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

Abstract

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.

In June of 2022, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced a new “framework to transform the food system to benefit consumers, producers, and rural communities by providing more options, increasing access, and creating new, more, and better markets for small and mid-size producers” (USDA Press, 2022). This includes a dramatic funding increase of $155 million to the Healthy Food Financing Initiative (HFFI), an Obama-era initiative that seeks to lure food retailers into so-called “food deserts” ¹ through community development financing and food retail and enterprise grants. This is a significant investment given that the HFFI has supported $317 million in total over 10 years (Benson, 2022). Such an investment, however, is perplexing given a decade of scholarship critiquing the food desert concept and its pathologizing tendencies. This proves a necessary point of interrogation, as food inequities and injustices continue to be exacerbated by compounding global events such as the Covid-19 pandemic, climate change crises, supply chain issues, unlivable wages and working conditions, and the deepening wealth gap.

This article attends to this perplexing point by suggesting that the food desert concept has a prominent role in shaping and informing projects and solutions within US food policy. To investigate this dynamic, I bring legal geographies to Henri Lefebvre's production of space analytic to demonstrate how the USDA uses the food desert as a guiding conceptualization in the production of abstract space. As I aim to show, the food desert concept, as mobilized by the USDA, is made materially meaningful through programs such as the HFFI. This analysis suggests that the food desert is more than a discursive problem, but rather articulates how the food desert concept itself becomes a socio-spatial-legal instrument that drives the production of abstract space.

Theoretically, this analysis highlights the potency of discursive and rhetorical descriptors of food inequity by tracing how the food desert concept became materially meaningful in the production of space. This illuminates how federal institutions and food policy can be recruited into the production of space and risk reproducing the very inequities they claim to fix. This bears important questions, or better yet, hesitations, about the role of US policy in ameliorating, reproducing, or exacerbating food inequities. Beyond the theoretical, this analysis builds on what has emerged in recent work as a radical food geographies praxis, which sits at the intersection of food systems scholarship and radical geographies, and exists, in part, to address manifestations of power and assemblies of oppression (Hammelman et al., 2020a, 2020b). Although the intervention herein certainly sits within the theoretical realm, I invoke radical food geographies praxis to foreground the material implications of the food desert concept as a socio-spatial-legal instrument. This draws out a new terrain of struggle, a project nested within a radical food geographies praxis, where the discursive, spatial, and legal comingle in the production of space. Despite claims that the HFFI can “fix” or “eliminate” “food deserts,” I demonstrate how these policies and programs actually (re)produce inequitable food landscapes through the ongoing prioritization of capital development and the exclusion of other more radical, community-demanded initiatives. When considered alongside community-, activist-, and scholar-led demands for more radical actions to address food injustices—such as livable wages, rematriation/repatriation and reparation initiatives, improvements to social security, and increasing nutrition assistance programs (Chilton and Shaak 2022)—the consistent prioritization of capital development within federal food policy can be seen as foreclosing and silencing more radical potentials while also falling short of enacting meaningful change.

Critical food desert scholarship and the limits of supply-side food retail solutions

The food desert concept's emergence offered the potential to illuminate and visualize spatial inequalities, tracing process of devaluation, capital retreat, redlining, and deindustrialization (McClintock, 2011). This proved attractive to activists and nonprofits as a way to make legible programming initiatives and community needs in order to secure funding (Shannon, 2014; Smith, 2012). However, over time, projects to address “food deserts” became limited to supply-side, corporate food retail development, a prioritization that is increasingly ironic given the extensive scholarship demonstrating that access to food does not automatically translate to the purchase of food (Wright et al., 2016) and that altering a food environment does little to alter food acquisition patterns (Cummins et al., 2014; Howerton and Trauger, 2017). To demonstrate the irony of the continual prioritization of supply-side food retail as a solution to “food deserts,” I briefly summarize the scholarship that has critiqued the food desert concept and its hegemonic mobilizations.

As a deficit-centered framework, food desert maps demarcate landscapes and communities as devoid of healthy food resources (Cummins and Macintyre, 2002; Morton et al., 2005; Raja et al., 2008; Short et al., 2007; Sparks et al., 2011; Taylor and Ard, 2015). This translates into an overemphasis on supply-side deficiencies that quantify access solely through the availability of corporate grocery stores and supermarkets (Alkon et al., 2013; Short et al., 2007). In this framing, a relational analysis of the supply and demand of food system is foreclosed, as is any systemic analysis beyond the confines of corporate food retail (Alkon et al., 2013; Alkon and Guthman, 2017; Shannon, 2014).

