Rethinking the Problem of Food Deserts

29 min readAug 16, 2021

“Food desert” is a popular term that refers to areas of the country with no retail stores that sell fresh and healthy food. In both official government definitions and popular understanding, food deserts are low-income communities, many of which have high rates of diet-related illnesses. Some researchers and policy makers have concluded that lack of access to healthy food in food deserts is a major cause of poor diet and health outcomes. They proceed to argue that the solution to food deserts and their associated health impacts is to promote the establishment of retail stores that sell fresh and healthy foods in low-income communities. This paper challenges the wisdom of this conventional argument.

Food deserts as a concept are of concern to food justice and anti-hunger advocates, but “food desert” is also an official designation of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) with accompanying government programs that attempt to fix the perceived problem. Food and nutrition became greater priorities for the White House and USDA with the election of President Barack Obama in 2008. First Lady Michelle Obama’s major policy initiative, the Let’s Move campaign, launched in 2010 to combat child obesity. And in a major initiative designed to solve the problem of food deserts, the Obama Administration announced in 2010 that it was creating a $400 million Healthy Food Financing Initiative to use government incentives to attract private investment in food deserts. From 2011 to 2016, the federal government spent almost $500 million to improve food store access in neighborhoods lacking large, well-stocked grocery stores. Through public-private partnerships, nearly 1,000 retailers have opened stores in areas of limited food access in 35 states.

The results of these public-private partnerships have been mixed at best. From 2010 to 2016, the share of the population living in limited-supermarket-access areas did decline gradually, from 6.8 percent of the population to 5.6 percent. However, chronic diet-related illnesses continue to rise, and about three-fourths of the population still does not eat the recommended amount of fruits and vegetables.

Poverty seems to be a larger driver of shopping choices than any other factor. Almost 80 percent of hungry people report that they buy less healthy food to save money for other expenses. Results from a USDA study showed that subsidizing fruit and vegetable purchases increased purchasing of fruit and vegetables, which shows that produce consumption is correlated with costs and economic factors. If costs are a barrier to healthy food consumption, then one solution would be to give people more money to spend on healthy food.

Income levels of communities play a role in the decisions of grocers when choosing to invest in new stores. In some neighborhoods, grocery stores will simply not invest in communities where they cannot forecast making a profit. In these cases, even public grant money may not induce or sustain private investment. However, even when controlling for income, Black neighborhoods have the fewest grocery stores. So while poverty is a barrier for neighborhoods to attract supermarket, structural racism is also a factor in increasing some people’s distances from grocery stores.

Communities may want local grocery stores for reasons unrelated to solving nutritional inequality. For example, driving long distances is an inconvenience and contributes to global climate change. Some communities also see grocery stores as culturally important gathering places or tools for economic development. At least two rural municipalities that had become food deserts through capital flight — one in Baldwin, FL, and one in St. Paul, KS — wanted local grocery stores even after private grocers had decided it was unprofitable. These towns chose to invest in their communities by owning and operating their own grocery stores. In both stores, employees are directly employed by the municipality.

This fully public model could offer benefits beyond convenience for local residents. If the store turns out to be profitable, municipalities could reinvest any profits for the public benefit or could reduce prices for its low-income residents. If the store is not profitable, public ownership can also increase food security because the community can collectively decide to keep the store by supporting it with public subsidies.

Part I of this paper helps make sense of the problems related to food deserts. Part II describes existing federal, state, local, and tribal programs that have helped bring grocery stores to food deserts. Part III discusses the failures of food desert initiatives to address the underlying problems of poor diet and bad health. Part IV presents alternative policy options to alleviate limited food access in areas that cannot attract private investment in local grocery stores. The paper concludes that transfer payments are the best option for addressing nutritional inequality and that public ownership of grocery stores or food delivery services can also help alleviate problems of food access in certain poor communities if used in conjunction with other government programs to improve nutrition and food security.

THE PROBLEMS UNDERLYING FOOD DESERTS

To properly evaluate food desert policy programs, it’s necessary to understand why policy makers initially became interested in people’s proximities to grocery stores and what problems they really wanted to solve.

Poverty

Congress first defined food deserts in the 2008 Farm Bill in a provision directing USDA to prepare a report on the prevalence and causes of food deserts and the effects of food deserts on low-income communities. The 2009 report noted that obesity and diet-related illnesses were major public health problems and that low access to nutritious foods may have been making the problem worse in some communities. The report found that 23 million people lived in 6,529 food desert communities at the time.

