INTRODUCTION

 Many scholars across diverse fields have discussed and theorized food deserts. Particularly urban sociologists, public health specialists, and urban planners have researched these spatial differentiations.  While these fields have approached the topic of food deserts from a number of perspectives, each tends to leave out critical points.  Food deserts have been theorized spatially, analyzed based on the quantity and quality of grocery stores within specific mile radiuses, but one critical piece that is lacking is understanding the role of relationships to power structures and how resources get distributed spatially.  In this paper I will review public health, urban planning, and urban sociology scholarship in an attempt to look at the different perspectives each of these fields brings to food desert research.  My aim is to review the theoretical tools that these scholars employ in food desert research too look at how we can better connect theory with praxis within this research topic.  I will also look at how these fields’ contributions can be used together to construct a more contextually accurate intersectional analysis of food desert research.  

According to Bower et al. (2014), “Studies find positive associations between healthy food availability in neighborhoods and the intake of those foods by residents.  Large supermarkets have been shown to stock more healthy foods at lower cost.  Grocery and convenience stores are found to stock more energy dense, processed, high-fat, sugary, and salty foods.”  In a research study conducted by Morland and colleagues (2002), they found that there were four times more supermarkets located in white neighborhoods compared to Black neighborhoods.  “Without access to supermarkets, which offer a wide variety of foods at lower prices, poor and minority communities may not have equal access to the variety of healthy food choices available to nonminority and wealthy communities” (Morland and Filomena 2002:23).  Research conducted by Morland and Filomena (2007) found that predominately Black neighborhoods in Brooklyn, New York had no supermarkets, demonstrating that the availability and variety of fresh produce is associated with neighborhood racial composition.  Bower et al. state that food deserts in urban areas are a possibleresult of racial residential segregation but the data states that it definitely is.  Food deserts in urban areas are in predominately Black and Latino neighborhoods (Morland and Filomena 2007; Morland et al. 2002).  Not many scholars have conducted intersectional work investigating the correlations of food deserts, racial residential segregation, and health inequities.  When we are looking at the geopolitics of food, health (morbidity and mortality), and segregation, we are looking phenomena mediated by the same power structures.  But a critical intersectional analysis is lacking from the discourse on these phenomena and they are rarely discussed together.  In this paper I will be covering a review of food deserts, public health, and racial residential segregation.  I will review some key works by urban planning, urban sociology, and public health scholars to look at how these fields have approached both food deserts. I will then use my understandings of these perspectives to understand how food deserts are the result of the biopolitics and necropolitics of space.  

PUBLIC HEALTH & SDI/SDHI

Health disparities/inequities are still new as a research topic in the field of public health in the United States.  Scholars from many fields are attempting to explain the health problems of modernity in the West: chronic illness.  While the United States is still considered one of the most powerful industrialized nations in the West, it still has the worst healthcare system of all industrialized nations.  Black people suffer the most every health inequity (morbidity and mortality) in the United States.  A wide variety of scholars have constructed and approached research questions in attempts to understand why this is the case.  Critical public health scholars are currently relying on social determinants of health & social determinants of health inequalities to understand these differential disease risks. Social determinants of health inequalities are about, the ‘causes of the causes’, the lived experience (Marmot 2005; Sheiham et al. 2011).  This concept looks to understand behavior beyond the victim blaming ideologies of Western intellectual traditions (Crawford 2005; Daniels and Schulz 2006; Goldberg 2012).  The behavioral choices that people make are rooted in their social, political, and economic circumstances.  Social determinants of health inequalities looks at the everyday lived experience coupled with the structural factors that cause them.  Social determinants of health inequalities are the, “…structural determinants and conditions of daily life responsible for a major part of health inequalities between and within countries” (Sheiham et al. 2011).  Social determinants of health inequalities see health inequalities as being rooted in the social stratification systems of modern societies.  Therefore, analyses of multilevel power structures and institutions are used.  

