Groce’d Out

Why do so many Americans have to go so far to get to the nearest grocery store? The problem is especially bad in rural America. “Tens of millions of Americans live in low-income communities with no easy access to fresh groceries, and the general consensus is that these places just don’t have what it takes to attract and sustain a supermarket. They’re either too poor or too sparsely populated to generate sufficient spending on groceries, or they can’t overcome a racist pattern of corporate redlining.” But it turns out that, like many problems, food deserts are the result of a policy decisions. In fact, the phrase Food Desert didn’t even show up until the mid-nineties, shortly after the widespread emergence of the reality it describes. Stacy Mitchell in The Atlantic (Gift Article) on The Great Grocery Squeeze. “Food deserts are not an inevitable consequence of poverty or low population density, and they didn’t materialize around the country for no reason. Something happened. That something was a specific federal policy change in the 1980s. It was supposed to reward the biggest retail chains for their efficiency. Instead, it devastated poor and rural communities by pushing out grocery stores and inflating the cost of food. Food deserts will not go away until that mistake is reversed.”