USDA designates census tracts as food deserts if they meet certain low-income and low-food-access thresholds:

Low income: a poverty rate of 20 percent or greater, or a median family income at or below 80 percent of the statewide or metropolitan area median family income;
Low access: at least 500 persons and/or at least 33 percent of the population lives more than 1 mile from a supermarket or large grocery store (10 miles, in the case of rural census tracts).

Food deserts became a concern in the United States Congress around the same time that President Obama was elected to the Presidency in 2008. In the 2000s, concerns about obesity and childhood obesity were the frequent subject of national reporting, but science had not — and still has not — settled on a unified theory of what causes obesity. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recognizes obesity as a complex health issue influenced a combination of factors including genetics, physical inactivity, and poor nutrition.

For much of human history, poor nutrition was mostly associated with people not having enough to eat, but by the mid-1990s researchers understood that the impoverished suffered from poor diet and nutrition even in wealthy, industrialized nations. Researchers often focus on obesity as a proxy for diet-related illness, though it’s worth noting that even skinny people with poor diets can exhibit symptoms of diet-related illnesses commonly associated with obesity.

Food deserts became an area of study related to health and poverty in Europe in 1990s. The term “food desert” first appeared in a United Kingdom government report produced in 1995 by a policy working group of the Low Income Project Team of the then Conservative government’s Nutrition Task Force. The group wanted to understand why the poor had greater rates of diet-related illnesses.

The political context surrounding the creation of “food desert” as a concept is important. In the UK in the mid-1990s, John Major, the leader of the Conservative Party and successor to Margaret Thatcher, was Prime Minister. At the same time, Democrat Bill Clinton was President of the United States and governing based on a strategy of “triangulation,” which involved a significant rightward political shift of the Democratic Party. When Pennsylvania was enacting its Fresh Food Financing Initiative in 2004, Republican George W. Bush was about to be elected to a second term. Major, Clinton, and Bush all advocated for, and often won, significant cuts to the welfare state while pushing for economic liberalization and free market reforms.

It matched the political climate of the time that the UK nutrition task force in the 1990s and USDA in the 2000s concluded that poor people were suffering from poor nutrition not because they lacked the money for more healthy food but because they lacked consumer options. By definition, distance from a grocery store alone does not make a food desert. Wealthy people who live far from grocery stores are presumed to have no problem obtaining healthy food. Poor people who live close to grocery stores are similarly assumed to be able to eat well.

Framing the problem of poor nutrition as a lack of access to healthy foods has led policy makers to conclude that the problem of food deserts can be solved by subsidizing private enterprise in order to provide access to foods. If the problem is access, then the solution is simple: induce more grocery stores from the private sector to open in poor communities. Once the access problem is solved then, in theory, the problem of poor nutrition will also be solved. It was through this framework that the Obama Administration and the states set out to bring grocery stores to food deserts.

Racism

Some people criticize the term “food desert” because they say it does not acknowledge racism in the food system more broadly. These advocates prefer the term “food apartheid” to the term “food desert” because it foregrounds the entanglement of structural racism and nutritional inequality. Income levels of communities play a major role in the decisions of grocers when choosing to invest in new stores. But even when controlling for income, Black neighborhoods have the fewest grocery stores, which is evidence that racism is also playing a role in increasing the distances people must travel to go to grocery stores.

The issue of race can be no more disentangled from food deserts than it can from poverty and health outcomes. Critics of the term “food desert” note that the problems of accessibility are not limited to food and that government programs that have focused on bringing grocery stores to food deserts do not do enough to address problem of structural racism.

EXISTING GOVERNMENT PROGRAMS TO ALLEVIATE FOOD DESERTS

All levels of government — federal, state, municipal, and tribal — in the United States have enacted policies to address the problem of food deserts. Mostly they have used grants to tax breaks to entice private grocers to build in low-income communities.

Federal

On February 19, 2010, the Obama Administration announced the details of the Healthy Food Financing Initiative (HFFI), a $400 million plan to bring grocery stores and other healthy food retailers to underserved urban and rural communities across America. HFFI is a collaboration between the Departments of Treasury, Agriculture, and Health and Human Services. Through a mix of federal tax credits, below-market rate loans, loan guarantees, and grants, HFFI sought to attract private sector capital to support projects ranging from the construction or expansion of a grocery store to smaller-scale interventions such as placing refrigerated units stocked with fresh produce in convenience stores. Because it was run entirely through the Executive Branch, the original initiative bypassed Congress.

