Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Erica Zurawski, University of California Santa Cruz

; ,

Description:

The concept of a “food desert” remains a dominant descriptor of food inequity in public policy, popular discourse, public health analyses, and community development studies despite extensive critiques from activists and scholars. On the one hand, the food desert concept emerged as an important intervention away from the trend of individualizing blame for poor health outcomes (Alkon et al. 2013) and the use of maps and spatial analyses of food access and food environments has been a useful tool for policy initiatives and research (Shannon et al. 2021). On the other hand, critical scholarship elucidates how the food desert concept as conceptualized as limited access to grocery stores and supermarkets actually oversimplifies the complex problem of food equity to supply-side deficiencies (Alkon et al. 2013; Short et al. 2007) which tends to ignore the importance of non-corporate food retail spaces like bodegas or backyard gardens (Short et al. 2007). This oversimplification risks over-prioritizing supply-side capitalist development projects (Rosenberg and Cohen 2018) that invite top-down educational, technocratic, and aid-based solutions from outside actors and especially from predominantly white, non-residents (Figueroa 2015; Guthman 2008a; b; Raja et al. 2008; Shannon 2014; Short et al. 2007; Taylor and Ard 2015). More recent scholarship notes how this also invites gentrification (green and otherwise) and the displacement of already-existing food geographies to prioritize white, middle class food solutions (Alkon et al. 2020; McClintock 2014; Reese 2019; Shannon 2014; Short et al. 2007).

This session takes this tension head on to foster interdisciplinary dialogues and rigorous conversation about how to move beyond the hegemony of the food desert concept, following numerous calls from the Movement for Black Lives, community activsists, and critical scholarship for more accurate and robust ways of conceptualizing food inequity, for example through food apartheid (Brones 2018; Reese 2019). This is incredibly important given the ‘whitened cultural histories’ of alternative food movements (Guthman 2008a) to explain access in a very particular way that does not attend to racialized environments subjected to uneven economic development (Block et al. 2004). How do we carefully converse across critical geographies and geospatial sciences to move beyond the food desert concept? How do we collectively refuse to reproduce the particular stigmatizing, paternalizing, racist and colonial ontologies and imaginaries around food access as we move beyond the food desert concept?


References
Alkon, Alison Hope, Daniel Block, Kelly Moore, Catherine Gillis, Nicole DiNuccio, and Noel Chavez. 2013. “Foodways of the Urban Poor.” Geoforum 48:126–35.

Alkon, Alison Hope, Yuki Kato, and Joshua Sbicca. 2020. A Recipe for Gentrification: Food, Power, and Resistance in the City. New York, NY: NYU Press.

Block, Jason P., Richard A. Scribner, and Karen B. DeSalvo. 2004. “Fast Food, Race/Ethnicity, and Income: A Geographic Analysis.” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 27(3):211–17.

Brones, Anna. 2018. “Karen Washington: It’s Not a Food Desert, It’s Food Apartheid.” Guernica. (https://www.guernicamag.com/karen-washington-its-not-a-food-desert-its-food-apartheid/).

Figueroa, Meleiza. 2015. “Food Sovereignty in Everyday Life: Toward a People-Centered Approach to Food Systems.” Globalizations 12(4):498–512.

Guthman, Julie. 2008a. “Bringing Good Food to Others: Investigating the Subjects of Alternative Food Practice.” Cultural Geographies 15(4):431–47.
Guthman, Julie. 2008b. “‘If They Only Knew’: Color Blindness and Universalism in California Alternative Food Institutions.” The Professional Geographer 60(3):387–97.
McClintock, Nathan. 2014. “Radical, Reformist, and Garden-Variety Neoliberal: Coming to Terms with Urban Agriculture’s Contradictions.” Local Environment 19(2):147–71.

Raja, Samina, Changxing Ma, and Pavan Yadav. 2008. “Beyond Food Deserts: Measuring and Mapping Racial Disparities in Neighborhood Food Environments.” Journal of Planning Education and Research 27(4):469–82.

Reese, Ashanté M. 2019. Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Rosenberg, Nathan A., and Nevin Cohen. 2018. “Let Them Eat Kale: The Misplaced Narrative of Food Access.” Fordham Urban Law Journal 45(4):31.

Shannon, Jerry. 2014. “Food Deserts: Governing Obesity in the Neoliberal City.” Progress in Human Geography 38(2):248–66.

Shannon, Jerry, Ashantè M. Reese, Debarchana Ghosh, Michael J. Widener, and Daniel R. Block. 2021. “More Than Mapping: Improving Methods for Studying the Geographies of Food Access.” American Journal of Public Health 111(8):1418–22.

Short, Anne, Julie Guthman, and Samuel Raskin. 2007. “Food Deserts, Oases, or Mirages?: Small Markets and Community Food Security in the San Francisco Bay Area.” Journal of Planning Education and Research 26(3):352–64.

Taylor, Dorceta E., and Kerry J. Ard. 2015. “Research Article: Food Availability and the Food Desert Frame in Detroit: An Overview of the City’s Food System.” Environmental Practice 17(2):102–33.

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda