New York City officials have taken unprecedented steps in the past few years to evict the junk and install healthy food in areas referred to as food deserts. The latest initiative is the Food Retail Expansion to Support Health (FRESH) program, which passed one bureaucratic hurdle on Wednesday, September 23, when the City Planning Commission gave its unanimous approval. This program, along with efforts to bring farmers markets and fruit stands to areas designated as lacking better options, should be applauded.
Yet the work cannot end there. The effort to lure supermarkets to under-served areas with tax and zoning incentives reflects the city's general categorization of food deserts as supply-side economic problems. The USDA, which recently published a report on the causes of food insecurity and the links to diet, health and socio-economics, challenges that view, suggesting that the problem is more deeply-rooted. Simply placing fresh options in a food desert, in other words, may not alleviate the pressures to follow unhealthy lifestyles.
The new Department of Agriculture report revises the conventional modes of measuring the grocery gap, adding a census approach to the geographic analysis, which tended to skew results by assuming that people in a given area acted uniformly based on average socioeconomic and demographic data. The report shows some rather surprising things:
• Ethnic minorities (defined loosely as “non-whites”) live generally closer to supermarkets than whites, though minorities are also less likely to have a car.
• In terms of sheer distance to supermarkets, a low-income family is better off living in a low-income area than not; in general, wealthier folks live further from supermarkets than low-income individuals, suggesting that the food desert phenomenon is as much a matter of too-few-options in poorer urban areas as a matter of sprawling growth patterns that promote big-box, auto-intensive retail.
• The data bear out the fact that poorer people spend longer getting to supermarkets than wealthier people. For poorer people living further than 1 mile from a supermarket, they face the highest travel times of almost any other group.
• According to the report, some people living far from supermarkets have jobs located closer to supermarkets and many of them buy food directly after work, which means that calculating food sources near homes may not be the best measure of food desertedness.
So, clearly the picture is a lot messier than the image of a food desert suggests. (Incidentally, the USDA report suggests substituting the term "food swamp.") In assessing access to food, studies need a basis for contrasting low and high access areas--high access means there's a supermarket near. But economics aside, for many people, supermarket shopping may not be the ideal way to shop for food. Some may prefer patronizing specialty shops, where they may be familiar with the owners and where they may socialize with neighbors. Others may not have the space or resources for bulk-food shopping. As the USDA report does show, supermarkets feature lower prices per unit as well as greater variety. Still, that does not mean that anyone who does not (or cannot) shop at a supermarket is necessarily at a disadvantage.
In short, the designation of "food desert" is too impersonal to account for the many choices that factor into a person’s shopping and eating habits. Yes, the country’s eating is out of wack, but the problem is not simply a matter of supply and demand (or irrigation and seeding, to extend the analogy). The demand for good food begins when life begins—although the meaning of healthy varies wildly, it's dishonest and absurd to argue that only certain people demand healthy food because of privilege or culture.
Food choice--the keystone in the food desert conundrum--becomes distorted by warped economics (when a $0.75 can of soda seems like a better deal than a $0.35 banana on the street), subversive advertising (where junk foods line the school halls) and bankrupt cultural values (when take-out is the norm, and cooking an anachronism, in the midst of economic recession and rising obesity rates). Supply is part of it, but so long as processed-foods dominate the demands of a supposedly-free market, initiatives like FRESH will stumble out of the block.
G. Salvage,
ReplyDeleteI like this. Also, if a supermarket opens in a food desert area, like East Harlem, are there any clauses that insist that it market and cater to the local residents? If a Whole Foods opened up, for example, would it be patronized by low-income families who need access to healthy food, or would people flock there from further away, like from the Upper East Side?
That's a great questions--in other words, is FRESH setting the stage for deeper inroads of gentrification?
ReplyDeletei think the answer partly depends on what you think are the causes of gentrification (i.e. whether amenities can drive a community's socioeconomic composition).
the proposal does not include language about catering to local residents, but it does note that supermarkets are great selling points for real estate. one might infer that this is an explicit, if unintended, reference to gentrification.
if you're right, and supermarkets are really the first movements in a massive relocation or poorer residents, it should be evidence enough that problems of food access are as much about the culture of food as about geography.