THE FOOD DESERT PHENOMENON
Author of The Consuming Geographies of Food: Diet, Food Deserts and Obesity
The term food desert was first coined in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1996 to describe the absence of local retailers selling affordable healthy food in poverty-stricken neighborhoods.1 However, studies looking at the lack of physical access to local food retailing in English villages had been conducted by the Women’s Institute as early as the 1970s. At that time, widows without cars had become isolated; local food stores were closing down, and a decline in bus services made transportation almost impossible without a car. By 2000, food deserts had been discovered in several British cities, including Coventry, where they were described as “areas where cheap nutritious food is virtually unobtainable. Car-less residents . . . depend on the corner shop where prices are high and fresh produce is poor or non-existent.” Worse, many residents were becoming reliant on nutritionally deficient takeout restaurants.
Several technological, socioeconomic and political processes came together to create the food desert phenomenon. For one thing, personal transport shifted to cars, leaving behind those unable to drive. At the same time, food retailing was being transformed by economies of scale, with supermarkets and their cheaper prices causing many small independent shops to close. A local food store requires a customer pool of a few hundred people whereas a large superstore requires some 10,000 consumers. In the middle are typical UK discount stores, like Co-operative or Tesco Express, which require 2,000 or 3,000 customers. This means the opening of one supermarket can cause the closure of twenty local shops, denuding several square kilometers of all food retailing, with the exception of fast food.
Meanwhile, these developments were themselves products of a shift, in the late 1970s, away from Fordist accumulative capitalism toward a globalized neo-liberal model that greatly increased inequality within developed countries. This shift also precipitated a more vocational approach to education, as UK schools in the 1980s dropped cooking lessons in favor of science and mathematics. As a result, a whole generation grew up without culinary skills. The spread of microwave ovens and ready meals, which undermined local greengrocers and butchers, solidified an attitude of “food as fuel.”
There are three levels of (impeded) access that create food deserts: poor physical access to retailers; poor financial access as household food budgets shrink; and poor information access as the skills required to prepare a healthy meal from raw ingredients wither away. Other societal changes only exacerbate these trends. Social ties have weakened, reducing help for shoppers who might be elderly or infirm. Meanwhile, increased traffic and crime have closed many smaller shops and made others hard to reach. The arrival of the Internet and increasing time pressures at home have shifted preferences toward unhealthy, ready-to-eat meals while removing incentives to cook. The only thing we don’t demand from food is that it be healthful—for us or the environment.
The irony is nobody starves in a food desert; food is plentiful but not nutritious. Inhabitants overconsume calorific food but miss out on vitamins. Cheap, fatty, sugary food is cheaper than healthy food, a phenomenon called the “health premium.” This gap widened between 1989 and 2007 in Britain and is even larger in less affluent areas where a basket of healthy food costs 58 percent more than obesogenic cheap meats and sugary fare. As a Birmingham nutritionist recently told me, “Burgers are ridiculously cheap round here,” highlighting the lack of financial incentive to eat healthy. Any fresh produce stocked by independent shopkeepers in food desert areas is likely to spoil before it can be sold, eroding already-low profit levels. Such shops therefore tend to stock only “hard,” longer-lasting vegetables such as potatoes, carrots, and turnips. A councilor for Halton Moor, a lower-income part of Leeds, noted casually the area’s malnourished children. It was almost as if this was natural, that malnourishment was to be expected despite being within sight of the prosperous city center.
Meat is cheap because free-market production and trade doesn’t have to allow for externalities such as health or the environment. Just as Nauru islanders have a high obesity rate because they eat fatty “flap meat,” deprived consumers in European and U.S. food deserts are becoming obese in part due to mass-produced beef burgers and cheap sugary foodstuffs. The real retail price of sugar, £300 a kilo in the year 1400, fell to under £10 in the 1800s and is now below £1. We need to reconnect the poor with healthy inexpensive food, perhaps locally produced through projects such as urban farms, allotments, or a modern Dig for Victory program. Demand for fresh produce could be stimulated through healthy eating leaflets and cookery classes hosted at job and community centers in food desert areas.
The costs of such a food reconnection program would be more than recouped through a reduction in the costs of obesity-induced illnesses. The UK’s National Health Service spends some £10 billion annually on such illnesses, but the total cost to Britain is nearer £25 billion. The issue of course is time. Just as consumers in food deserts fuel up on cheap meat and sugar, giving little thought to future health consequences, so too are governments unwilling to spend money on initiatives that won’t pay dividends until the future. The pertinent question becomes how long can we afford not to preserve both our own health and that of the planet? What we do to tackle the food desert phenomenon is a kind of litmus test—and the future depends on how willing we are to act.