Grocery Store Inequity

FOOD DESERTS ARE low-income areas in urban or rural locations whose populations lack easy access to fresh fruit, vegetables, and other whole foods, usually because of lack of easy access to supermarkets. In 2010, the USDA reported that 18 million Americans live in food deserts, meaning more than a mile from a supermarket in urban/suburban areas and more than 10 miles in rural areas.

While suburban shoppers have more choices than ever, urban and rural Americans often lack access to quality food choices.

Karen Gonzalez, a church and community engagement specialist in Baltimore, works with immigrant populations. “For our clients, the challenge is that they work a lot, often two jobs, so getting to the grocery store and then cooking is a challenge,” says Gonzalez. “The other issue is that there are only two grocery stores in that part of town, and one of them is in the gentrified district—a Whole Foods. So clients often end up in bodegas or convenience stores, which have limited options and are more expensive.”

Food deserts in rural regions naturally raise different problems than those in urban areas. It is unsurprising that supermarkets are farther from people’s homes, but it can be overlooked that some rural low-income people do not own or have direct access to cars.

“Driving down a two-lane highway in rural Nebraska last spring, I passed a Native American man riding an old bicycle toward the nearby Omaha Indian Reservation,” wrote Steph Larsen on Grist.org. “We were at least seven miles from the nearest town, and he had four grocery bags bulging with food slung over his handlebars as he worked to climb a hill. I’ll bet a week’s worth of groceries that he wasn’t biking for the exercise.”

In stark contrast to urban and rural low-income areas, the affluent town of West Hartford, Conn., has two Whole Foods stores within two miles of each other, along with various other supermarkets and specialty stores. The one store that did not survive for long in the West Hartford market was Walmart’s grocery store brand, Neighborhood Market. While the town’s mayor said he’d had doubts from the beginning that a Walmart would do well in the saturated and competitive West Hartford marketplace, a shopper from the adjacent and less affluent town of Bloomfield expressed disappointment about the closing because “cat food is 10 cents cheaper” and she could always find a “good deal.”

Areas like West Hartford have the most options for their residents. The large supermarket chains that favor the economic conditions and plentiful building space of the suburbs often neglect their urban neighbors.

The pride of Rochester

Wegmans, a grocery store chain founded in Rochester, N.Y., in 1916, has developed a cult following of shoppers who love its store brands, elaborate cafes, wine bars, and prepared meals. With 92 stores in six states, the store is among the largest privately held companies in the U.S., earning $8.3 billion in 2016. The Wegmans franchise has 17 stores in the Rochester area. However, only one store remains in the city of Rochester proper. The rest are located in suburbs adjacent to the city. The stores that are the pride of Rochester have not returned to the city neighborhoods that dearly missed them when they left.

A metro area of about 1 million people, Rochester has the segregation and wealth divide common in many mid-sized, Rust Belt cities. City dwellers have a history of flagship businesses leaving the city limits. Wegmans is no exception, having closed two urban locations in the 2000s. Rochester residents have often questioned CEO Danny Wegman about the lack of city locations. Wegman has responded by emphasizing the relative closeness of suburban stores to the city border (at least for those with cars), as well as highlighting the store’s commitment to hiring people from all backgrounds and providing college scholarships for employees.

A 2015 proposal for a new Wegmans in a gentrifying part of Brooklyn, N.Y., drew criticism from United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1500. They urged citizens to send a letter to local officials that stated: “Wegmans has repeatedly closed inner-city stores, has violated workplace safety [regulations], and has recently taken away health insurance for part-time employees.”

A store representative did not speak to the allegations that the chain had previously abandoned city neighborhoods. Danny Wegman did tell The New York Times that Wegmans’ first round of hiring will focus exclusively on residents from three nearby housing projects.

A multifaceted problem

The Flint, Mich. water crisis found its way into national headlines in 2015 when state cost-cutting measures led to dangerous water quality, including alarmingly high lead levels. After Flint made news for its water crisis, media outlets also began to report that the city has a shortage of major grocery stores. It is clear that Flint faces an “overall disinvestment in the community,” Richard Sadler, an assistant professor in Michigan State’s department of family medicine, told The Huffington Post.

More than 40 percent of Flint residents live beneath the poverty level. This makes it an unattractive market for grocery stores. Moreover, Flint’s health problems (and those of any low-income community) will not be solved by more supermarkets alone. On the PBS NewsHour, public health researcher Steven Cummins described a study he led that found that building more supermarkets in food deserts does not directly lead to better diets for residents, at least in the short term. Individual behavior changes (and the willingness to make room in tight budgets for more expensive fresh foods) are also factors. The study did find that new stores do provide a better perception of food choices.