In the 2014, Congress renamed HFFI “America’s Healthy Food Financing Initiative.” It is now a public-private partnership with the Reinvestment Fund, a national nonprofit Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI), on behalf of USDA Rural Development. The program was reauthorized by the 2018 Farm Bill. To date, HFFI has awarded more than $220 million in grants and attracted an estimated $1 billion in additional financing. It has also supported nearly 1,000 grocery and other healthy food retail projects in more than 35 states across the country. Reinvestment Fund also uses HFFI funds to influence policy makers and advocacy groups about the importance of food desert initiatives.

States

Prior to the creation of HFFI, some state legislatures adopted their own food desert initiatives. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed the state legislative landscape and found that 12 states (including the District of Columbia) had enacted healthier food legislation between 2001 and 2011, while an additional 7 states had introduced such legislation that either did not pass or was pending further action. Like the federal model, state initiatives appropriated money for loan, grant, and/or tax incentive programs designed to encourage private retailers to open stores in low-income neighborhoods without a nearby grocery store.

The state most frequently cited as a model for food desert legislation has been Pennsylvania. The Obama Administration credited Pennsylvania’s Fresh Food Financing Initiative when it announced the creation of HFFI. Like Pennsylvania, the Obama Administration chose to create the initiative as a public-partnership with Reinvestment Fund administering the fund. Created in 2004, the Pennsylvania program’s goals are to:

Reduce the high incidence of diet-related diseases by providing healthy food;
Stimulate investment of private capital in low-wealth communities;
Remove financing obstacles and lower operating barriers for supermarkets in poor communities;
Create living wage jobs; and
Prepare and retain a qualified workforce.

Pennsylvania said it was the first state to enact a grocery store development initiative and that the program had been a model for the other states and the federal government. Over the course of six years, the state government pledged:

$13.1 million in loan capital and credit loss reserves;
$12 million as direct grants to store operators;
$3.1 million to support the federal New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC) financing;
$1.8 million for program administration.

40 percent of the program funding was given straight to the grocery store owners, about 44 percent went to loans, and just over 10 percent was available through tax credits.

According to the Reinvestment Fund, it leveraged the $30 million in initial state funding to attract another $145 million in additional private investment. In total, 206 retailers applied for state funding, and 88 projects had been financed as of June 2010. In total, more than $73.2 million in loans and $12.1 million in grants were approved.

Municipal

Municipalities have used tax breaks to attract private sector development for a long time, and the same approach has been used to attract grocery stores. One researcher traces the origins of municipal development spending to the Great Depression when a struggling town in Mississippi used public funds to attract a textile factory. In 2012, the New York Times estimated that U.S. cities, counties, and states issued roughly $80 billion in incentives per year. State and local tax incentives for small to midsize companies tripled from 1990 to 2018.

Using public funds to attract private investment can be controversial. Critics of the practice say:

Economic development incentives are often not determinative for where businesses locate.
Projects may not deliver on promises of jobs and/or economic growth.
Subsidies may result in diminished public services.
There is little accountability or oversight for incentive programs.

These criticisms could apply to grocery store financing initiatives as with any other public expenditure to attract private sector development. One promise unique to food desert initiatives is that the new grocery stores will change local eating habits or reduce nutritional inequality. These promises will be examined further in Section IV.

Tribal

The problem of food distribution within tribal nations has been a federal government concern that predates the current food desert discourse. In the 1800s, the federal government intentionally deprived indigenous tribes of its wild food sources such as bison to starve the tribes into submission. By the late 20th Century, federal strategies toward tribes had changed. When Congress created the modern food assistance program with the Food Stamp Act of 1977, it created a nutrition assistance program for tribal communities called the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations (FDPIR). Congress at that time was particularly concerned about the distances that some reservation residents had to travel to SNAP offices and grocery stores in order to obtain and use their benefits.

