By Mike Gray

Until three days ago, I’d never heard of ‘food deserts’; their first mention—for me—was on a local TV station news report concerning how much and where tax revenues should be spent on what is euphemistically called ‘community development.’ An article on Wikipedia tells us

A food desert is a district with little or no access to foods needed to maintain a healthy diet but often served by plenty of fast food restaurants.

Without defining ‘a healthy diet,’ the article goes on:

The concept of ‘access’ may be interpreted in three ways.

‘Physical access’ to shops can be difficult if the shops are distant, the shopper is elderly or infirm, the area has many hills, public transport links are poor, and the consumer has no car. Also, the shop maybe across a busy road, difficult to cross with children or with underpasses that some fear to use because of a crime risk. For some, such as disabled people, the inside of the shop may be hard to access physically if there are steps up or the interior is cramped with no room for walking aids. Carrying fresh food home may also be hard for some.

Thanks to criminals, children are starving! But we digress:

‘Financial access’ is difficult if the consumer lacks the money to buy healthy foods (generally more expensive, calorie for calorie, than less healthy, sugary, and fatty ‘junk foods’) or if the shopper cannot afford the bus fare to remote shops selling fresh foods and instead uses local fast food outlets. Other forms of financial access barriers may be inability to afford storage space for food, or for the very poor, living in temporary accommodation that does not offer good cooking facilities.

Evidently, ‘fast food outlets’ have absolutely nothing nutritious to offer—and how about defining ‘the very poor’? Continuing:

Mental attitude or food knowledge of the consumer may prevent them accessing fresh vegetables. They may lack cooking knowledge or have the idea that eating a healthy diet isn’t important.

It would seem lacking ‘cooking knowledge’ prevents someone from using a can opener. Once again ‘a healthy diet’ goes undefined.

Evidently changing demographic patterns in large cities can produce ‘food deserts’:

In some urban areas, grocery stores have withdrawn alongside residents that have fled to the suburbs (see urban sprawl). Low income earners and senior citizens who remain find healthy foods either unavailable or inaccessible as a result of high prices and/or unreachable locations.

Even the boonies—places where people used to grow their own food—can be afflicted with ‘food deserts’:

In rural areas, local fresh food outlets have closed leaving shoppers without cars in these areas with difficult access to healthy foods, as rural bus services have also declined. Whilst the idea of ‘food deserts’ in the early 21st century has mainly an urban flavour, the first case studies into difficulties faced by consumers accessing healthy foods were made in rural English villages. The Women’s Institute looked at the plight of elderly car-less widows left stranded by closure of village shops and withdrawal of bus services as far back as the 1970s, although recent use of the term seems to stem from its use by the Obama Administration, and in and around Chicago.

Aha! Now we’re getting down to the nitty-gritty: “. . . recent use of the term seems to stem from its use by the Obama Administration, and in and around Chicago.”

Furthermore, Wikipedia links to another article that points to the term’s origins in—wait for it—socialist Britain’s welfare state programs:

The actual term ‘food desert’ is quoted, by S CUMMINS (British Medical Journal, 2002, Vol. 325, p. 436), as having been originally used by a resident of a public sector housing scheme in the west of Scotland in the early 1990s.

Definitions of ‘food deserts’, pre-2000 –

1) Low Income Project Team (1996) ‘areas of relative exclusion where people experience physical and economic barriers to accessing healthy food’.

2) The Independent (11 June 1997) ‘food deserts were those areas of inner cities where cheap nutritious food is virtually unobtainable.  Car-less residents, unable to reach out-of-town supermarkets, depend on the corner shop where prices are high, products are processed and fresh fruit and vegetables are poor or non-existent’.

3) The Observer (13 September 1998) ‘many poor housing estates were left as food deserts by the closure of local food shops’ and that in the few local food shops left, prices were up to 60% more thanin the supermarkets.

4) The Guardian II (17 March 1999) ‘on the poorer estates of Coventry, low cost, good quality, food is not available to the poorest.  These people ‘either have to shop at expensive local stores or pay for transport and lug small children for miles and back with shopping’.

Wikipedia also links to an article in Chicago Magazine, which is more meticulous in its definition:

What qualifies as a food desert? A cluster of blocks without a corner grocery doesn’t by itself warrant the label; an entire neighborhood, or a cluster of neighborhoods, without a mainstream grocery store—such as a Jewel, a Treasure Island, or an Aldi—almost certainly does.

While portions of neighborhoods such as West Town fall within these boundaries, Chicago’s food desert lies entirely below Division Street, affecting a population that is overwhelmingly African American: about 478,000 blacks, compared with some 78,000 whites and 57,000 Latinos, according to Gallagher’s calculations. For her 2006 report, Gallagher measured the distance from the geographic center of each of the city’s 18,888 inhabited blocks and found that not only do residents living in majority African American blocks travel the farthest on average to reach any type of grocery store—0.59 miles as opposed to 0.39 miles for majority-white blocks or 0.36 miles for Latinos—but they must travel twice as far to reach a grocery store as a fast-food restaurant.

So we are not discouraged from inferring that ‘food deserts’ are the product of white racist policies. Living in a ‘food desert’ is such a challenge that poverty’s pangs are intensified:

An estimated 64,000 households in food deserts don’t have cars, so a weekly shopping trip can require cobbling together a multibus route. If the hassle of schlepping grocery bags on the CTA sounds tiring—especially given that 109,000 food desert residents are single mothers—that’s because it is. Many simply opt out, ducking into a fast-food outlet or a convenience store instead, where the inventory often runs more toward potato chips and liquor than spinach and oranges, and where a banana that would cost 29 cents at Dominick’s goes for around 70 cents, if it’s even available.

In the very next paragraph we have our hearts tugged at—my God, it’s the kids who suffer most:

“Diet has a direct link to obesity, diabetes, and other diseases, and you can’t choose a healthy diet if you don’t have access to it,” Gallagher [of the National Center for Public Research] says. “Many in the food desert who suffer are children who already have diabetes but who have yet to be diagnosed and treated.”

Although other factors such as poor health care and stress are likely contributors, Gallagher found that, among those living in neighborhoods with the worst access to fresh food, ten out of every 1,000 people die from cancer, as opposed to fewer than seven per 1,000 in neighborhoods with the best food availability. The comparison is even bleaker when it comes to deaths from cardiovascular disease: 11 per 1,000 in the hardest-hit neighborhoods, compared with fewer than six per 1,000 among the best off. And because nearly one-third of Chicago’s food-desert residents are children, these latent repercussions have years to germinate.

Obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer—is there no ailment not attributable to these accursed ‘food deserts’?

With so much suffering being caused by ‘food deserts,’ are there any public policy initiatives that will alleviate these problems? Fear not, friend, corrective measures have been and are being enacted even as we speak: free universal health care (even for non-residents), insurance for all (even non-residents), food for all (even non-residents), and economic redistribution (even for non-residents).

With the people now in charge—the ones we’ve been waiting for all this time—soon healing waters will be flowing throughout all of America’s ‘food deserts,’ ensuring everyone ‘a healthy diet’—whatever that means—and abolishing the pernicious blight of SevenEleven, BK, MickeyD, and KFC that afflicts ‘the very poor’—whoever they are.

Preliminary conclusion: When one considers their origin as well as how policy makers exploit them, ‘food deserts’ appear to be a political device constructed for the express purpose of expanding governmental (i.e., taxpayer-supported) social welfare entitlement programs.