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/

[CrispyQ]

1. If a community can't support a giant store, the big chains aren't interested.

King Soopers just closed a 50,000 sq ft store three blocks from me & opened a new 100,000 sq ft store five blocks down the road. This store is gigantic! The dairy spreads across most of the back of the store so if you forget something, it's a trek to go get it. If you walked the length of the store & back eight times, I'll bet you'd clock a mile. Amazingly, the smaller Safeway store across the street, which was on life support, is doing better now cuz a lot of people find the new store too big.

Years ago I read a story of a woman who bought an old food truck & turned it into produce truck. She stocked it as full as she could & drove to the inner city where she'd read they don't have access to fresh produce. She was swamped!! And some of the women told their boys to stay & "Make sure no one bothers the produce lady cuz we want her to come back!" What she thought would last for eight hours, she sold out in three. I wish there were a follow up to that story.

[Passages]

2. My Bubbe told me stories of how in her neighborhood the produce man

came to each neighborhood with his hand-painted green school bus. She said the bus had no seats and a small fan over stationary tables with boxes of fresh vegetables.

Today that seems hard to imagine, a luxury that was never thought of as one...more American decline, unfortuantely.

[Diamond_Dog]

3. I think a lot of this is why Aldi's is still hanging in there.

Aldi stores aren’t gigantic football fields. They offer good quality products at decent prices and they pay their employees well. Customers appreciate that.

[Freddie]

4. Short version: Reagan did it

Yet another way St. Ronnie set the nation to the path of destruction.
Excellent and enlightening article. When I was a kid (60s & 70s) my mid-size exurban town had an A & P, an Acme, and 4 “mom and pop” stores. Now all the mom & pop stores are gone. The Acme moved from downtown to the “strip” and closed. The A & P, also downtown, closed in the 80s but several independent stores opened in the building for years. Now the building is vacant. Our grocery choices are 2 large Giants and the Walmart.

[dalton99a]

5. Kick

[crud]

6. I'd like to add that in rural small towns

the small locally owed and operated stores that sold staples and other convenience items have been put out of business by corporate owed dollar general stores. I'm talking about really small towns with one stop sign.