Giving Compass' Take:

• Jessica Fu discusses recent research that suggests that food deserts are not a major defining factor in the nutritional quality of a household’s grocery purchases.

• How can high-quality nutrition be made standard in more households? 

• Read about making healthy food more affordable and accessible. 

Last month, the Fort Worth, Texas city council voted to ban development of new dollar stores within two miles of existing ones, and required that any new dollar-store facilities devote at least 15 percent of their floor space to fresh food. Around the same time one year prior, the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma made a similar move, blocking new dollar stores from operating within a mile of others in three neighborhoods where residents were primarily black and experiencing unemployment at over twice the rate that white Tulsans were.

Since then, numerous localities, from New Orleans, Louisiana to DeKalb County, Georgia have followed suit, passing ordinance after ordinance aimed at resolving the same, seemingly intractable issue: a dearth of grocery stores that sell fresh food.

According to elected officials and proponents of such bans, traditional supermarkets struggle to compete with dollar stores because the business model of the latter faces significantly lower labor and operating costs. And that’s at least in part because not all of them sell fresh food. When conventional grocery stores fold as a result, the logic has gone, communities are left with fewer nearby options from which to buy fresh items like produce and meat.

The resulting phenomenon been referred to since at least the 1990s as a “food desert,” a term reportedly coined by a U.K. government task force concerned with nutrition inequality. The official U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) definition of the term includes any census tract with a 20 percent or greater poverty rate and where a third or more of the residents live more than one mile away from a supermarket.

Over the past decade, state and municipal-level governments have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on incentives to encourage grocery store development in these areas, on the premise that their absence is the primary cause of diet-related health issues like obesity and chronic disease. But what if that assumption isn’t really accurate and is instead a classic case of correlation mistaken for causation? Emerging research has found that the extent to which a supermarket’s location shapes our food choices may be significantly overstated, and that subsidizing their expansion does remarkably little to change what people eat.

In a study published in the November issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, economists from six universities analyzed grocery purchases made between 2004 and 2016 by 100,000 households across the country. They were looking for changes in what people bought and presumably ate after new stores moved into a neighborhood. Detailed purchase information came from market analytics firm Nielsen, which runs a program asking a nationally representative group of participants to scan and log every barcode of every product they buy.

What they found was that the biggest beneficiary of new supermarkets were supermarkets themselves, which enjoyed an increased share of consumer spending.

The overall nutritional quality of a household’s grocery purchases, however, was not heavily impacted by a new store’s presence in the area. Nor was the proportion of a household’s budget spent on groceries. This was the case across the entire study and—most importantly—among “food deserts,” which the study defined as zip codes lacking a supermarket.

Read the full article about shifting focus away from food deserts by Jessica Fu at The New Food Economy.