Framing the problem of “food deserts” as a supply-side deficiency also translates into similar problems with the solutions to “turn the food desert into a food oasis.” As Jerry Shannon (2014) notes, the spatial pathologization of “food deserts” quarantines health threats and prescribes specific health-related solutions (Shannon 2014 citing Craddock 2000). By identifying the problem as a dearth of corporate food retail access, the solution is thereby limited to economic development projects to bring in supermarkets and grocery stores.

This deficit framing also reinscribes what Ashanté Reese (2019: 46–7) has noted as narratives of nothingness that elides resident knowledges, understandings, critiques, and navigations of their food geographies, demonstrating how these narratives are writ onto landscapes and internalized by community members. When paired with an explicit failure to shift “the public health conversation away from personal responsibility and individual choice,” this framing invites neoliberal education-based solutions that “locates the problem in the knowledges of low-income people, and blames them for not ‘knowing’ what to eat,” while also failing to account for the ways that race, class, and gender structure food inequity to begin with (Alkon et al., 2013: 128, 133; Alkon and Guthman, 2017; Guthman, 2011; Reese, 2019; Shannon, 2014).

Bringing the production of space to critical food studies

These critiques are necessary entry points to understand what is at stake with the food desert concept; however, there remains room to interrogate why, despite these critiques, supply-side corporate food retail remains the preeminent solution prescribed by the USDA. With a total federal investment in the HFFI of nearly half a billion dollars, it is undeniable that the USDA has sponsored significant transformations in food landscapes. In the context of these critiques, I posit that the food desert concept itself plays an important role in the justification and invitation of these limited, supply-side, corporate food retail development solutions. To investigate how this abstract concept is concretized, I turn to a legal geographic analytic that draws upon Henri Lefebvre's theory of the production of space. With specific attention to process, I trace the construction of the food desert abstraction through the three Lefebvrian tendencies of abstract space: fragmentation, homogenization, and hierarchy. I then examine how this food desert abstraction is made spatially, legally, and materially meaningful within “food desert policy.” Methodologically, I conduct this analysis through archival investigations of the emergence of the food desert concept and legal archaeology of all legislative invocations of the food desert concept. With attention to the precise moments the concept is spatialized and mobilized up by US legal institutions, this legal geographic methodology allows me to pinpoint the creation of a specifically abstracted food desert and its codification in US law and policy.

Given the development projects that the HFFI has sponsored and its continued investment in changing food landscapes, an investigation of the significance of discourse and metaphor in naturalizing and justifying these projects is a necessary task. Where legal geographies demonstrate the spatial significance of law beyond the realm of pure discourse, I argue that such a move must also not swing too far away from understanding the potency of discourse. Bringing legal geographies and the production of space to critical food scholarship bears important contributions to both. For one, I extend a Lefebvrian analysis of the role of legal judgments in reproducing abstract space to also include the role of legislation and federal institutions in the uneven development of food landscapes and thus the production of space. Additionally, I follow a Lefebvrian preoccupation with how abstractions are driven by practices, representations, discourses, and the very institutions that foment such processes. For critical food studies, this brings attention to the role law and policy has in retrenching and naturalizing food inequities. Altogether, this article demonstrates how the food desert concept undergirds US legislation and policy and the projects they prescribe and is, therefore, imbricated in the production of space through the (re)production of inequitable food landscapes. Thus, the food desert concept transcends the discursive through its mobilization as a socio-spatial-legal instrument put in the service of capital development. Beyond the confines of food policy, this article provides an empirical account of how discourse is rendered material and the role of law in such materializations.

The violence of abstraction in the production of space

To understand the food desert concept, its invocation in the USDA's HFFI, and its relationship to broader processes of capital development, I turn to Henri Lefebvre's project in The Production of Space ([1974] 1991) ² generally and the role of abstract space specifically. This requires more than a reproach of abstraction (Butler, 2016), but attention to the process by which this abstraction is imbricated in the production of space, and the consequences of such imbrication. To begin, I briefly detail Lefebvre's theory of the production of space and the theorization of law in this process.

The production of space

In his transformative text, The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre ([1974] 1991) offers a unitary theory of space that articulates how social life is spatially shaped and historically configured, thus confronting a notion of space as an empty container or mere backdrop to social life (Elden, 2007: 112; Gottdiener, 1993: 131). With an eye to how humans produce and reproduce space, Lefebvre saw space as the ultimate locus of struggle, where competition over the production of space means that any politically oriented or revolutionary project must attend to space as a political project (Lefebvre, 1991; Molotch, 1993: 890). Famously, Lefebvre states “there is a politics of space because space is political” (1991: 59).

