Food Insecurity, Environmental Justice, and the Perpetuation of the Food Desert, Food Swamp, and Supermarket Redlining Myths in Low-Income Communities of Color in the United States

Food insecurity is an issue that is commonplace in American cities and one that impacts People of Color disproportionately. Many food access scholars label urban communities with large populations of Blacks and Hispanics/Latinx as "food deserts" and "food swamps" either devoid of places to purchase healthy and affordable food or swamped with stores selling junk food. They make these arguments because they often study supermarkets/grocery stores as the primary or only sources of healthy and affordable foods. Moreover, food experts often argue that "supermarket redlining" accelerates the formation of food deserts and swamps. They contend that large grocery stores move from formerly redlined neighborhoods to formerly greenlined ones (or from Black neighborhoods to high-income White ones).

We investigate these theses in two time periods in three Michigan cities: Detroit, Grand Rapids, and Saginaw. We ask: (1) Do the cities fit the definition of a food desert? (2) Do the cities fit the definition of a food swamp? (3) Is there evidence of supermarket redlining in each city? Food store data were collected and verified in 2012 and 2022 from Data Axle and other sources. We used ArcGIS 10.8.1 for the spatial mapping and SPSS 28 for statistical analyses.

We created an exhaustive list of food sources and found hundreds of food outlets in each city during each study period. Despite the focus on them, supermarkets and large grocery stores comprised less than 5% of the food outlets studied. Though portions of each city had limited access to supermarkets and large grocery stores, describing entire cities as a food desert is inaccurate. The findings did not support the food swamp thesis; supermarkets were intermingled with junk food stores. Most of the supermarkets were not in formerly redlined or greenlined neighborhoods but mostly in formerly yellow-lined and uncoded parts of metropolitan areas.