FOOD INSECURITY & HEALTH INEQUITIES 

 Within segregated inner cities, many individuals rely on high calorie, low nutrient processed foods as quick convenient meals on a regular basis. These types of foods cause malnutrition through providing too many empty calories (over-nutrition) and too little nutrients (under-nutrition).  A useful definition of a food desert is supplied by Steven Cummins and Sally Macintyre (2002:436); “poor urban areas where residents cannot buy affordable, healthy food”.  Defining a region as a “food desert” highlights social as well as spatial inequalities.  People tend to make food choices based on what is available in their immediate neighborhood.  Food deserts involve factors such as income, mobility, residential segregation, neighborhood deprivation, race, space, place, sociopolitical processes, political economy, as well as factors of socio-economic status.  Working poor Black people in the United States lack political clout, authority, and power structures do not deem this population deserving of good quality infrastructure and resources.  Poor whites tend to live in middle class neighborhoods while middle class Blacks tend to live in high-poverty neighborhoods in the United States (Lipsitz 2011).  As pointed out by Dill and Zambrana (2006:11), “…race, ethnicity, and geography matter; they are all determinants of access to social capital or social resources”.  When the residents of predominately Black and poor neighborhoods begin to get sick as a consequence of racial and economic residential segregation coupled with food deserts and chronic disinvestment, their own plight is used as justification for why they are not worthy of assistance.  Their health disparities and economic inequities are seen as the consequences of their own incompetence. The disinvested poor Black neighborhoods do not warrant any importance till socially, politically, and economically valued groups move into their neighborhoods to displace them.  This is a vicious cycle that is continued until predominately Black neighborhoods become targeted for gentrification.  The subject of food deserts and health disparities requires an interdisciplinary perspective and analysis that is capable of taking on all of the causal factors involved instead of perpetuating systemic inequalities in the lives of poor Black urban residents.

We must also take into consideration that there are large numbers of individuals who have limited access to affordable nutritious foods, poor, and are suffering from health inequalities directly and indirectly tied to the lack of or limited supply of nutritious fresh foods versus processed foods in their immediate neighborhood area.  The health disparities that can be seen in some urban areas are proof of systemic inequality.  It is expensive to be poor, the working poor spend more and get less. When the inner city residents spend their money at a fast food restaurant or a local convenience store they end up spending a large amount of money in the end because the food is not nourishing and the costs add up in other ways.  The poor do not have reliable sources of affordable good quality nutritious foods.  Under-nutrition and over-nutrition as parts of malnutrition are components in the construction of food insecurity.  According to Mobley et al. (2009:3), food insecurity is defined as, “…a lack of adequate quantities of safe foods to meet nutritional requirements at some time during the year, is increasingly recognized as an environmental link between hunger, lack of adequate food resources, patient behaviors, including compliance, and disease risk. Food insecurity is pronounced in both rural and urban communities…”.  An intersectional approach is required for us to be able to begin to investigate how living at the margins of power structures impacts the everyday lives of the disenfranchised.

The question is no longer whether or not social, political, and economic status impacts the quality of life and health of Blacks, as stated by Leith Mullings and Amy Schulz (2006:6), “the challenge we now encounter is how to understand the ways in which gender, race, and class relations intertwine and are expressed in disparate chances for health, illness, and well-being”.  Research has already demonstrated that social, political, and economic stratification impacts health; the next step is to ask how and understand the nature of these impacts so that the wider research can contribute to constructing contextually accurate health interventions to reducing health inequalities.  According to Faye Harrison (1995:50), white supremacist racism is an international hegemonic system in which, “…wealth, power, and advanced development are associated largely with whiteness or “honorary whiteness”. …the world system represents a “Global apartheid” marked by severe inequalities of income, life expectancy, and power”.  Researchers need to acknowledge the intersectional processes and ways that hegemonic systems function together, not observe them in decontextualized ahistorical apolitical singularities and vacuums.  So even after dealing with disadvantages of low socioeconomic status, material deprivation, social exclusion, and the stress of racism, poor Blacks also have to deal with inferior medical care (Crawford 2005; Goldberg 2012).  The issue of race, within a broader context of power relations, social inequality, and racism cannot and should not be ignored.  We have to pay close attention to the different power relationships in society if we want to produce accurate scholarship with the potential of reducing health disparities (Thomas 2001).

 According to Mullings and Schulz (2006:3), “Health disparities based on race/racism, class, and gender/sexism are matters of life and death.  They express, in differences of both quality and length of life, the unequal structuring of life chances.  …for example, whiteness and blackness are gendered, and masculinity and femininity are “raced” within particular cultural contexts”.  This means that researchers need to find ways to incorporate intersectional analysis into their work in order to understand the local context and historical and modern factors are contributing to the quality of life of those suffering from health disparities.  Weber states that if researchers and policy makers understand how social, political, and economic conditions and factors are related to power structures and sources of subordination (such as racism, classism, patriarchy, etc.) they can better shape interventions, “…that might alter the balance of power – a living wage; shifts in workplace control; universal, affordable, quality child care; safe and affordable housing; equal access to quality education; and universal prevention focused health care…” (Weber 2006:39).  Understanding how the social conditions create environments where populations become exposed to disease risk is the first step towards effective intervention as well as the first step towards the prevention and elimination of health disparities.

