationship between school closures during COVID and food access for students.
