Fresh for Less: Cross-Sector Collaboration for Funding, Implementation, and Evaluation of a Local Initiative to Improve Equitable Healthy Food Access

Janda, Kathryn M.; Nielsen, Aida; Phelps, Alexis; Helman, Heather; Abel, Andrea; Benz, Simone; Pulido, Carmen Llanes; Helfman, Stephanie; Ranjit, Nalini; Berg, Alexandra van den

doi:10.1353/hpu.2022.0160

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…As the National Fund Manager since 2017, the Reinvestment Fund manages the applications and awarding for the USDA's HFFI program. This public–private partnership has been broadly advertised to “provide capacity building and financing resources to stimulate food business development at scale and build a more equitable food system that supports the health and economic vibrancy of all Americans” (Spade, 2022). However, reporting on the competition process and the awarded projects is incredibly vague.…”

Section: Materializing the Food Desert Abstractionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Materializing the metaphor: Theorizing the food desert as a sociospatial–legal instrument in the production of space

Zurawski

2023

Human Geography

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In June of 2022, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced a new framework to address and transform the food system, including a commitment to increase funding to the Healthy Food Financing Initiative (HFFI) to the tune of $155 million to address “food deserts.” This investment is perplexing given the decade of scholarship and activism critiquing the food desert concept and its tendency to invite supply-side, corporate food retail development, of which the HFFI is emblematic. Bringing legal geographies to critical food studies, this article argues that the food desert concept, as invoked, spatialized, and abstracted by the USDA, is better understood as a socio-spatial-legal instrument imbricated in the production of space. First, this article attends to the USDA's use of the food desert as a guiding metaphor in the production of abstract space, highlighting the dominant characterizations of abstract space—fragmentation, homogenization, and hierarchy. Second, this article traces how this abstraction is materialized through US legislation and policy aimed at “fixing food deserts,” most readily through the HFFI. In the context of extensive scholarship that has criticized the prioritization of capital development and food retail, this analysis engages radical food geography praxis to outline a new terrain for struggle, namely where the discursive comingles with and co-constitutes the legal and spatial. From this analytical vantage point, this article demonstrates how the food desert concept, through US law and policy, is made material and spatial in ways that reproduce inequitable food landscapes and foreclose more radical approaches to food equity. Beyond the context of the food desert concept, this analysis offers an account of how discourse is rendered material, and the consequences therein.

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Section: Materializing the Food Desert Abstractionmentioning

confidence: 99%