<
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/12/food-deserts-robinson-patman/680765/?gift=QFVDFKVE3HQ31cU_KmT1dE6iUvq0qv3pUv2sTwMbqdQ>
"The concept of the
food desert has been around long enough that it feels
almost like a fact of nature. Tens of millions of Americans live in low-income
communities with no easy access to fresh groceries, and the general consensus
is that these places just don’t have what it takes to attract and sustain a
supermarket. They’re either too poor or too sparsely populated to generate
sufficient spending on groceries, or they can’t overcome a racist pattern of
corporate redlining.
But these explanations fail to contend with a key fact: Although poverty and
ruralness have been with us forever, food deserts arrived only around the late
1980s. Prior to that, small towns and poor neighborhoods could generally count
on having a grocery store, perhaps even several. (The term
food desert was
coined in 1995 by a task force studying what was then a relatively new
phenomenon.)
The high-poverty, majority-Black Deanwood neighborhood of Washington, D.C., is
typical of the trend. In the 1960s, the area had more than half a dozen grocery
stores, according to a study by the anthropologist Ashanté Reese. These
included a branch of the local District Grocery Stores co-op, a Safeway
supermarket, and independent Black-owned businesses such as Tip Top Grocery on
Sheriff Road. By the 1990s, however, the number of grocery stores in Deanwood
had dwindled to just two, and today the neighborhood has none.
A similar story played out across rural America, following the same timeline.
Up until the 1980s, almost every small town in North Dakota had a grocery
store. Many, in fact, had two or more competing supermarkets. Now nearly half
of North Dakota’s rural residents live in a food desert. (The USDA defines a
food desert as a low-income census tract where the nearest grocery store is
more than 10 miles away in a rural area or more than one mile away in a city.)
A slew of state and federal programs have tried to address food deserts by
providing tax breaks and other subsidies to lure supermarkets to underserved
communities. These efforts have failed. More food deserts exist now than in
2010, in the depths of the Great Recession. That’s because the proposed
solutions misunderstand the origins of the problem.
Food deserts are not an inevitable consequence of poverty or low population
density, and they didn’t materialize around the country for no reason.
Something happened. That something was a specific federal policy change in the
1980s. It was supposed to reward the biggest retail chains for their
efficiency. Instead, it devastated poor and rural communities by pushing out
grocery stores and inflating the cost of food. Food deserts will not go away
until that mistake is reversed."
Via
Garbage Day: Finding a Chalamesque boyfriend
https://www.garbageday.email/p/finding-a-chalamesque-boyfriend
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
