Why Food Desert Interventions Fail: Accounting for Americans’ Taste for Convenience

• In Event: 3166 - Section on the Sociology of Consumers and Consumption Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 3: Cultural Capital and Distinction

Abstract

The term “food desert” was coined by policy makers in the UK during the mid 1990s to describe geographic areas that lacked grocery stores. Calls to address the problem noted the higher rates of obesity and diet related health problems of those who lived in them. By 2010, in the US, the concept had provided the theoretical cornerstone for the Healthy Food Financing Initiative, a $400 million federal program designed to increase the availability of healthy foods in underserved areas. After 2010, however, scholarly research on food deserts began to show that subsidized retail interventions—like inserting grocery stores in food deserts—did little to change the eating habits of nearby residents. One reason for this is that people who live in food desert, and Americans in general, increasingly now spend more money on food prepared outside of the home than on food cooked inside the home. Since the 1960s, there has been a significant drop in the percentage of people who cook as well as the time they spend on food preparation. Currently, only 60% of Americans engage in any type of food preparation at all on any given day. As one part of a larger ethnographic study on food deserts from the perspective of those who live in them, this paper attempts to account for Americans' “taste for convenience” and challenges the notion that distance is the primary determinant of one’s diet. By analyzing the interaction of our biology, socialization, and access to food, I offer a model for how changes in food processing, food retail, and household dynamics have produced a durable taste for convenience that is unlikely to change any time soon—even in the face of retail interventions.

Author

• Kenneth H. Kolb, Furman University