The Great Grocery Squeeze

[Passages]

How a federal policy change in the 1980s created the modern food desert

By Stacy Mitchell

December 1, 2024, 7 AM ET


The concept of the food desert has been around long enough that it feels almost like a fact of nature. 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 these explanations fail to contend with a key fact: Although poverty and ruralness have been with us forever, food deserts arrived only around the late 1980s. Prior to that, small towns and poor neighborhoods could generally count on having a grocery store, perhaps even several. (The term food desert was coined in 1995 by a task force studying what was then a relatively new phenomenon.)

The high-poverty, majority-Black Deanwood neighborhood of Washington, D.C., is typical of the trend. In the 1960s, the area had more than half a dozen grocery stores, according to a study by the anthropologist Ashanté Reese. These included a branch of the local District Grocery Stores co-op, a Safeway supermarket, and independent Black-owned businesses such as Tip Top Grocery on Sheriff Road. By the 1990s, however, the number of grocery stores in Deanwood had dwindled to just two, and today the neighborhood has none.

A similar story played out across rural America, following the same timeline. Up until the 1980s, almost every small town in North Dakota had a grocery store. Many, in fact, had two or more competing supermarkets. Now nearly half of North Dakota’s rural residents live in a food desert. (The USDA defines a food desert as a low-income census tract where the nearest grocery store is more than 10 miles away in a rural area or more than one mile away in a city.)
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/12/food-deserts-robinson-patman/680765/