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Food deserts are ‘areas of relative exclusion where people experience physical and economic barriers to accessing healthy food’. They are a growing problem in both the US and the UK, and likely elsewhere in the world, but those two countries are the places I have encountered them.

Food deserts are a result of the ever-larger super- or hyper-markets who, because of their big-box bulk migrate outside of urban areas, leaving the residents (usually poor working class) of those areas with little choice in how to get their food other than either to spend precious monies on the logistical nightmare of using foot power or public transport to out-of-town locations to secure food, or to rely on ‘convenience’ or liquor stores with their tiny selection and outrageous prices.

Not everyone, of course, sees food deserts as a problem, or even a reality. The always defensive Mises Institute trots out their standard ‘there is no problem here, business is good‘ response and engages in a bit of intellectual dishonesty and sleight-of-hand (something they are quite practiced in) to equate access to (healthy) food with access to theaters and video stores, as if one could eat films or stage plays. It is deliberate and childish attempt to simultaneously politicize and demonize the term, without ever really trying to understand it.

One of the most interesting aspects of their knee-jerk, reactionary mindset is the very existence of any opposition to the idea of food deserts. While those who study such things talk about sudden shifts in the ‘food retail strategy’ of an area, and look at things like what kind of diet people have based on their travel distance to food stores, the greed apologists at the Mises Institute ridicule the very idea that a market would not provide for all the needs and wants of a whole society, ignoring the times of transition from one local model to another that terms like ‘food desert’ describe.

Once we move beyond the fingers-in-the-ears denial and pseudo-semantics of those of the Mises Institute ilk, we can look at what kinds of opportunities and challenges are created by the sudden appearance of a food desert in an area. The first thing that pops into my head is Urban Farming, a variety of community agriculture that can provide sustainable, economic access to foodstuffs, often better quality at a much lower price than travelling out of the food desert to haul back supplies.

Even if you are a dyed-in-the-wool free economic liberal, it seems hard not to look at the existence of a food desert simply as a market that is not served, an opportunity to create a business of value to the local community it is part of.

I am sure that quite a few new schemes will be tried by both local residents fed up with their ‘desert’ and by outsiders who wish to help and/or turn a profit by doing so. It seems obvious to me that food deserts cannot last long, either the desert will disappear or the residents will - like the residents of Detroit they will flee the areas that no one will serve.