RACIAL RESIDENTIAL SEGREGATION AND FOOD DESERTS 

 Many urban sociologists who study racial residential segregation mention food deserts in passing, and those who do focus on food deserts.  Scholars who study food deserts tend to glaze over the importance of racial residential segregation.  Many researchers argue that discussing these two phenomena is difficult because separating the racial and economic factors poses a challenge for social scientists and public health scholars.  Many scholars have spent a lot of time attempting to disentangle these two phenomena; such attempts places the academic discourse out of contexts, causing many to produce theory not rooted in the actual praxis of residents who live in both economically and racially segregated spaces.  What many urban sociologists, urban planning, and public health scholars lack is an intersectional analysis.  The fact is, both race and economics are at play in the politics of space, not either or.  The fact that race is a political-economic construct and capitalism is a racialized political-economic phenomena points to the inherent entangled reality of how these factors play out in the social, political, and economic world.  The fact is that the logic of each city scape is different and contextual, but they still serve the larger rationales of the reigning power structures.   

 Urban sociologists who critically review the impact of white supremacy on the urban space and the lives of poor inner city Black residents tend to only lightly mention food deserts.  And scholars who study food deserts, mention racial residential segregation as a footnote without taking power relationships into consideration.  For example, in “How Racism Takes Place” by George Lipsitz (2011), he reviews the impact of racism on segregation in inner cities.  Lipsitz manages to approach the topic from the perspective of Civil Rights Legislation consciousness. Lipsitz closely analyzes how systemic racism functions as a rationale for the differential distribution of ‘races’ across urban spaces.  But his analysis of food deserts and public health was glossed over, since it wasn’t the topic of the work. Each one of these fields makes statements about race, place, and space that are key and contribute to the larger discussion but these discussions are being had in academic vacuums.  What I propose is that critical evaluations of how and why urban areas are maintained by current power structures and intersectional rationales can greatly benefit work on food deserts. 

 Bower et al. (2014) oddly enough states that the topics of health, food deserts, and racial residential segregation difficult to understand since scholars cannot determine if racial residential segregation or economic inequity is the main cause of food deserts.  It’s a different means of prioritizing particular epistemologies versus studying the object from plural perspectives.  Public health scholars have demonstrated that both food deserts and racial residential segregation has impacted the health of urban poor Blacks. But what public health scholars lack is a critical analysis of how inequity interact with physical landscapes.  What I suggest is the use of intersectional analyses, one that understanding the plurality and dialectics of life, of praxis.  None of these factors should be prioritized over the other when they each is have an influence and their interaction is creating other social phenomena.

 Another example is in “Beyond Food Deserts: Measuring and Mapping Racial Disparities in Neighborhood Food Environments” by Raja et al. (2008), in which Raja and colleagues state that the term ‘food desert’ is inaccurate and implies that there is a lack of food stores in urban areas which is not the case. In this article Raja et al. call attention to the lack of standardization of the definition and use of the term food deserts.  Here, what Raja and colleagues ignored is the fact that in praxis, food deserts are defined by food insecurity not necessarily the lack of food stores. Many food stores can be present and provide no affordable good quality produce to its residents, these are the circumstances that define American inner cities.  In this article Raja et al. (2008) suggest that a possibility in the Erie County area is relying on smaller food stores (aka bodegas and/or corner stores) to provide healthier food stuffs to these poor and PoC (people of color) communities.  This led me to think of whether or not urban planners ever interviewed owners of bodegas/corner stores asking why they don’t provide good quality and affordable produce in predominately Black neighborhoods.  To suggest that corner stores owned by non-Black PoCs is a possible solution to providing affordable and good quality produce ignores the racial dynamics of these neighborhoods and assumes that the owners of bodegas are interested in the health of the urban Black populace.  Such suggestions are a stretch in a settler colony whose urban spaces function on the rationale of anti-Blackness and victim blaming health narratives.

