Greenville Leader

A new book by Furman professor Ken Kolb seeks to expose a flawed narrative about food deserts arguing the problem is more about retail inequality due to the abandonment of poor black neighborhoods and segregationist policies.

Kolb is a professor and chair of the sociology department at Furman University.  His second book, “Retail Inequality:  Reframing the Food Desert Debate,” is set for release in December by the University of California Press.   In his book, Kolb suggests the conversation about areas where there is a lack of access to healthy food involves much bigger issues.

“The fight over food deserts was about much more than food,” Kolb told the Greenville News.  “It was a battle over retail, over what can be bought and sold, just like the civil rights movement was not really about the actual lunch counters and the diners.  We’ve just got a little bit blinded by the healthy-food aspect and grocery stores to realize that this is a much deeper, more entrenched problem that was actually caused by clear city, state, and federal policies decades ago.”

Areas that lack nutritious, high-quality, affordable food are known as food deserts. According to the USDA, food deserts are also any area with a 20 percent or greater poverty rate and where a third or more of the residents live more than a mile away from a supermarket.  They tend to be predominately low-income communities of color.

Kolb points to areas like Southernside and West Greenville that have suffered economically from segregationist and political policies.  Poor black urban areas struggle with crime, unemployment, and little infrastructure discouraging retail shops and food markets from doing business.

Kolb pointed out that projects like urban renewal and various road and transportation projects created neighborhoods of concentrated poverty that don’t have the economic support to attract nice retail outlets white counterparts enjoy.

“For better or worse, to be an equal member in American society is to have an equal ability to shop at the same venues and for the same goods as everyone else,” Kolb writes in his upcoming book.

The impact of consuming highly processed and nutritionally inadequate food can be devastating, causing diet-fueled diseases like cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s and type 2 diabetes.   People who rely most on fast food to survive are seven times likely of having a stroke before age 45 and at double risk of having a heart attack.

Kolb offers a few solutions to the problem including launching a collective home meal preparation program and pairing farmer's markets with stores like gas stations and dollar stores.