Tag: food-deserts

In 2011, I moved from Oregon to a rural, isolated region in eastern Montana. My AmeriCorps position was tasked with helping build a school garden in a neighboring town and to explore the possibility of developing a cooperatively run grocery store in the community next door. Both these tiny towns had high poverty and hunger rates, but the one lacking a grocery store faced some serious challenges. With less than three hundred aging residents, this community was approximately thirty miles from the nearest small grocery store, and eighty miles from a department store. My workplan proposed assessing the feasibility of bringing a grocery store to this “food desert.”

At the time, eliminating food deserts was a trending solution for fighting hunger. Spurred on by Michelle Obama’s healthy food initiatives, the movement assumed that distance was a primary barrier to healthy foods for these communities. Her campaign advocated for bringing grocery stores and retailers of fresh produce to communities experiencing hunger to facilitate access and consumption of healthy foods, to the benefit of children and communities alike.

Over the past decade, we’ve learned that hunger in low access communities is far more complex than simply being able to get to a grocery store. Although physical access is an important barrier to consider, it is not necessarily the one most significantly influencing hunger rates.

Although still in occasional use, the phrase “food desert” has fallen out of favor, and for good reason.

The term itself is misleading. The official definition of a food desert is a region that is more than one mile from a grocery store in an urban setting or more than ten miles in a rural area. Rather than recognizing the assets available, the phrase defines a community based on what it lacks. A desert conjures up an image of a desolate wasteland, bereft of resources. This paradigm disempowers communities by ignoring the power and resources they do have, and glossing over the fact that what they lack is determined by external influences.

Another reason the term is no longer regularly used is because it recognizes that a desert is a naturally occurring ecosystem, whereas a food desert is a deliberately manufactured setting.

Choices are made at every level of administration and government to determine whether a region gets a grocery store, or a farmers’ market, or nothing but fast-food restaurants. The creation of a food desert is anything but passive, and it’s rarely a decision that residents have influence over.   

In the 1980s, activist Karen Washington introduced the term “food apartheid” to describe communities lacking adequate food access more accurately. It references the racial disparities of hunger highlighted by redlining, segregation, and discrimination.

Over the last ten years, the food justice community has improved our appreciation of terminology which explicitly recognizes that hunger and poverty is never an accident. Too much of our society’s understanding of food access focuses on individual responsibility, but adopting language that uplifts the systemic nature of hunger is an essential step to helping evolve our cultural paradigm. Calling out apartheid is a powerful and impactful way to engage with the systemic nature of hunger.

In the Montana community where I worked, surveys revealed that most residents wouldn’t shop at a store in town unless its prices were cheaper than those of the major retail chain eighty miles away. Residents recognized that the prices for a local grocery store, no matter how well managed, would never be as low as the supercenter even considering the price of fuel to get there, and they simply couldn’t afford it.

Introducing a local store would have had minimal to no impact on residents.

This explicitly demonstrated that income and cost were the greatest barriers to food security for this small town. Calling it a food desert oversimplified these challenges, and ignores the fact that poverty prevented people from shopping or eating how they like. Montana’s high population of Indigenous People, and economic forces that produce the ultra-cheap, exploitive, centralized supercenter grocery model, absence of living wages or healthy retirement accounts, ensured that this town remained food insecure.

Calling it a food desert prompts solutions that bring resources to the area that don’t empower residents, while confronting food apartheid makes us address the reality that hunger can’t be solved without systemic change.

The opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.

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