Battling food deserts is an invented solution to a more complicated problem

How fun it must be to spend other people’s hard-earned money. That’s the position government leaders find themselves in day in and day out as they make decisions about what to spend our tax dollars on. They have billions to indulge the most fanciful items on their policy wish lists. 

Sometimes they splurge hundreds of millions on a 911 system that doesn’t work at all or billions on a fancy new high-speed rail to nowhere – that’s billions of dollars, every one of which you had to sacrifice your time, body, and mind to stock aisle 4, carry packs of shingles up a ladder, or contemplate violence as an angry customer waterboards you for doing exactly what the clueless higher ups told you to do. 

These fiscal decisions don’t appear to weigh much on our prudent stewards of public funds – they come to these decisions easily and if they turn out to be wasteful and pointless, they carry on to the next wasteful and pointless decision without so much as an apology. No pause to consider the implications or the sweat it took to generate the funds. 

Most often though, they spend a couple million here and a few million there. For example, last month, “State and local leaders celebrate[d] the grand opening of a new neighborhood grocery store in Lynwood, made possible by $5.1 million in state funding to clean up a long-vacant former gas station. The store now provides fresh food for a community once designated a food desert.”

Since 2024, LA County’s Food Equity Fund has handed out $20 million to nonprofits, in part, to establish “new markets in food deserts” including a farmer’s market on wheels. And just last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom had to veto Senate Bill 1419, which was approved by the Legislature and meant to expand grants to open grocery stores in food deserts. 

“Over the past decade, federal and local governments in the United States have spent hundreds of millions of dollars encouraging grocery stores to open in food deserts,” according to research from NYU.

The FDA defines a “food desert” as a census tract of land with a “poverty rate of 20 percent or greater, or a median family income at or below 80 percent of the statewide or metropolitan area median family income” and “at least 500 persons and/or at least 33 percent of the population lives more than 1 mile from a supermarket or large grocery store.” In simpler terms, a poor area that isn’t absolutely littered with grocery stores. 

The concept of food deserts has been quite popular for the past few decades as a contributing factor to the health disparity between the poor and the wealthy. As the thought goes, poor people have less access to healthy food, therefore, they turn to unhealthy fast-food, which contributes to their poor health outcomes. By funding programs that provide healthier options, we can improve the health of many. 

Such thoughts are behind New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s plan to build government-run grocery stores – he wants to provide cheap, healthy food to people living in the food deserts of New York City. 

Does it strike anyone else as immediately ridiculous to think that there is a problem to be remediated because not everyone lives within half a mile of a grocery store? Apparently, one mile is such an arduous and taxing journey that poor people are forced to feed their children poison from McDonald’s. That Vons may as well be a thousand miles away, there is simply no way to traverse such distances without being a regular at the Bohemian Grove. 

Forget the fact that there wouldn’t be enough demand to keep that many grocery stores open, everyone in LA County who has the money to buy fast-food also has access to fresh fruits and vegetables, they simply choose the junk food. According to a survey funded by the USDA, the average SNAP recipient lives 1.96 miles from a supermarket but typically travels 3.15 miles to their preferred grocery store – even though they are financially struggling, they choose to travel farther in order to shop at a grocery store they like better, which doesn’t seem like the behavior of individuals whose shopping tendencies are limited by distance.

Indeed, research published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics looked at a thousand supermarkets opened in food deserts across the U.S. and examined the grocery purchases of 10,000 households within those neighborhoods. They found that those households shopped at the new supermarkets but did not switch to purchasing healthy food – their junk food was just a bit more convenient to buy. 

Low-income communities are undoubtedly suffering from poor health outcomes in large part because of their nutrition. If government officials wish to help, a good starting point would be to acknowledge that the notion of food deserts is not of much use and simply planting new grocery stores does nothing but waste money. 

Early childhood nutrition education and family outreach has an appreciable but modest effect, which makes it at the very least more worthwhile than increasing the number of grocery stores. Ultimately, bad nutrition is one of the many symptoms of poverty, which only changes as people lift themselves out of poverty of wallet and education.

Rafael Perez is a columnist for the Southern California News Group. He is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Rochester. You can reach him at rafaelperezocregister@gmail.com.