Oakland Food Policy Council

Finding the appropriate term to describe the landscape of the US food system brings us again to the paradoxical nature of the US food system itself.  As levels of obesity and health related disease rise in places where access to healthy food is difficult, it becomes unclear whether such areas, with limited access to nutritious and affordable food, should be understood as food deserts, food swamps, or perhaps both. The USDA’s report titled “Access to Affordable and Nutritious Food: Measuring and Understanding Food Deserts and their Consequences,” released in June 2009, sets out to assess the prevalence of such areas with limited access to fresh fruits and vegetables under the assumption that health and nutrition can be expressed at the regional level as the outcome of two factors: distance to a supermarket and access to a vehicle.         

Articulating a definition of food desert as ‘an area with limited access to affordable and nutritious food,’ (as measured by distance and car ownership) their efforts seem misguided from the start, as the report fails to understand the structural causes of obesity, poor nutrition. Health and access to nutritious foods have been historically distributed along lines of race and income in a process understood by many as food apartheid. Their narrow consideration of the prevalence of food deserts focuses on solutions that strengthen the agri-industrial complex wherein the problem finds its root causes, recommending incentive programs to entice new stores, with a preference for supermarket-led development and Wal-Mart style superstores, leaving community programs ($100 million) vastly underfunded in comparison to the amount spent on farm subsidies ($74 billion).         

As millions of Americans are finding themselves in increased food-insecure situations (approximately 49 million Americans, or 16% of the population, were food insecure in 2008 according to a November 2009 released USDA report, the highest ever recorded), and as the externalities of our American food system wreak further havoc on our health, our environment and our economy, the task of understanding the true causes of food deserts becomes essential if we are to move forward in rebuilding local food systems, guided by the principle of food sovereignty and devoted to the cause of making food deserts bloom.  Taking a closer look at the USDA’s conclusions and the public debate that followed, we can begin to make sense of the food desert phenomena and develop an understanding of how government, non-government, and community actors are thinking about and tackling the dual issues of diet-related disease and access to food and nutrition in the United States.       

Identifying only a small percentage (2.2%) of the American population with limited access to a grocery store, the report goes on to conclude that supermarkets and large grocery stores have lower prices than ‘smaller stores,’ convenience stores may not provide all the foods needed for a healthy diet and may be more expensive, and that easy access to all food, rather than lack of access to specific healthy foods, may be a more important factor in explaining increases in obesity. Drawing the conclusion that availability of nutritious food doesn’t necessarily mean improved outcomes, the USDA’s report asserts that understanding the market conditions that contribute to differences in access to food is critical to the design of policy interventions that may be effective in reducing access limitations. If high development costs serve as a barrier to entry for supermarkets in some areas with low access, then subsidy programs or restructured zoning policies may be effective solutions.         

Further, the USDA’s assessment goes on to report that,

The rise of nontraditional retailers in food retail (Wal-Mart, Costco, or Super Target), which offers foods at prices that are 8 to 27 percent lower than at large supermarket chains, has changed the competitive environment and has likely led to decreases in the average prices of foods for consumers.  These stores are not typically located in urban areas and may not be accessible in all rural areas either.  Thus, those outside of the reach of these large stores may be less affected by the price benefits of the stores… If cost factors keep food retailers from developing new stores or expanding services in existing stores, then efforts to reduce these costs or to subsidize development of new or expanded stores may be effective policy solutions (104).       

In making these policy recommendations, the report opens the discussion of what constitutes a just, accessible, and equitable food system, touching off a national public debate over the issues raised.  Will the construction of a Costco in aregion known as a food desert be sufficient to provide health and nutrition for the community?  And who exactly will benefit under this type of food development?       

While high food prices do serve as a major obstacle towards making healthy food more accessible, simply making more cheap food available-in the form of Costco’s and Wal-mart’s- is not seen as a solution for many of those interested in greater food justice and food security. Instead, the further expansion of corporate food suppliers into new communities can be seen as an extension of the problem, misunderstanding that what needs to happen is a more radical change in what we consider healthy food and how certain modes of distribution work into or against the development of a healthy food system stretching from the community to international level. As Raj Patel writes in his book Stuffed and Starved,      

Supermarkets have been successful in shutting down neighborhood       

channels for the distribution of fresh fruit and vegetables, the foods predominantly available in poor neighborhoods are highly processes and fat-saturated.  When      

supermarkets decide that they will not expand into areas of predominantly poor     

people of color, and having by their very existence already restricted the       

possibilities of other fruit and vegetable distribution mechanisms, they consign     

the residents to a diet of frozen pizza, pork rinds, beef patties and corn dogs (242).      

