Leftist Food Writer Says Food Deserts Are "A Flawed Conceit"

Tracie McMillan, the author of The American Way of Eating and a significant voice in the "food justice" movement, does a surprisingly nice job of taking apart the urban myth of food deserts in a new Slate article.

McMillan's work focuses on the intersection of food and economic class, and her latest book stirred up a lot of discussion when it was released earlier this year, including a lengthy response by Rush Limbaugh. 

In her new article, McMillan writes that the debate about Americans' dietary problems is fought from two sides. One side focuses on "individual preferences, which are seen solely as a product of a person and her culture."

"Then," she writes, "a second, and no more perfect, strategy for changing America’s food and diet emerged: treating it as a structural problem. In the last decade, concern over food deserts—neighborhoods with insufficient grocery stores, and thus insufficient supplies of healthy food—has boomed. The food desert analysis holds that access to a supermarket is a key part of making sure Americans eat healthier meals. It’s an approach that is arguably more sympathetic to the poor, but can also imply that people are solely products of systems, rather than agents of free will."

Building more grocery stores in supposedly underserved areas (the so-called 'food deserts') was a key part of First Lady Michelle Obama's anti-obesity program, but the theory took a serious hit when researchers found that less affluent areas had as many or more grocery stores than more affluent ones.
McMillan's article continues: "Food deserts are—and have always been—a flawed conceit," because not all grocery stores are created equal in terms of quantity and quality of fresh healthy foods, and also because the build-more-supermarkets approach overlooks the fact that many smaller vendors and farmers' markets also sell produce.

In other words, the inner-city obesity problem can't be simply be chalked up to "food access," "the food system," and class/income status.

"How do we fix the American food system? The answer is going to include both individual changes and structural ones," McMillan writes. I find her talk of fixing the food system to be eerily vague, and I wonder why her discussion of race and class in this article doesn't mention the record number of Americans on food stamps, but I give her credit for acknowledging the validity of conservative criticisms of food-desert policy.