July 21, 2011

Is That A Real "Food Desert" Or A Mirage?


What’s a “food desert”? It’s not a barren place without vegetation; that would be an actual buzzards-and-cactus desert. It’s an ominous term for an urban area so deep, deep in the heart of the inner city that it’s devoid of convenient sources of healthy food. Only greasy-spoon joints, fast-food chains, and quickie-marts can be found in these wastelands. Or at least that’s how First Lady Michelle Obama makes it sound. The fact that Walmart and other chain stores are joining in her efforts to help the food deserts bloom indicates that there’s something to this; these companies must think that there are markets to tap in these areas (and let's remember that there have been cases where Walmart has been blocked from building stores in urban areas).
But wait, you might be thinking, aren’t farmers’ markets all the rage in many big urban areas? Are there really no fruit stands or community gardens downtown? Ah, but you see, “the USDA bureaucracy defines ‘access to fresh food’ as access to a large supermarket with more than $2 million in annual sales,” writes Manhattan Institute senior fellow Dr. David Gratzer in the Washington Examiner. Shockingly, according to Gratzer, this government-declared crisis is rather overblown.


To the extent that food deserts really are a problem, the contention that government needs to make healthy food convenient for you is debatable, to say the least. Personal health is either a priority or not, whether it is convenient or not. Presumably other measures need to taken for those of us who live in food non-deserts yet are still overweight. It could be argued that car-owning suburbanites are victims of their easy access to drive-thrus. Just don’t argue that personal responsibility has anything to do with these matters: that would be very upsetting to the big-government types who are working so hard to organize your life for you.


7/22 Update: It turns out the First Lady misstated the number of Americans living in food deserts by about, oh, 10 million in her speech Wednesday. The official USDA estimate is 13.5 million.

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