What needs to happen therefore is a shift of focus away from supplying more cheap food (made artificially cheap by heavy subsidies towards large agri-businesses), towards reestablishing the neighborhood channels of fresh fruits and vegetables that contribute to the flourishing of healthy food systems, recognizing local farmers as key stakeholders and partners in the process of promoting greater access to fresh, healthy and affordable foods for all.   

Indeed there are highly productive, equitable and sustainable alternatives to the present industrial practices, and many people working to advance these alternatives and reestablish community channels of nutritious food in this time of need.  In the United States, the livelihood struggles of low-income, African-American, Native-American, Latino-American, Asian-American and immigrant communities are at the center of programs for food justice and agricultural sustainability. Low-income people of color are mobilizing locally, forming national coalitions, drafting legislation, and reaching out internationally in their efforts to build healthy, equitable, food systems that contribute to the social and economic development of their communities (http://www.foodfirst.org/en/blog). 

Yet in the face of a formidable movement working towards greater sovereignty stands the great challenge of a growing hungry populace, as the number of hungry and food insecure soars to an all time high amidst times of economic hardship.  Last year, according to the USDA’s November 2009 report documenting hunger in America, the deterioration of access to food from 2007-2008 far exceeded any other single year in the report's history as 16% of the population sometimes ran short of nutritious food, compared to about 12% the year before. In 2008, people in 4.8 million households used private food pantries, compared with 3.9 million in 2007, while approximately 625,000 households resorted to soup kitchens, more than 90,000 from the year before (Goldstein). 

The USDA’s report on hunger also found that African-American or Hispanic people were more than twice as likely than whites to report food insecurity in their household and more than half of the people surveyed who reported they had experienced food shortages said that they had, in the previous month, participated in either the government’s food stamp program, subsidized school lunches or WIC, the USDA’s nutrition program for women, infants andchildren (Goldstein). Despite $60 billion yearly in government food nutrition programs and the explosion of over 70,000 food banks and emergency food programs across the nation, more than one in five children in the US go hungry each month, with nearly 17 million children living in a food insecure household, up 4 million from the year before (Winne).

President Obama, who pledged to eliminate hunger among children by 2015 in his presidential campaign, has responded to questions of how to fix the problem of hunger in the US by saying that solutions begin with job creation. Further, he has stated that the administration has been working to increase food stamp benefits and is hopeful that the $85 million dollars that Congress freed up through an appropriations bill will be able feed more children during the summer, when subsidized school breakfasts and lunches are not available (Goldstein). Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has also identified unemployment as the leading cause of lack of access to nutrition in the US, as more than 10 percent of Americans are unemployed, and many more ‘underemployed.’ Vilsack acknowledged that next year’s report may also show rising rates of food insecurity, although he is hopeful that the administration’s economic stimulus and job creation plans may ease the problem. Yet are the issues of hunger, lack of access to food, and growing food deserts merely a matter of unemployment? And will more government dollars allocated towards food stamps/food banks/emergency programs be effective solutions towards the goal of eradicating food deserts and hunger in the US?

A plan simply for job creation and increasing emergency food outlets won’t go far enough to reverse the trend of growing food deserts and a populace that’s more than ever at risk for diet related diseases and hunger.  To solve the food desert phenomenon, we need to fix the food system.  This entails reducing the oligopolistic power of the agri-food corporations, rebuilding agroecologically resilient family agriculture, and increasing support to local economies and sustainable farming and production practices. We need to make food affordable by turning the food system into an engine for local economic development in both rural and urban areas by supporting production based on social, ecological, and economic justice and the goal of greater food sovereignty.  These movements already exist, and are gaining strength in the face of the food crisis as independent community-based food business are growing, new mechanisms of local distribution (such as farm to food bank linkages) are being established, and food policy councils are sprouting up throughout the country working to localize and rationalize food systems at various levels of governance.  This movement towards greater food democratization remains the greatest hope towards eradicating hunger, unraveling the structure that has created a food desert and food insecure reality for so many, and founding a food system based on the idea of justice and health. Join and support organizations campaigning for fair food systems policies; write letters and make calls to your elected officials, and ask questions of presidential and congressional candidates about hunger and food system related issues in the US and what they intend to do.  

Goldstein, Amy. “American’s Economic Pain Brings Hunger Pangs.” Washington Post

Bibliography

Ver Ploeg Michele, Vince Breneman et al.  “Access to Affordable and Nutritious Food—Measuring and Understanding Food Deserts and Their Consequences: Report to Congress.” USDA Administrative Publication AP-036: 160. June (2009).

Winne, Mark. “High Food Prices- Just Another Bad Day in the Foodline.” Food BankSpeech, Seattle, WA. 15 May 2008.

Food First: Institute for Food and Development Policy, http://www.foodfirst.org/en/blog

17 November 2009.