In response to the recent in kind grant from IBM given to the city, the Birmingham News has created a series on food deserts. In many ways, this looks to be a great series, focusing on voices from the community and from those experiencing hunger. I commend and support this effort to catalog how it feels to be hungry. This is important work. However, I believe there are serious problems with the concept of food deserts that need to be addressed. Some of these problems stem from some conceptual looseness and maybe a bit of laziness in the methodological arena. Other problems are more nefarious.
First, hunger and food insecurity are economic problems and not geographic ones. The editorial board of the Birmingham News seems to understand this and has made it a point to focus on poverty. However, focusing solely on geographic factors would not solve the problem. Low-income people could get to the store, but can't buy high quality groceries. Essentially, the idea of food deserts assumes that proximity to a grocery store is the primary determinant of hunger and obesity. This is clearly untrue.
Second, and more nefarious, food deserts, when used as a planning tool either by government or non-profits, is a form of neoliberal governance. Neoliberal governance is the use of market-based tools to shape the behavior of target populations. I suspect that one of the main conclusions of the IBM consulting will be to use economic incentives to attract grocery stores and to promote farmer's markets and community gardens in areas deemed food deserts, most of which are low income. This is an attempt to change the behavior of the residents in a way that will reduce hunger, but importantly prevent obesity, which have been connected in much of the literature. This is not just an attempt to promote access, but the influence target populations to purchase the right food, which usually means fruits and vegetables. What this means is that the food behaviors of those living in food deserts, low income target populations, have been deemed aberrant, and that it is basically a matter of individual choice as to whether target populations will become less hungry and less obese. In essence, a food desert is a constructed space of aberrant behavior that needs to be repaired through market processes. I ask you, do we really have any business telling poor folks how and what to eat? For more on these click here.
Finally, food deserts depoliticize problems in low income communities rendering them legible to technical, apolitical solutions. Conditions in food desert communities are not natural, but the result of years of racial and economic segregation. Food deserts have been redlined by supermarkets because the populations of those areas are not wealthy enough to produce a profit. Supermarkets in those areas often charge more for the same product than in wealthy neighborhoods. Instead of talking about access sans income increases, we need to be talking about the deeply rooted and long-standing processes of racial and economic segregation that created these conditions in the first place.
I want to suggest that community development through an agricultural economy is an alternative to the food desert concept. What food desert communities need is not more grocery stores or farmer's markets or community gardens. What they need is more money, plain and simple. By utilizing technologies like aquaponics, an agricultural economy can be built in low income areas. Aquaponics is highly productive, producing approximately 140,000 heads of lettuce and 12,000 pounds of whole fish a year on about a quarter acre. Combine this with a cooperative form of firm organization, and community members can use neoliberalism to their advantage instead of detriment. Increased incomes make neighborhoods more attractive to grocery stores that are selling the food produced in the neighborhood. It's a virtuous cycle.
I hope that those considering solutions to food deserts consider thinking about it in a different way and consider working from the bottom up instead of the top down.
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