New York’s “Food Desert” Myth
3rd May 2016
To encourage a “sustainable, resilient food system,” New York’s city council has proposed a $5 million municipal farm-subsidy program, under which the city would buy development easements in the Hudson Valley. In this way, the council plans to help feed “3 million New Yorkers liv[ing] in neighborhoods without adequate supermarkets.” It’s alarming to consider that New York could suffer food shortages so acute that the city government must establish its own agricultural supply chain. Indeed, according to the council, 1.4 million New Yorkers are “food insecure,” indicating a massive failure of markets to respond to this most basic need.
But is it true? If it’s hard to reconcile the idea that New York City has, simultaneously, starvation-level conditions and an “epidemic” of obesity in the same neighborhoods and among the same people, it is because the contemporary debate about food availability tends to ignore individual choice (and taste). Paternalism and finger-wagging masquerading as science distort the argument about how and what poor people eat. For example, the idea of “food deserts,” which is what the council means when it refers to neighborhoods without adequate supermarkets, has become a truism among liberals concerned about urban dietary habits. First Lady Michelle Obama, for example, has made their elimination one of her top priorities. And indeed, some areas around the country, especially in rural regions, lack good grocery stores.
Few of these are in New York City, however. According to the Department of Agriculture, which originated the term, two small areas on Staten Island qualify as food deserts—meaning that at least one-third of the local residents live one mile or more from a grocery store that sells fresh food. The rest of the city, the department concludes, is reasonably well served.