THE ANTI-BLACK SPATIAL IMAGINARY: FOOD DESERTS, RESOURCE DISTRIBUTION, AND BARE LIFE

 According to fundamental causal theory originally theorized by Bruce Link and Jo Phalen (1995), what is key is a focus on power relationships and basic social conditions as risk factors for major diseases.  Link and Phalen argue that socioeconomic status is a means of measuring access to resources and the relationship an individual has to institutional and systemic power structures.  They state that socioeconomic status is one of the fundamental causes of disease because it reflects access to important resources, influence multiple disease outcomes through a number of mechanisms, and maintains an association with disease even when the intervening mechanisms change. Link and Phelan state that social factors are ultimate causes of disease while individual/behavioral factors are proximate factors.  Following this line of reasoning and understanding the hegemonies that inform political-economic factors, we come to see that food deserts and the over saturation of better quality and more affordable produce in spaces where white bodies are located are a differential distribution of resources across physical space.  White lives are the type lives that are valued according to the logic of white supremacist racism.  Research has shown that predominately Black neighborhoods are more likely to be food deserts (Block and Kouba 2006; Lipsitz 2011; Bower et al. 2014).  In a U.S. Department of Agriculture study, researchers found that poor inner city residents pay four percent more for food than suburban residents (Lipsitz 2011:7).  

 Race, space, and place matters.  Spatial distribution patterns of resources, people, and the value of particular types of places is all a consequence of the valuing and devaluing of particular lives. According to George Lipsitz, 

People of different races do not inhabit different places by choice. Housing and lending discrimination, the design of school district boundaries, zoning regulations, policing strategies, the location of highways and transit systems, and a host of tax subsidies do disastrous work by making places synonymous with races.  The racial meaning of place makes American whiteness one of the most systematically subsidized identities in the world.  It enables whites to own homes that appreciate value and generate assets passed down to subsequent generations.  At the same time, Blacks confront an artificially constructed housing market that often forces them to remain renters unable to take advantage of the subsidies that homeowners receive from the tax code (2011:6).

Hence racial residential segregation patterns are the result of a wide variety of power plays, some that have been in the works since a wide variety of farmers bills in the 1930s and 1940s provided many whites with the land and capital needed to achieve middle class status (Katznelson 2006). The lives that are least valued also inhabit places that are least valued.  According to Achille Mbembe, a ‘bare life’ is a life that is unworthy of being lived, hence this is the person without juridical value, a person who can be killed without the commission of a homicide.  As evidenced by the most recent decisions of not to indict police officers who killed unarmed Black people, Black life is bare life.  Predominately Black neighborhoods are reflective of this fact, they lack grocery stores, food is overpriced and low quality, streets and homes are dilapidated, the values of the homes are lowest in the area, and the only thing the Black residents can get access to is predatory home loans from red-lining banks.  For instance,

“Housing and school segregation function to channel white children into well-equipped classrooms with experienced teachers while crowding Black children into ill-equipped buildings where they are taught by inexperienced teachers and surrounded by impoverished classmates many of whom suffer from lead poisoning, malnutrition and a variety of undiagnosed and untreated disabilities.  The estimated four million violations of federal fair-housing law that take place every year offer whites privileged access to parks, playgrounds, fresh food, and other amenities while relegating Blacks to areas that suffer disproportionate exposure to polluted air, water, food, and land” (2011:6-7).  Differentially distributing resources and access is the purpose of biopower.  What’s most important here is recognizing that poor Blacks have lives that are intersectionally controlled by the state and deemed devoid of life, hence the neighborhoods that poor Blacks reside in also happen to be devoid of the very resources that are key to having a good quality of life.  Another important point that Lipsitz made is that it’s not just the fact that poor Blacks live in urban spaces that are devoid of life, what is also key here is looking at where the resources are being distributed.  Thus cautioning us to not only think about the disenfranchised but to also look at how those with agency, value, and capital maintain their status in society and their relationship to power structures.  

THEORIZING THE “FOOD OASIS” 

Recently Buffalo, New York residents found out that the city was getting a Whole Foods Market.  Seeing that Buffalo, New York has been dubbed a “food desert” by urban planning and demography experts, the store appears to be providing Buffaloians with a very much needed resource.  But a closer look at where this Whole Foods Market is going to be built paints a different picture; one that fits perfectly into the spatial mismatch of good quality food in Buffalo, New York.  The new Whole Foods Market is going to be in the Northtown Plaza, the same plaza that the new Trader Joes Market and Target is located, within a mile of Tops Markets, Wegmans, Aldi’s, Walmart, and BJ’s.

