From Food Deserts to Food Apartheid

Abstract

In 2012, First Lady Michelle Obama launched the “Let’s Move” campaign to improve food access and combat childhood obesity noting in a speech that 23.5 million Americans lived in food deserts (Obama White House 2010). “Our goal” Mrs. Obama said, “is to eliminate food deserts in America completely in seven years.” The “Let’s Move” campaign’s goal has yet to be reached even 14 years after Michelle Obama set out to solve the problem. It is not for wont of trying; Mrs. Obama continues to work towards healthier food for children, activists continue their work in food pantries, farms, and community gardens across the country, and students sit in our classrooms each semester hoping to learn how to address food insecurity. Access to healthy food is a much more complicated issue to solve than it was first assumed to be by everyone involved – Mrs. Obama, USDA officials, and many of us relatively privileged researchers. In this chapter, we suggest that the solution to the food inequality question may have less to do with where people acquire food, and more with how the problem of food access is framed in the first place. The paper uses the lens of food apartheid to reveal several processes of uneven, racialized capitalist and colonial development through which unequal food access is created and sustained. Our list is not comprehensive so we invite you to consider other possible forms of exclusion that materialize in communities that experience food apartheid.