FDPIR directly provides food to poor households on tribal reservations and to some designated locations near reservations in Oklahoma. There are approximately 276 tribes receiving benefits under FDPIR through 102 tribal organizations and 3 state agencies. Tribal organizations and state agencies choose from a list of available USDA Foods, and USDA ships the food to the local agencies. These administering agencies store and distribute the foods, determine applicant eligibility, and provide nutrition education to recipients. USDA provides the administering agencies with funds to cover program administrative costs.

For some tribal nations, restoring food sovereignty is as important as food assistance programs. Food sovereignty is “the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.” For indigenous people, food sovereignty could include returning ancestral lands to tribal ownership or the recognition of tribal hunting and fishing rights.

Tribal nations have also opened fully public grocery stores. In 2001, the Citizen Potawatomie Nation leveraged gaming revenues to open a $9 million grocery store in Shawnee, Oklahoma. The store included a bakery, a deli, and a tribally owned bank. At the time of opening, the media coverage focused more on tribes trying to diversify revenue streams, but the store also provided important social services, including free transportation for anyone 65 or older to get to the store. The store is still open and had been so successful that the mayor of Shawnee, OK, argued that the tribal store was drawing customers away from nontribal stores Shawnee.

The Choctaw Nation also opened a tribally owned grocery store in 2016 in Clayton, Oklahoma. Other tribes have expanded beyond retail to create tribally owned food production. The Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians launched Choctaw Fresh Produce, which grows and sells organically raised fruits and vegetables in and around the tribe’s 35,000-acre reservation.

THE FAILURES OF FOOD DESERT INITIATIVES

Food desert policy initiatives appear to have missed the mark in terms of diagnosing what’s driving poor health outcomes in impoverished communities. Obesity, which is often seen as an indicator metric for other diet-related illnesses, doesn’t drop when grocery stores exist or open in poor, urban communities. A 2011 study based on 15 years’ worth of data from more than 5,000 people in five cities showed no connection between access to grocery stores and more healthful diets. A 2012 study showed that there was no observable relationship between the local food environment and the diet of middle-school children in California. Another study published in 2012 looked at young peoples’ eating habits found no connection between food environment and diet. That study also noted that, on average, poor neighborhoods have more grocery stores than wealthier neighborhoods, casting doubt on the entire concept of food deserts.

A study published in 2014 looked at one Philadelphia grocery store that opened with help from Pennsylvania’s Fresh Food Financing Initiative and found that the store had no significant impact on reducing obesity or increasing daily fruit and vegetable consumption in the four years since it opened.

Study after study has shown that increasing food access has little effect on diet and nutrition. The National Bureau of Economic research conducted a comprehensive analysis that attempted to quantify the relative importance of local supply and demand factors in generating nutritional inequality. Using a structural demand model, the study found that exposing low-income households to the same products and prices available to high-income households reduces nutritional inequality by nine percent, while the remaining 91 percent is driven by differences in demand. The study concluded that policies to reduce supply inequities, such as eliminating “food deserts,” would not work to reduce nutritional inequality. Another recent study found that increasing access in low-income communities to healthy foods that are found in more wealthy communities reduces nutritional inequality by only about 9 percent.

The Obama administration may have understood that food deserts weren’t driving nutritional inequality even as it was creating the Healthy Food Financing Initiative. A report from Department of Agriculture researchers presented to Congress in 2009 showed more grocery stores in poor neighborhoods than wealthier neighborhoods. To quote the report, “Median distance for low-income individuals is about 0.1 of a mile less than for those with higher income, and a greater share of low-income individuals (61.8 percent) have high or medium access to supermarkets than those with higher income (56.1 percent).” In 2012, USDA researchers confirmed that low-income neighborhoods had more grocery stores than other areas.

Even in 2009, USDA was reporting that poor households shopped where food prices were lower, not at whichever store was closest. USDA found that food purchases at convenience stores made up a small portion of total food expenditures (2 to 3 percent) for low-income consumers, and that low- and middle-income households were more likely to purchase food at supercenters, where prices are lower. In 2016, USDA reported that households often bypass the nearest supermarket to obtain groceries, indicating that proximity to a grocery is not a determining factor for how people shop.

More than 10 years in, it is reasonable to conclude that bringing more grocery stores to food deserts has not made people healthier. Rather than throwing good money after bad, policy makers should look to different solutions to address nutritional inequality.

