Turning Point USA

The term “food desert” refers to an area that typically has lower access to grocery stores or healthy food. The popular narrative is that food deserts are a result of racism, an attempt to segregate the races — unfortunately, there isn’t much truth to the claim. According to Food is Power, food deserts are predominantly found present in low-income, urban areas, or rural areas.

A quick Google search on the topic will give off the impression that food deserts “are the result of systematic racism and oppression in the form of zoning codes, lending practices, and other discriminatory policies rooted in white supremacy,” according to NRDC — the first article that appears on the topic.

However, if there is any natural separation is occurring, it’s more so on the basis of class rather than race. But in reality, neither race nor income have a significant impact on eating habits.

Exposing low-income households to the same products and prices as those experienced by high-income households reduces nutritional inequality by only 9 percent while the remaining 91 percent of the nutrition gap is driven by difference in what shoppers prefer to buy, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, “The Geography of Poverty and Nutrition: Food Deserts and Food Choices Across the United States,” by Chicago Booth Professor of Marketing Jean-Pierre Dubé,  New York University’s Hung Allcott and Stanford University’s Rebecca Diamond.

University of Chicago

The research paper conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded that different income classes typically gravitate towards certain food categories due to a difference in nutritional education.

Instead of blaming poor city zoning or racism, the results of the study referenced above “may suggest that policies aimed at nutrition education may be more effective at closing the nutrition gap than subsidies and grants meant to encourage building more supermarkets and farmers markets in food deserts.”

This reveals one problem occurring in low-income areas, but in my opinion there could be another significantly contributing factor: crime.

I’ll use California as an example. California crime has skyrocketed in the past few years, so much that the chances of being the victim of a violent crime in the state are 1 in 47. The chances are higher in Los Angeles, where the stats are 1 in 44 people. The city has a serious homeless crisis, violent protests and riots every few months, and COVID-19 restrictions that closed small businesses down for nearly two years — an unrecoverable amount of time for a local grocer. Stores downtown are vandalized frequently due to the incremental decriminalization of theft, and still people are shocked when businesses close down, and no longer want to be located in high crime areas.

There are a lot of reasons that lower income individuals and families do not seek out similar diets to those making more money — racism is not one of them. People in society are frequently looking for a scapegoat, something or someone to criticize for every hardship, when in reality, it is typically their own life choices that are to blame.