A food desert is a poor urban areas where residents cannot buy affordable, healthy food.  So now that we have a definition what do we call place that is oversaturated with food resources?  A food oasis? According to the 2010 Census 14226 is 83% White, median household income in 2010 was $72,585.  Amherst’s estimated per capita income in 2012 was $37,306 and Buffalo’s was $19,973.  In 2009 Buffalo, NY was dubbed the 4th poorest city in America.  Then there is unfortunate fact that according to the 2010 Census, Buffalo is also the 5th most racially segregated city in the US. Let us take a quick look at the grocery stores listed in the 14215 zip code on the East Side of Buffalo: one actual grocery store (Tops), one gas station, four Family Dollars, one Dollar General, & eighteen corner stores/bodegas.  This is an issue of food insecurity that is true across predominately Black neighborhoods in Buffalo, New York.

The placement of Whole Foods Market is not necessarily a surprise but it is interesting in light of the company’s strategic placing of their new store in Detroit, IL where Whole Foods Market CEO Walter Robb stated, “People perceive Whole Foods as only receiving a particular community and I don’t like that,” when he spoke of the company’s reputation as catering to a more-affluent clientele.  The fact is, the placement of the Whole Foods Market in one of the poorest and most racially segregated cities in the United States is very telling. The company’s reputation for serving privileged clientele is perpetuates local issues of spatial resource deprivation in Buffalo, New York.  Whole Foods is being placed outside of the reach of those who need it, further demonstrating how food is a raced and classed issue.  Many could argue that the placing of Whole Foods market makes business sense. That’s a valid argument but if the discussion is about equitable access to good quality and affordable produce then improving the health of Americans doesn’t isn’t a favored business model.

Health is politics by other means and food “gets at the heart of the amaranthine question of ‘difference’ under capitalism” (Slocum and Saldanha 2013:1).  The differential allocation of food is a consequence of inequality under intersectional hegemony.  Food choice, for those who aren’t part of the affluent club that the majority of supermarkets target is not much of a ‘choice’.  People tend to make food choices based on what is available in their immediate neighborhood.  When one discusses food deserts a myriad of perspectives must be taken into consideration. Food deserts involve factors such as income, mobility, residential segregation, neighborhood deprivation, space, place, sociopolitical processes, political economy, as well as factors of socio-economic status.  How can poor and non-white communities begin to change their nutritional behaviors if they still don’t have access to affordable good quality produce?  How do we go about discussing these food oases? How do we talk about places oversaturated with resources that also happen to be predominately White and middle class spaces as well?

UNDERSTANDING FOOD DESERTS AS THE BIO- AND NECRO-POLITICS OF SPACE

 The state’s purpose is to maintain sovereignty, authority and control over people. But in order for the state to maintain hegemonic order in a capitalist nation it has to be financed. Corporations function as financers that provide the state with the funds necessary to maintain control.   Corporations need the state to regulate and subjugate in order for them to make the max profit and the state needs capital to fund its control over the people.  Thus, the state produces very particular types of people, spaces, and circumstances, through which corporations can make the maximum profit off of.  Hence disenfranchised populations (bare lives) are at the mercy of state control for the purposes of maintaining maximum profits in a capitalist nation.  Therefore, the state and capitalist corporations’ functions and rationales have a symbiotic relationship within an oligarchic capitalist republic.  

So based on this line of reasoning, food deserts are a biopolitical and necropolitical phenomena.  According to Rachel Slocum, “bodies are shaped in racial terms through their labor, what they eat and where they live” (2013: 43). Good quality, affordable produce within close proximity of one’s residence functions as a political technology of power exacted by modern states that allows the state to regulate, subjugate, and control PoC (people of color) bodies.  Therefore, “certain populations of bodies are deemed less worthy of sustenance” (Slocum and Saldanha 2013:1).  The differential distribution of good quality and affordable produce that impacts the morbidity and mortality rates in poor urban Black neighborhoods is a consequence of an anti-Black spatial rationale.  This means that when we look at urban food deserts we are looking at the differential distribution of resources and thus the differential distribution of morbidity and mortality.  For instance, let’s consider the transgenerational epigenetic impact of malnutrition on disease risk and mortality.  Research has shown that epigenetic changes occur in individuals who suffer from malnutrition (an environmental stressor) during their childhood, increasing their children and grandchildren’s risk for cardiovascular disease as well as diabetes (Kuzawa and Sweet, 2009; Gravelee 2009; Sullivan, 2013; Slocum 2013:40).  In their article, Thayer and Kuzawa (2011) review how social and economic inequality can influence epigenetic expression and health through nutritional stress, psychosocial stress, and environmental toxicants.  Nutritional stress in prenatal environments and childhood drastically impacts the health of adults, research has shown that the food insecurity of an individual’s grandparents can increase their risk for cardiovascular disease and diabetes related death.  This is one example of how food insecurity is contributing to morbidity and mortality rates.