POLICY SOLUTIONS THAT COULD ALLEVIATE FOOD DESERTS

If poverty is driving poor health outcomes, then one approach to the problem would be to eliminate poverty. Studies have already observed that an extremely effective way to address poverty is through transfer payments to needy people. In the United States, Social Security is an example of a universal program of cash payments that has been extremely effective at reducing poverty. However, much of the discourse surrounding poverty and nutrition has instead focused on nutrition education and grocery store access.

Increasing SNAP Benefits

The simplest solution to solving the bulk of problems associated with food deserts would be to increase cash payments to poor people. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) provides eligible recipients with an electronic benefit transfer (EBT) card that can be used to purchase food at grocery stores and other eligible retail stores. It functions very much like any other debit or credit card, though there are restrictions on the types of food that can be purchased.

When SNAP benefits are increased, poor people spend more money on food. One study examined records of more than 500 million grocery transactions by nearly half a million households over more than six years. Households that received an average of $200 per month in SNAP benefits increased their spending on groceries by approximately $110. This means that SNAP benefits raise overall food spending by between 50 and 60 percent of the benefit’s value. Furthermore, increasing SNAP benefits increases structural demand for groceries in poor communities and could make these neighborhoods more attractive for private grocery store investment. While this approach would involve increased government spending on payments to poor people, it could eliminate the need for the Healthy Food Financing Initiative and allow for the impoverished to spend money on other things. Inequality has hurt U.S. economic growth, and transfer payments to poor people will stimulate the economy through increased consumer spending. A recent study found that cash payments to poor people have ripple effects in the economy that benefit more than just the recipients of the payments.

Increasing SNAP benefits would also help solve the problem that initially created the concern around food deserts: nutritional inequality. Almost 80 percent of hungry people report that they buy less healthy food to save money for other expenses. Results from a USDA study showed that subsidizing fruit and vegetable purchases increased purchasing of fruit and vegetables, indicating that using SNAP to help eliminate poverty would be an effective way to tackle nutritional inequality. SNAP also provides an additional way to subsidize healthy eating through multiplier programs that apply to fresh vegetables. The Double Up Food Bucks program doubles the value of SNAP benefits spent at participating markets and grocery stores, helping people bring home more healthy fruits and vegetables while supporting local farmers.

Current USDA benefits for a SNAP-eligible household of four are an estimated average of $138 per month. Yet the USDA’s estimated budget for eating healthfully at home for a family of four is between $1,144 and $1,340. SNAP benefits should be raised significantly to be more in-line with actual food budgets and help people eat better while producing more equitable health outcomes. This would improve health outcomes in poor communities and could also raise the structural demand necessary to attract and permanently support more retail grocers.

Public grocery stores

Opening a new grocery store in a food desert will technically solve the USDA-defined problem of a food desert, but, again, opening new grocery stores in food deserts has no discernible effect on eating patterns or on the amount of money spent on food. A study published in 2019 that analyzed the effects of 6,700 grocery store openings, the researchers found, “Total expenditure shares across grocery stores, supercenters, and club stores increase by only a fraction of a percentage point in the full sample, with no statistically detectable effect in the food desert subsample. Thus, the primary effect of supermarket entry is to divert sales from other supermarkets.” Government subsidies for food deserts can therefore be seen as public expenditures that benefit some retailers at the expense of others.

Still, there are reasons that public entities may want grocery stores in their communities beyond changing people’s eating habits. The Kansas State University Rural Grocery Store Initiative (RGI) notes that grocery stores provide economic development through jobs and by contributing to the local tax base. These grocery stores may also act as community hubs for local residents to gather and connect with each other. RGI has helped six towns in Kansas open or keep open at least six grocery stores with a variety of models:

Municipality gives grant money to a private store owner and operator.
Municipality buys the grocery store building and then leases it back to a private store operator.
Municipality uses taxes and bonding to purchase land and construct a new building for lease to a private store operator.
Municipality owns the land, building, business, and inventory.

The model of full public ownership received national attention in 2019 when Baldwin, a small town on the outskirts of Jacksonville, FL, opened a fully public store. City officials said they had been unable to attract private investment, probably because the town’s median household income of $44,271 was below the state average of $53,267.. The city’s new store is a for-profit enterprise, yet the workers are all municipal employees, and the mayor says the city’s is not trying to turn a profit. According to the city, sales have thus far exceeded projections, but the city would reevaluate the project after it had been open longer.