However, as Japhy Wilson (2013) and Chris Butler (2016) point out, more accurate would be to say that Lefebvre's specific concern was with the “alienation and abstraction characteristic of capitalist modernity” and in tracing the history of abstraction as a process (Butler, 2016; Elden, 2001; Wilson, 2013: 366). When situating The Production of Space within Lefebvre's oeuvre, his preoccupation with the nature of state power and its central role in the production of abstract space is rendered more explicit (Butler, 2016: 19). Important and largely unacknowledged as Chris Butler shows, Lefebvre's exploration into the development of abstraction theorizes social space and state power, showing how “forms of abstraction play a pivotal role in both law's self-definition and its reproduction of social relations” (Butler, 2016: 2).

Abstract space ³

Indisputably, abstractions are prolific in our world. They are necessary to how we think, imagine, represent, and dream. Representations of space are likewise necessarily abstract and “play a part in social and political practice” (Lefebvre, 1991: 41). Although Lefebvre notes that a defining marker of modernity is the “inescapable need to navigate a path through the continual production of abstractions,” (Butler, 2009: 16; Lefebvre, 1995: 193) it would be an oversimplification to say that all abstractions are part of the production of space. Instead, Lefebvre delineates between those who produce space for domination and those who produce space as an appropriation to serve human needs (Molotch, 1993: 889). In this distinction, space produced for domination is space put toward an abstract purpose, such as the reproduction of capital, thus producing what Lefebvre distinguishes as abstract space (Molotch, 1993: 890). Abstract space is then another aspect of alienation under capitalism and is space that is put to service, again, for some abstract purpose such as power, profit, exclusion, or the reproduction of capital (Lefebvre, 1991: 288; Molotch, 1993: 887, 890).

Throughout the entirety of his oeuvre, Lefebvre historicizes the emergence of abstract space, beginning in the nineteenth century and evolving over the twentieth century through the production of an “urban fabric” “founded on a ‘vast network of banks, business centres, and major productive entities…motorways, airports and information lattices’” (Wilson, 2013, p. 367 citing Lefebvre, 1991, pp. 53, 307). Throughout The Production of Space, ⁴ Lefebvre offers two examples of the development of abstract space and its material manifestations. In the first, Lefebvre looks to the agrarian reforms and peasant revolutions of the twentieth century, which transformed large swaths of landscapes and emptied out landscapes of complex histories, all in service of abstract space (1991: 55). This is representative of how Lefebvre understood how certain relationships to space are valorized (land put to use for abstract purposes such as capital, profit, and labor), curating a sort of “spatial consensus” where such relationships are rendered “quasi-legal” and thus unquestioned and regularized as part of civilization (Lefebvre, 1991: 56).

Lefebvre's second example is the contrast between center and periphery, where the “centre organizes that which is ‘around it, arranging and hierarchizing the peripheries’” (Butler, 2016: 10; Lefebvre, 1976: 17). This is taken up in more recent scholarship on planetary urbanization ⁵ ; however, Lefebvre notes how city and urban centers “overtook the countryside and sharpened its domination and exploitation of it,” arguing that “urban space became a giant and ‘terrifying’ abstraction, or ‘abstraction in action’” (Butler, 2016: 10; Lefebvre, 1991: 268–269). As Chris Butler (2016: 10) notes, the effects of this “terrifying urban abstraction in action” endure today as peripheral spaces suffer the lost support of the center and lose their share of distribution of power, wealth, resources, and information. This is especially prescient for the analysis herein, as it opens up analytical space to see “how political, administrative and legal institutions actively intervene in the production of abstract space, using it as a political instrument through which social order can be reinforced” (Butler, 2016, p. 10; Lefebvre, 1991, pp. 312–313, emphasis added).

Law's complicity in the production of abstract space

Exemplified above, Lefebvre is attentive to the role of legal order “in entrenching and reproducing each of the tendencies that characterise abstract space” (Butler, 2016: 11). Where many quote Lefebvre on the “violence intrinsic to abstraction,” more precise would be to say that he saw forms of legal judgments as emblematic of this violence (Butler, 2016: 12; Lefebvre, 1991: 289). In his work following The Production of Space, Lefebvre looked to the nature of state power to elaborate on “law's complicity in reproducing new modes of abstraction” (Butler, 2016: 11). Therefore, Lefebvre's spatial history of the emergence of abstract space offers an opportunity to get precise about how “law … is a powerful force driving the homogenization of socio-spatial relations” and in naturalizing, entrenching, and reproducing the production of abstract space (Butler, 2016: 11–12; Lefebvre, 1991).

