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🍔 The crazy truth about food deserts

What if I told you that plentiful access to good, affordable grocery stores has little to no effect on people eating healthier?

According to the holy site that is Wikipedia, in the U.S., food deserts are areas that have limited access to food that is plentiful, affordable, or nutritious.

Many of us have seen how low-income areas are filled with Dollar Trees instead of big supermarkets that offer plenty of healthy options, like Kroger.

Let’s break down what’s going on with food deserts and what they tell us👇

This tweet above refers to another study that demonstrates the surprising cause of food deserts: lack of demand for healthier foods. 

It’s not because people can’t get to supermarkets, afford the food, or don’t have the option to buy healthy food.

Idk about you, but seeing studies like these have made me feel confused, kind of bitter, and also in denial.

For a long time, I believed that food deserts were another indicator of how the “system” deprived poor people of stuff that wealthier people had access to. Another example of the “haves” vs “have-nots”.

But it looks like I was wrong.

To be clear, food deserts are real.

But it looks like it’s mainly a problem of demand —  it’s a matter of what people want, not what people can access.

So why is there low demand?

• Unprecedented access: We live in a time in which most people are overweight because we have easy access to plentiful, cheap food that is the tastiest it’s ever been and very calorie-dense. Not just fast-food, but tons of foods you find in any kind of store, in general.
  

  We literally live in a paradise compared to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, who spent most of their day trying to find their next meal.
  
  They’d literally explode from the sheer sensory overload from eating a Taco Bell Doritos Locos Taco Supreme.

• Marketing: Companies invest BILLIONS into marketing these delicious foods to us and designing them to be as tasty as possible
  

• Genes: your taste buds, like many things, tend to be genetic — you’re actually pretty likely to inherit what kinds of food you like and don’t like. For example, one of my biology teachers in high school could only eat baby food and apple sauce because of her genetic condition. Everything else tasted terrible or way too strong - imagine!!!
  

• Not enough money and education: some argue that it’s a problem of people not having enough income, but this major study shares the contrary: “exposing low-income households to the same food-buying opportunities and prices that are available to higher-income households would reduce nutritional inequality by only 9 percent; the remaining 91 percent is due to differences in demand.”

Across the rich and poor, unhealthy households contain people who desire unhealthy food.

So how can we get people to have better diets?

What if we add more gyms? Nope, doesn’t work. 

Well, adding even more fast food chains makes it even worse, right? Surprisingly, also does not look like it works.

“Ok, but c’mon, it’s got to be that food is too expensive.”

Contrary to your angry reactions to how much you pay at the grocery store, we as Americans currently spend a near record-low on food as a percent of our income.

On average, only 6.7% of our income is spent on food (including restaurants).

Look how much worse it used to be!

The graph above actually stops at 2022, right when we experienced our worst inflation in years (like most of the rest of the developed world did too). 2023 and 2024 results would show this as even better now.

What about compared to other countries? Americans actually spend nearly the lowest in the world as a % of our income on food. 

Look below — while Americans are on the low-end to the left, you have countries like Mexico on the high-end that are like how we were back in 1900 — spending 40% of their income on food!!!

So what does the future hold for us?

The food desert situation reflects a growing problem across the world — obesity.

In 2019, obesity led to around 5 million deaths worldwide, which is 20 times as many as malnutrition did.

Obesity is not a “rich person” problem.

So far, no country has been able to reverse this obesity trend.

The country closest to a “solution” looks like Japan — but it’s not because they have higher taxes on sugary foods, warning labels, nutrition classes, or higher education.

It looks like it comes down to their culture - the behaviors that are socially acceptable in their country.

The TL;DR: food deserts seem to be a problem of demand — not income, education, access, or something else. So we should probably add this unhelpful notion of food deserts into the bucket of other myths, like breakfast as the most important meal of the day, and the 90s food pyramid we were all subjected to as kids.

Still curious?

• This great post on food abundance

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Zach

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Disclaimer: This is not financial advice or recommendation for any investment. The Content is for informational purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.