This fully public model can bring democratic control into how the business is run and consequently what the community chooses to eat. Residents tell the store’s manager and often the mayor himself what they want stocked at the grocery store. Baldwin’s store supports local farmers by stocking local green beans, tomatoes, peanuts, cabbage and milk. The mayor says he tries to buy directly from local farmers and is working with a fisherman from a nearby town to stock the store with fresh shrimp. By supporting local food producers, more of the residents’ money can stay within the community and support local food sovereignty.

While Baldwin’s employees were all part-time when it opened, fulltime public grocery store employees could presumably join municipal healthcare plans. Compared to other cooperative or independent operator models, municipalities tend to have more employees and therefore more leverage when negotiating healthcare plans.

Grocery stores can function as natural monopolies in low population density areas. Natural monopolies are areas where there have high costs or a limited customer base, so private competition does not make economic sense. A small town can only support so many food stores, which have some of the lowest profit margins of any businesses. David Procter, the director of RGI, compares food stores to public utilities that are necessary for a town’s continued existence.

Perhaps not coincidentally, rural electric utilities are often cooperatively owned. The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Administration created the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) in 1935 to help bring electricity to rural areas. The REA drafted the Electric Cooperative Corporation Act, a model law that states could adopt to enable the formation and operation of not-for-profit, consumer-owned electric cooperatives. Today there more than 800 electric cooperatives that supply electricity to 56 percent of the country. Because grocery stores in low density areas are also providing a public service and often have no nearby competition, public ownership is a model that should be embraced and expanded.

So far, the municipal ownership model has not been tried as often as nonprofit or customer cooperative ownership. Brian Lang, the director of the National Campaign for Healthy Food Access at The Food Trust points out that because governments tend to have more resources and be more stable than nonprofits, a municipally owned grocery store may have more longevity than one operated by a community group. Furthermore, public grocery stores could allow communities of color to bypass the structural racism baked into private grocer investment decisions. If no private sector store will not open a store in a neighborhood, then voters can simply petition their government to open and operate the grocery store anyway.

Municipalities and tribes have already proven themselves capable of finding funding for grocery stores, but states or the federal government may want to support municipalities that are struggling financially, particularly in the wake of COVID-19. USDA already has a number of programs that can help supply financing for grocery stores, including Rural Development Financing programs. Stores in urban areas may be eligible for the Community Development Block Grant Program or the Community Economic Development Program. The Department of the Treasury also released a guide for financing healthy food options.

Using SNAP for delivery services

During the COVID-19 crisis, almost 80 percent of U.S. Americans bought groceries online, which was nearly double the rate of pre-pandemic online grocery shopping. As online shopping has become an increasingly popular way to acquire groceries, USDA has begun looking at ways to deliver food to SNAP recipients. The 2014 Farm Bill required USDA to explore options for using SNAP benefits on online deliveries, and in February 21, 2017, USDA announced it was creating a pilot program. In New York state, SNAP beneficiaries were able to order groceries from two major retailers (Amazon and Wal-Mart) and a regional grocery cooperative (ShopRite). SNAP participants were able to use their benefits on groceries but were not able to use benefits to pay for service or delivery charges.

Though USDA did not mention food deserts in its press releases regarding the program, the implications seems obvious. If low-income households without access to a car can get their groceries delivered, there would be less need to subsidize grocers to open new stores in food deserts. Grocery delivery services can also help elderly and disabled people or people without cars regardless of how many miles away their nearest grocery store may be, especially as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to make in-person shopping unsafe.

For advocates of small business development, Amazon and Wal-Mart may not be ideal partners for grocery delivery, but the program can be expanded to local grocers that offer delivery service. Improving food access is supposed to help solve nutritional inequality, which is a separate question from corporate consolidation. Additionally, there are already existing federal programs to support local economic development, which can always be strengthened.

Conclusion

The problem of food deserts has been largely misunderstood by policy makers. The problems associated with nutritional inequality are the result of poverty, not lack of proximity to grocery stores. The solution to poverty is to give poor people more money, which they can then spend on food. The United States already has a system in place for this called SNAP that should be expanded to provide benefits in line with the amount of money it takes to eat healthfully. In areas where there are no grocery stores and residents want one, publicly owned grocery stores offer advantages that other models do not. Governments can also look to partner with grocers that offer delivery service or expand upon existing tribal models that directly deliver food to impoverished communities.

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Rethinking the Problem of Food Deserts

Written by Kendall Dix

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