The Problem With The Term “Food Deserts”
According to the USDA, nearly 20 million Americans live in an area without easy access to a supermarket — where they’re at heightened risk of cancer, obesity, diabetes and other unhealthy-diet-related diseases. The department calls these areas food deserts.
That term has been ubiquitous in discussions of food insecurity ever since its coinage in the early 1990s. Yet Google Trends data show that interest in “food deserts” as a search topic has fallen sharply over the last two decades… and there’s a reason for that.
In recent years, a growing number of activists have pushed back against the term, arguing that it misrepresents the roots of food insecurity in the U.S.
The issue?
Deserts form naturally.
So-called food deserts, on the other hand, are largely a man-made problem — and one in which the influence of racism can’t be ignored.
America’s Racialized Supermarket Shortage
A 2002 study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that 31% of white Americans live in a census tract with at least one supermarket — compared to just 8% of black Americans.
Here in New York City, that discrepancy is visible on a map.
Below, the map on the left marks areas with fewer fresh food retailers than the city average in crimson. The map on the right shows the racial makeup of the city, with black-majority areas marked in dark blue and hispanic-majority areas marked in gold.
Researchers have long argued that racial stereotypes about income and crime influence corporate grocers’ decisions on where to open new stores. And the industry doesn’t even really deny that charge.
In a statement to CNN for a 2020 article on food insecurity, Heather Garlich, spokesperson for food retail trade group FMI, admitted, “Market, economic and demographic factors influence a company’s decision to establish a store.” (Emphasis added.)
Former Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter, who spent years on the city council trying to attract a grocery store to a largely black area of the city, put it more directly: “White people don’t think black people spend money, and they weren’t willing to invest in predominantly black neighborhoods.”
But the private sector isn’t the only force behind America’s racialized food insecurity problem.
How Policing Contributes To Food Insecurity In Majority-Nonwhite Areas
The image at the top of this post is a screenshot from a viral video taken in late September, in which the NYPD, Department of Sanitation and Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP) can be seen throwing away hundreds of pounds of produce from a street vendor in the Bronx.
The vendor in question, Diana Hernandez Cruz, was selling fruits and vegetables in a neighborhood where as many as 20% of residents experience food insecurity, according to a 2020 report by Hunger Free America.
NYPD officers shut down her stand, claiming that she lacked the necessary permits for it. The incident follows a mass-enforcement action against (mostly-hispanic) street vendors in the Bronx in July.
And in 2019, two separate videos of teams of white officers arresting hispanic churro vendors in Queens sparked social media outrage. A screenshot from one is shown below.
It’s worth mentioning here that New York City capped the number of street food vending permits at about 3,000 in the 1980s, and that the waiting list for new permits has been closed for 15 years.
The city has subtly acknowledged that its street food vending policies tend to target vendors in mostly-nonwhite neighborhoods.
DCWP spokesman Abigail Lootens was quoted in a recent New York Times article about the Cruz incident, saying that the city focuses on “problematic” areas, including Fordham Road in the Bronx and Main Street in Flushing, in shutting down unlicensed vendors.
From “Food Deserts” To “Supermarket Redlining” And “Food Apartheid”
As we’ve discussed, many institutional factors — including stereotype-driven investment decisions by corporate grocers and racially-biased policing — play a role in the formation of so-called food deserts in America.
With all this in mind, some activists have proposed alternatives to the term “food deserts” — alternatives which address the racist and systemic roots of food insecurity more explicitly.
Nutter has used the term “supermarket redlining” to describe food insecurity in mostly-black areas of Philadelphia — a term which compares the problem to the racist Great Depression-era government practice of designating black neighborhoods as unsuitable for real estate investment.
Black Urban Growers founder Karen Washington goes further; she prefers the term “food apartheid.” In a 2018 interview with The Guardian, she explained that the term “brings us to the more important question: what are some of the social inequalities that you see, and what are you doing to erase some of the injustices?”
Doing Your Part To Fight Food Insecurity In New York City
Here at Feed Forward, we believe that technology can play a role in remedying the injustices which leave many New Yorkers without access to healthy food.
Our More Than A Meal Program allows New Yorkers in need to select and order free or reduced-cost meals for delivery or pickup from dozens of local restaurants. The program is partially funded by donations from conscientious citizens like you — click here to see how you can help.