Morbidity; or quality of life, is differential distributed across urban spaces.  It is also important for us to understand that morbidity contributes to chronic disease risk and ultimately mortality, the rate of death and dying.  Morbidity is where we see the results of biopower on health inequities, while mortality is where we see the result of necropower on health inequities.  Mbembe (2003) states that necropower is contemporary technologies of power exerted by individuals and groups to maximize the destruction of persons and to create populations subjected to inhuman conditions which makes them “living dead”.  As stated by Jao H. Costa Vargas, “dimensions of Black genocide in the contemporary United States include mass imprisonment, police brutality, high infant mortality, early death (of children, men, women, and the elderly), deficient medical treatment, lack of competitive education and economic opportunities, everyday violence in the inner cities, and chronic depression. …The concepts of symbolic violence and genocidal continuum allow for the understanding of genocide as part of a constellation of phenomena ranging from everyday forms of individualized discrimination to structural marginalization (residential segregation, unemployment, barred access to credit), historically persistent killing of those deemed less than human, and globally connected state policies and cultural knowledge” (2011:259,261-2).  What I am suggesting is that necropower must be understood beyond just military power, especially since sovereignty is not solely found in just deciding who gets to live and who gets to die but also through dictating how these bodies live and how they die.  Power is maintained through multiple strategies and the maintenance of intersecting hegemonic rationales and the fact is, military power is not the sole cause of death not the leading cause of death in the United States, in fact, its cardiovascular disease is.  Food is a contemporary technology used to create and maintain subjugated populations through dehumanizing conditions.  According to Mbembe, “to exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality…sovereignty means the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not” (2003:27).  In other words, he who controls your food, controls you.  Food is a powerful resource that directly contributes to the differential distribution of life and death.  Food deserts are hence biopolitical and necropolitical spaces that result in very particular decisions made about who deserves to live and who deserves die.  The nature of many infrastructures dictates the nature of limited mobility among the working poor, influencing how they shop for groceries or travel to doctors’ appointments.  When we see underserved infrastructures like roads, bridges, lack of basic facilities and services in neighborhoods, we are also seeing specific groups of disempowered people and social scripts that justify the declining infrastructure through a common victim blaming rhetoric.  In this way, infrastructures are the physical materializations of social, political, and economic landscapes.  

CONCLUSION

 Intersectional approaches to these phenomena will help researchers better understand how food deserts can be undone.  The correlations between food deserts and racial residential segregation are results of the same types of economic, social, and political inequities in society.  Urban planning scholars’ approach to food desert research has much to offer to urban sociologists and public health scholars.  Through assessments like that of walkability and bikeability, urban sociologists and public health specialists can have a more reliable analytical tool for measuring mobility.  What much of public health and urban sociologists are missing is a practical approach that looks at the praxis of physical space, urban planning can better offer that.  But this first requires that urban planners move beyond this stagnant point of not having a more realistic grasp on the critical race theory and human biology. This requires that urban planners be critical and realistic of how the work they do impacts public health and then look at trying to understand which relationships matter, which factors need to change.  Employing critical power analyses at each level of inquiry will help construct not only new ways to understand food deserts but also new ways for scholars to implement progressive change.  

 But what remains in question is how urban planners; along with public health specialists, will remedy the profit logic and logic of cost-effectiveness. Is there a way to unhinge these disciplines from the profit engine of capitalism?  Is it possible for urban planners to do anti-capitalist work?  How does working with disempowered community members directly contribute to the public policy work that urban planners do? I look forward to seeing what mixed strategies and methods will be employed to answer these questions in the future.  

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