Recent conceptualizations of ‘food deserts’ have expanded from a sole focus on access to supermarkets, to food retail outlets, to all household food sources. Each iteration of the urban food desert concept has associated this kind of food sourcing behavior to poverty, food insecurity, and dietary diversity characteristics. While the term continues to evolve, there has been little empirical evidence to test whether these assumed associations hold in cities of the Global South. This paper empirically tests the premises of three iterations of the urban food desert concept using household survey data collected in Nairobi, Kenya, and Mexico City, Mexico. While these associations are statistically significant and show the expected correlation direction between household food sourcing behavior and food security, the strength of these relationships tends to be weak. These findings indicate that the urban food desert concept developed in North American and UK cities may have limited relevance to measuring urban food insecurity in the Global South.
Moving towards a more sustainable, healthier, and equitable food future requires a significant system transformation. Policies to achieve this transformation are notoriously difficult to achieve, especially where actors with conflicts of interest are involved in governance. In this paper, I analyze how corporate actors frame issues inside a process to develop Front-of-Pack Labelling across the Caribbean. Focusing on three major framing strategies, I show how industry actors argued 1) (falsely) that FOPL would privilege Chilean food suppliers; 2) that FOPL would constitute a major transgression of international trade law; and 3) that a regional public health organization (the Pan-American Health Organization) is an illegitimate influence on the policy. Together, these three framing strategies reconstruct the policy problem as one of trade rather than public health. I argue that the resulting narrative is both a product and a function of the discursive power food companies wield in the standard-setting process and provide empirical detail about how food companies act to prevent policy attempts facilitating food systems transformation.
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