We're all familiar with food deserts.  Here is the official USDA definition of a food desert:  places where one-third of the population lives at least one mile away from the closest supermarket in urban areas and at least ten miles away in rural areas.

             A New York University study found that food buying preference is more significant than availability.  In other words, they looked at places where supermarkets entered food deserts and found only a tiny shift (9 percent) in nutritional inequality.  The other 91 percent of nutritional inequality is based on buying demand, or shopper preference.

             The point is that availability is not the weak link; it's choice.  What guides choice?  What makes a person buy one thing and not another?  Their background, their paradigm, their knowledge. 

             The researchers even found that healthier options were often priced less than unhealthy ones (whole grains versus Cheerios, for example) and yet in these food deserts, when presented these options, people purchased the more expensive unhealthy options.  Even people in poverty.

             Generally, the emotional and policy impetus for solving the food desert problem is to make sure these areas have access to better food.  But access doesn't guarantee sales or use.  You can't solve prejudice with access.  Many of us would like to think that if we just went into food deserts with better food options, folks would warm to the availability.  But that is not the case.

             A study like this forces us to go beyond do-goodism and feel-goodism in public policy and face some harsh realities.  Entrenched behavior and worldview can't be changed with a program, agency, or even options.  It brings up the question:  How do you help someone?  Too much of our help is inappropriate.  Too much of our help doesn't speak to the weak link; it's too often some sort of penance for a guilt we shouldn't bear.

             The point is this.  For the most part, food deserts are simply one manifestation of an entirely dysfunctional social, intellectual, economic context.  Fixing it requires empowerment and enablement within the heart and soul of individuals in that community.  To be sure, this can be catalyzed by out-of-community ministry, but it means people must feel safe, must feel like there is economic freedom and opportunity, and that there is hope for something better.  A supermarket does not create that.  And transfer payments do not create that.  And free this and that do not create that.

             The yearning to get out of this death spiral is alive and well in many areas.  Yet the National Education Association tries to torpedo every charter school option that is in many ways the ultimate self-help way out of this morass for the next generation.  To change a food desert, you have to change the mind, and the mind must be fed with brain food (meat and animal proteins) and intellectual stimulation that is offered best in non-institutional and alternative learning environments.

             People trapped in food deserts need freedom to get out.  Bringing them an apple won't change their situation.  Letting them grow an apple will.  We've practiced dependency culture for too long; it's time to try responsibility culture.  According to the USDA definition, my community is a food desert.  It's rich land, sparsely populated, but entirely dependent on Wal-Mart and Costco.  That's a choice exercised by a worldview that thrives on helplessness and dysfunction.  Until we deal with that, don't point a judgmental, elitist finger at me for not giving food to food deserts. 

             If you were king for a day, what one policy would you implement to eliminate food deserts?

Image Credit : Jurgen Mantgze