Why ‘Food Apartheid’ Is a Better Term Than ‘Food Desert’

Across the United States, about 40 million people don’t have easy access to a grocery store. In New York City, hundreds of thousands of people experienced food insecurity in 2023. Despite the comprehensive subway system the city is famous for, many people, especially those in lower-income neighborhoods that were historically redlined, experience a low proximity to grocery stores. This makes accessing fresh produce difficult, especially as subway fares continue to increase, and some police have used deadly measures to crack down on those who don’t pay.

Grassroots food activist Karen Washington has spent years living in such a neighborhood, and now runs a farm just outside the city. Washington advocates for her community and others impacted by food apartheid, a term she coined to better describe the lack of access to fresh produce and healthy foods.

While areas experiencing a lack of healthy food access would have once been called “food deserts,” critics argue that the term is misleading, and wrongfully allows communities to bear the blame for what’s ultimately a systemic problem.

The problem with the term “food desert” is that it implies these areas, and their lack of access to healthy food, are somehow natural phenomena. You’re [also] blaming the community for the fact that these things don’t happen to exist in that particular community, as though the community had any control over whether those things exist,” Laurie Beyranevand, who leads the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law and Graduate School, tells Sentient.

As Washington points out, it’s not that there’s a lack of food, but rather that there’s no fresh, healthy foods in areas that have been subjected to food apartheid. “When you talk about limited access to food, I always say that’s not a problem, because we have a lot of food,” says Washington. “Up and down in the neighborhood we have the junk food. We have the processed food. We have the fast food. What we don’t have is healthy food options.”

How ‘Food Apartheid’ Is Different from ‘Food Desert’

When Washington first started reading and hearing the term “food desert,” she was struck by how disconnected the phrase was from the communities themselves; the people whose access to fresh food was being restricted. “‘Food desert’ was “an elitist sort of data term. It wasn’t a term that grew out of a grassroots organization,” she says, or that came from the community. The term was “putting a name on people who have limited access to food, but not explaining why.”

She coined the term “food apartheid” in 2018 to address not just the problem at hand, but why there’s a problem there in the first place. With the term, she’s looking through the lens of race, economics and demographics to address the root causes of disparate food access.

“Food apartheid is important for us as a way to recognize the structural racism and the intentionality that’s associated with a lot of policy decisions that have led to inequities in food access [and] food distribution,” adds Beyranevand.

An example of those policies are New York City’s zoning laws. There, the fight for access to green spaces has stretched over decades, with community activists battling zoning laws in order to construct gardens where people can gather and grow their own food.

“A lot of zoning decisions are also an example of [redlining],” Beyranevand says, referring to the policies that kept Black and Brown people from moving into certain neighborhoods. “Zoning decisions that have allowed the perpetuation of fast food and other types of unhealthy retail food options, but have also sort of zoned out grocery stores. Those types of decisions have led to the conditions that have created food apartheid — and those are really intentional.”

Food Apartheid Is Part of a Bigger Problem

Fixing food apartheid doesn’t just mean making sure everyone is fed, but, because it represents an intersectional approach to food justice, involves widespread reforms.

As an example, Washington points to the federal minimum wage. “Let’s get people the ability to make a living so that they can afford housing [and] health care, and they can afford food, instead of standing on a line so that food is being handed out.” Washington argues that while direct food distribution like soup kitchens are great, they’re ultimately a “band-aid.”

While some states have increased their minimum hourly pay, the federal minimum wage sits at $7.25, and hasn’t increased since 2009. Meanwhile, the average cost of a loaf of white bread has increased from $1.38 to $1.94, a change of 40.5 percent.

“It’s so much easier for people with power and privilege to look down,” Washington says. Ultimately, she argues that “wealthy people don’t want to see people less fortunate move up that ladder, to be like them. Because if that happens, then there’s an influx of those people coming into [their] neighborhood.” Sociological analyses have found that class-based charity — for example, donating to soup kitchens — actually exacerbates inequity by reinforcing stereotypes based on class.

Food Justice in the Policy Sphere

While the interconnectedness of food sovereignty can make solving the problem more complicated, it also means that advocates sometimes see improvements from unexpected places.

As policymakers and city planners grapple with developing resilient cities in the face of climate change, they’re having conversations about how communities can produce food closer to home. “The fact that people are starting to move toward planning for food system resilience, by its nature, is going to start to hopefully implement some of those food sovereignty, food justice frameworks,” says Beyranevand. “It should get people thinking about how they can keep and grow food closer to home and have more control.”

Food apartheid isn’t just being addressed as a symptom of other policy decisions, either. Some policies seem to directly address the problem, though they have yet to use the term “food apartheid,” according to Beyranevand. “There are some examples,” she says, “of local level ordinances that feel like they’re trying to address food apartheid, but in the research that we did to try to see if there were any ordinances that  explicitly called out food apartheid, we didn’t find any.” She thinks that could be because it’s a “loaded term.”

It’s a similar story at the federal level, where the U.S. Department of Agriculture is shifting away from using the term “food desert,” and instead has been favoring the phrase “low-income, low-access food areas.” Even so, the USDA has been using the outdated term since 2008, so the terminology still appears in various policy documents and grant applications.

Despite considerable progress within the food advocacy movement, there is still a way to go, both for advocates and within the policy realm, notes Beyranevand. Students continue to come to her using outdated language, even among those who “have experience in the food system.”

Still, she’s hopeful for the future, and that people will be increasingly receptive to discussions of food apartheid. 
“I think right now, given what’s happening in Gaza, it’s a good time to be raising an issue like this,” Beyranevand says, in reference to the food insecurity Israel has created in the Gaza Strip in Palestine. “I think there’s some awareness. People might actually be more receptive to hearing about this as a concept, and start thinking about a shift in the way they think about food access, and why food access is the way that it is.”