Uneven Food Environments

The uneven development of food environments contributes directly to food access disparities. So called “food deserts”, focus on the lack of grocery stores in a given community. Yet such a binary logic of presence or absence fails to take into account the agency of vulnerable households and their complex food sourcing strategies including cultural and social practices that affect food consumption patterns. The food desert framework also tends to naturalize uneven access to food as an unfortunate yet natural side effect of market-based relationships, whose interventions tend to reproduce existing power relationships in the broader food system. Food justice activist Karen Washington redefines the problem as “food apartheid” instead, placing this phenomenon squarely within the development of the capitalist food system over time and the root causes of uneven access to food. 

Over the past 40 years the food system in the United States has segmented eaters along lines of disposable income. The overall price of food has fallen along with the relative value of wages, yet the industrial production systems processing and delivering this food have contributed to nutrient deficiencies and health problems especially among the poor. Rising rates of obesity, diabetes and hypertension are alarming and most policy interventions continue to seek to reform the consumptive habits and behaviors of individual consumers rather than address the food and economic policies that produce markets awash in low-cost unhealthy food options. The rise of alternative food movements including local, organic and fair-trade can be understood as consumer reactions to the industrial food system, and many eaters now engage with ethical supply chains as a form of resistance to the conventional food system. This struggle has redefined the politics of eating and is embodied within practices such as “voting with your fork” to enable sustainable food futures. Aptly summarizing this phenomenon, Food Justice scholar Julie Guthman describes a process whereby “the yuppification of food has developed simultaneously with ‘McDonaldization’, the proliferation of cheap, standardized and nutritionally debilitated food creating a bifurcation of sorts in contemporary foodways” 

Food charities are part of this unevenness as well, in fact the recovery and free distribution of unsold foods to feed the poor has been growing significantly over the past decade, and even faster since food banks served to mitigate the inefficiencies of a food system that produces both waste and want during the COVID-19 pandemic. While food access failure and hunger relief are not new, charitable food networks are now bearing a larger and larger responsibility for resolving food access crises and generating debate about their role in society. They are sites where wasted food is revalued through free volunteer labor, where corporate welfare becomes entangled with social welfare, but also sites that offer spaces of care, social support and potential to incubate alternative food futures where food is no longer thought of as a commodity to be bought and sold, but as a public good that should be accessed by all regardless of income. 

Text courtesy - WVU Food Justice Lab