A food desert is a neighborhood devoid of sources of healthy food. A food swamp is a neighborhood overrun by sources of unhealthy food. These two terms have emerged in the last decade in conjunction with the concept of food insecurity: the inability of people to get enough to eat. The USDA, for example, estimates that one in seven people experience food insecurity for short periods during each year. The question that researchers, regulators, and activists have been asking is what can be done about food insecurity, food deserts, and food swamps.
It should not surprise you to learn that this is focused on impoverished neighborhoods in which food is only one of many challenges. One of the dominant ideas in the public health literature is that food insecurity can be alleviated by encouraging supermarkets to locate in underserved communities. In fact, a lack of supermarkets is used to identify a food desert. A more recent strategy calls for the reduction of fast food restaurants—intended to clear food swamps.
A study in a recent issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine suggests that clearing food swamps is more effective than populating food deserts. The researchers used data from an ongoing health study to examine the relationship between what people ate and the accessibility of various food outlets. What these people ate was measure by how frequently they ate fast food and the quality of their diet based on USDA standards. Accessibility was measured by the density of fast food stores, grocery stores, and supermarkets in relation to each person’s home address.
What the researchers found was that proximity to grocery stores and supermarkets had no effect on the quality of a person’s diet. On the other hand, proximity to fast food stores increased a person’s consumption of fast food—but only for some people: principally, men with low incomes.
The researchers comment that, gee, it looks like this problem is more complicated than we thought. We guess it’s not going to be solved by cajoling or bribing a bunch of supermarkets to move in or by legislating away fast food joints.
As often happens, these well-meaning people are not asking the right question, although they’re dancing around it. They’re asking, “What can we do to manipulate these people’s environment so they’ll eat right?”
An obvious answer is better and more stable income, but that’s not their job. Another obvious answer is bulldoze the fast food stores and stock the groceries and supermarkets exclusively with healthy food. That, of course, is a problem because what counts as “healthy food” is the official one that many people think is wrong. Most importantly, these interventions impose the standard on these people.
Acknowledging a weak relationship between access to food sources by itself and what people eat leads to the question of what else affects people’s eating. In my opinion, there are four things. The four are access (how easy is it to get to good food), income and its stability (for each person and for his or her community generally), what counts as normal or good food (again specific to the person and community), and the specific food problems each person needs to solve. This last one is impossible to summarize, precisely because it is specific to the person and his or her food web. It might be who she’s responsible for feeding or how long it takes for her to get to work or the other challenges she must solve.
I want to emphasize that each of these four issues is local—specific to the material and cultural conditions of a specific food web. I want to draw your attention to the people in each food web and the vast body of knowledge they possess about that web and the food deserts and food swamps they inhabit. That knowledge is going to waste. So the question researchers should be asking is “How can people’s local knowledge be put to use in getting what they regard as better food?”
Researchers tend not to ask that kind of question. They tend to be concerned with interventions on behalf of the disadvantaged. However, there are people who do ask those questions, who are about supporting people in getting better food, and who are not about interventions but about power: the ability to get what you need. Unlike researchers, who begin with a conception of healthy food and “diet behaviors,” these folks start with the idea that people actually know something about what’s good for them and something about what they need to do to get it.
I will mention one organization among many: the Community Food Security Coalition. As its name suggests, it works with communities to overcome the problems created by food deserts and food swamps.
The recent book Food Justice advocates an approach to food deserts and food swamps that isn’t about interventions but is instead about the right to good food. In other words, it approaches the problem of better food not with the manipulation of a community’s food web but with enabling people to exercise their right to good food.
The food justice movement has its roots in the work of redressing wrongs committed against people whose right to good food has been denied. The interesting thing is that everyone has that right. Everyone has the right to good food. We all, one way or another, live in a food desert or food swamp. We deserve better. We have the right.
