The Problem With Blaming Food Deserts

As far as analogies go, the food desert is a pretty effective one. You can almost imagine yourself out in the middle of nowhere, not a banana or egg for miles. It’s not a pleasant thought, especially if you like bananas and eggs. But really, everybody’s gotta eat, and without food nearby, eating is not easy. Because this analogy works so well, it’s very well used – by food activists, public health officials and countless researchers. But like many analogies, it doesn’t really capture the whole picture.

“A lot of the work on food deserts has been people rather unscientifically pointing to urban areas and saying, ‘oh, there’s no grocery stores there’ and that was sort of the end of it,” says Laura Leete. She’s an associate professor of public policy at the University of Oregon, and co-author of a recent paper looking at how food deserts are measured in different cities. What she and her co-authors found is that there’s not a lot of consistency in these measurements across cities. But in looking at the different ways food deserts are measured, it became clear that the context of communities had an important impact on which neighborhoods had low access to food. And, contrary to the easy analogy of the food desert, the people with low access to food in many cities aren’t all living in the same neighborhood.