I’m going to continue with my discussion of the paradoxes of our industrial food system this week, since there are so many of them. Here’s something I experienced in my own life but hadn’t really thought about until recently: people in rural areas have less access to food than people in cities.
It sounds ridiculous–they’re in the country! There are farms! You don’t exactly see what and corn and cattle being raised in cities. This is another perversity of how we get food these days: most rural areas produce just one or a couple agricultural products, and those are sold as commodities and shipped around the world to be transformed into what we recognize as food. We then go pick them up at the supermarket. Living on or near a farm doesn’t necessarily–or even usually–free you from this food system.
Up until a few decades ago, most small towns had a small grocery store. But when supercenters like Wal-Mart and large warehouse-style grocery stores like Food 4 Less entered the market, many smaller grocery stores went out of business. The transportation costs to bring food to a rural community often far from an interstate highway meant small stores often had to charge more for products. Limited shelf space prevented them from offering the wide variety of products found in larger stores. I remember when the grocery store in my hometown finally went out of business; it had limped along for several years as the owner watched his former customers drive to the new Wal-Mart 20 miles away.
A “food desert” is a region where residents have insufficient access to food. A recent study* found 481 counties in the U.S. where all residents had to drive a minimum of 10 miles to buy food. Most are in the Great Plains, one of our most productive agricultural areas. Instead of buying from local farms, we’re driving to the nearest large supermarket to buy food shipped in from hundreds or thousands of miles away–food that was grown by people who themselves probably bought their food at supermarkets.
In many rural food deserts, convenience stores are the only place to buy food–at prices much higher than at grocery stores. And of course much of the food available at convenience stores is high in fat and sugar.
The lack of local grocery stores can be a particular problem for elderly residents, a group over-represented in rural areas. For those who can no longer drive, getting to a grocery store 10 or more miles away can be a challenge. My grandmother used to know an elderly woman who had no relatives living nearby. Once a month Grandma took her to a grocery store to buy a full month’s worth of food. In rural areas where social services such as Meals on Wheels may not be available, those who cannot drive themselves to surrounding towns to go grocery shopping have no choice but to rely on neighbors and friends to take them to the store or shop for them.
So there you go, folks: another paradox of our modern food system. People struggle to get access to food while surrounded by fields of agricultural commodities.
*Morton, Lois Wright and Troy C. Blanchard. 2007. “Starved for Access: Life in Rural America’s Food Deserts.” Rural Realities 1(4).
