The Myth of the Food Desert

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: