Food Deserts vs Food Apartheid
To better grapple with and seek alternatives to the high rates of diabetes, obesity, and heart disease (all diet-related illnesses) that are affecting predominantly Native American and Black communities at disproportionately high rates, scholars and organizers have coined several terms to describe the conditions of the food geographies that have caused this epidemic (Penniman 4). Two of these terms, “food desert” and “food apartheid” are widely contested due to the implications of each.
According to the CDC, the term “food desert” was first coined in Scotland, and is generally understood to refer to “areas empty of good-quality, affordable fresh food” (CDC)(Washington, from Brones). It is often used in conjunction with the term “food swamps”, which is “s a geographical area with adequate access to healthy food retail, but that also features an overabundance of exposure to less healthy food and beverages” (NCCEH Tina Chen). Both of these food environments are seen to have distinct racial elements, and are a common feature of the food landscapes in poor, predominantly Black urban communities and Native American reservation communities.
Because food deserts use the general cultural understanding of the desert as a place of nothingness and emptiness (this being explicitly stated in its original definition), it prevents us from understanding that in “these places, there is so much life and vibrancy and potential” (Brones). It is a term that has been imposed by the federal government on these locales, and enables a passive understanding of the processes that have formed these environments and “presupposes that residents are passive consumers who are trapped” (Reese 67). The use of food desert naturalizes the problem of unequal food access, allowing the structures that imposed these realities to escape culpability and placing the onus of sourcing healthy food on the individual. Additionally, the use of desert as a synonym for naturally-formed environments of desolation inhibits us from recognizing that “a desert ecosystem is full of life,” which is problematic for Native Nations like the Navajo and Apache Nations that have thrived off of the natural resources of the desert for millennia (Livingston 173).
As the food desert metaphor “often obscures the processes that led to unequal access and reflects a long-standing interest in uncritical and negative evaluations of Black communities and people,” numerous scholars and food organizers have taken issue with the terms, preferring to use “food apartheid” to describe environments of unequal food access (Reese 46). Drawing on the histories of the South African Apartheid, it refers to “a human-created system of segregation that relegates certain people to scarcity and others to opulence” (Penniman 15). Food apartheid shifts our understanding of unequal food environments from a naturalized occurrence to one borne of racist social construction, opening up a dialogue about the systemic processes that led to these disparities instead of accepting the reality as inevitable. Said best by Karen Washington, “"food apartheid" looks at the whole food system, along with race, geography, faith, and economics. You say "food apartheid" and you get to the root cause of some of the problems around the food system. It brings in hunger and poverty. It brings us to the more important question: What are some of the social inequalities that you see, and what are you doing to erase some of the injustices”(Brones)?