For the people of Flint, whether a food desert technically exists or whether new stores spur immediate change in eating habits are unimportant distinctions. What is clear is that this community needs better access to both food and clean water, as well as deliverance from the margins on which their zip codes force them to reside.

Transportation and discrimination

While the one-mile radius without a supermarket that defines an urban food desert may seem very small, people living in food-desert areas often have less access to automobile transportation than do their suburban counterparts. This adds to the time and energy grocery shopping requires.

Many city dwellers must wait for a friend or relative to drive them to the supermarket. In other cases, people take public transportation to get to the store and call a cab to take the groceries home. While yellow cab drivers loading groceries into the trunk was a once frequent sight, new travel options such as Uber and Lyft provide a cheaper alternative. However, these services use private citizens driving personal vehicles, which means discrimination can be a problem.

Whether or not to pick up riders at grocery stores is a common topic of conversation on internet message boards for Uber and Lyft drivers. While many drivers are gracious about helping anyone who needs the service, others indicate that they will drive off when they realize that a call is from a grocery store. Some drivers suggest learning the addresses of local grocery stores and cancelling any requests from those locations or giving grocery store passengers a low rating so that it will be more difficult for them to procure rides in the future. While many driver complaints focused on the low fares from short trips and the inconvenience of helping with grocery bags, others used racial epithets and class-based insults when criticizing passengers.

The relatively low-cost transportation offered by the sharing economy, though helpful, does not offer a viable or reliable solution to the transportation challenges facing food-desert dwellers. What, then, are the solutions to this national problem?

Working for solutions

The federal government has launched several programs to combat food deserts and food insecurity in underserved areas. One such program is the Healthy Food Financing Initiative (HFFI), founded in 2010. One component of HFFI, the Department of Health and Human Services’ Community Economic Development program, awards grants to nonprofit community development corporations to support endeavors such as new stores, farmers markets, and other sources of quality, nutritious foods. As of 2015, the program has awarded more than $44.5 million to this mission.

In Philadelphia, The Food Trust has made great strides in providing better healthy food options for people living in low-income communities. This nonprofit works to support policy change as well as community-based solutions. Perhaps The Food Trust’s presence in Philadelphia since 1992 provided the groundwork for the city’s food desert supermarket success story, Brown’s Super Stores.

Brown’s Super Stores are part of the ShopRite grocery chain, and since 2004 owner Jeff Brown has worked to bring high quality, accessible, and profitable stores to Philadelphia’s underserved neighborhoods. Brown seeks to emulate the high-end store experience with samples from delicious in-store cooking demonstrations, carefully stacked produce, and healthy prepared specialties such as collard greens flavored with turkey instead of the traditional high-fat pork products used in Southern and soul food recipes. Brown has responded to the challenges of urban stores by lobbying the city to strategically place transit stops near his locations. His stores have offered community meeting spaces, nutrition counseling, and credit unions, which make the stores gathering spaces. Brown’s philosophy is that more time spent in the store means more profits.

Brown’s success story gives hope that quality stores can indeed survive in low-income neighborhoods when operated with optimism and smart business sense. With Philadelphia’s success in eliminating food deserts, is there hope for food deserts in other areas? Brown’s decision to value low-income purchasing power may be a model for ending the food-desert problem nationwide.

No easy fix

Food deserts are not a naturally occurring reality but a symptom of systemic racism, segregation, and economic disadvantage. From poor air quality to dangerous water to food deserts, life’s most basic necessities are more likely to be threatened for the marginalized.

For too long, communities in low-income urban and rural areas have been effectively forgotten by the economy as well as by other parts of society. Those who have historically tried to help disadvantaged communities have often missed the mark. The traditional charitable food bank model ignores the need for permanent, self-determined solutions to the issue of food insecurity. Relying on education by outsiders also falls short, as communities need ownership of their food supply and food habits. The misperception of low-income communities by outsiders, as well as from within, affects the way their citizens value their resources. Decades of being ignored by the food industry will not be corrected within months or even years of opening a new supermarket.

But while outsider advocates may focus on the failure of supermarkets to entice low-income people to buy more fruits and vegetables, there are other health benefits from adding supermarkets to neighborhoods. Eliminating transportation complications, long travel time, and the necessity of carrying heavy loads can improve a person’s standard of living tremendously. There are tangible physical and mental health benefits from ease of access, choice, and a sense that society values low-income communities and purchasing power.

Eliminating food deserts is not only a question of healthy diet, but also a question of consumer and social equity.