Lefebvre's account of the three tendencies within abstract space—fragmentation, homogenization, and hierarchy—“provides one way to explain how law functions concretely through its spatial ordering,” and thus how law reproduces, fosters, and underwrites the production of space (Butler, 2016: 20). Therefore, “identifying, confronting, and resisting the abstract character and concrete manifestations of law require a reframing of both its modes of expression and the practices it produces” (Butler, 2016: 20 citing Cunningham, 2008: 466–7). Despite the proliferation of abstractions within capitalist modernity, the point is not to launch a polemical critique of the abstract, but to investigate how forms of abstraction are developed (Butler, 2009: 16), and I would argue, how they are put to use within processes of the production of space, and the role that legal institutions play in this production.

It is here that I turn to legal geographies to help examine the role that state apparatuses and legal institutions play in the production of abstract space. With similar inroads as Lefebvre's assertion that space is no mere backdrop to the social, legal geographies emerged to confront an assumed passivity and objectivity of space and law, asserting that “geographies of law are neither passive backdrops in legal processes nor of random import” (Blomley and Bakan, 1992: 669). A legal geographic analytic creates an opportunity to investigate the role that law plays in the production of space, with attention to how law and space are relationally co-constructed (Blomley and Bakan, 1992; Blomley and Clark, 1990: 434, 439; Butler, 2009: 324; Molotch, 1993). Put simply, in the world of space, place, and environment, there is nothing that is not affected by the workings of law (Delaney, 2015: 99); therefore, legal geographers take us to where space, law, and (injustice) are co-produced and mutually constituted (Delaney, 2016: 268).

Producing the food desert abstraction

At first glance, the food desert metaphor may seem benign, merely a discursive descriptor of inequitable food landscapes. I argue, however, that it takes on a different status as it becomes adopted, abstracted, and proliferated through the USDA. By looking at the process of how this concept is imbricated in state and legal practices, I trace how the USDA invokes the food desert as a guiding metaphor to then inform food policy. This investigation highlights the role the USDA and later policy and legislation play in invoking the concept to play a very particular role in “entrenching and reproducing each of the tendencies that characterise abstract space” (Butler, 2016: 12; Lefebvre, 1991: 289).

Attentive once again to process, Lefebvre is specific about how abstract space is produced, noting three tendencies of abstract space—fragmentation, homogenization, and hierarchy. Altogether, these three characteristics complexly breakdown space into objective, systemic, empirical, and logical sectors, such as the transportation system, urban networks, the school system, and the banking system (Lefebvre, 1991: 311). Others note the design of and implementation of suburbs is demonstrative of the fragmentary, homogenizing, and hierarchical tendencies of abstract space (Molotch, 1993: 887, 889). Far from a theoretical matter, Lefebvre's abstract space provides the tools to account for how abstract space is produced, including what institutions, practices, and projects construct, reproduce, and rely on certain abstractions of space, while also attending to the purpose for such abstractions. I utilize Lefebvre's analytical tools to create an account of how the USDA invokes the food desert metaphor, transforms it into an abstraction of space that is subsequently taken up and concretized by food policy such as the HFFI. This account demonstrates how the USDA, US legislation, and the projects prescribed through legislation subsequently reproduce and rely on the food desert abstraction. By tracing the production of the food desert abstraction, I suggest the “violence intrinsic to [this] abstraction” is its materialization through food policy that does little to enact meaningful change toward food justice.

To create this account of the production of the food desert abstraction, I articulate the process through the three Lefebvrian characteristics of abstract space—fragmentation, homogeneity, and hierarchy (Butler, 2009: 324; Lefebvre, 1991). Focusing on the production of abstract space by tracing the manifestation of each of its tendencies is, therefore, a useful and generative way to see how state power consolidates in capitalist-industrial rationality (Lefebvre and Goonewardena, 2008: 128). This is especially necessary as “abstract space works in highly complex way[s]” (Lefebvre, 1991: 56) and is less a simple representation or ideological outcome (Lefebvre, 1991: 393) but a practice which when attended to helps theorize the process of the production of space and the nature of state power (Butler, 2009: 3; Stanek, 2008). Attention to the proces remains true to a Lefebvrian approach and visibilizes the complex intertwining of representations and materiality, making this a potent analytic to bring to the food desert metaphor and its imbrication in US policy (Elden, 2004: 16; Wilson, 2013: 365).

(Legally) defining the food desert

The food desert concept first appeared in US law in the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008 (2008 Farm Bill), which generally defined a “food desert” as “an area in the United States with limited access to affordable and nutritious food, particularly such an area composed of predominantly lower-income neighborhoods and communities” (Title VI, §7527, 2008). The 2008 Farm Bill also included a mandate to report on “the problem of food deserts,” resulting in a year-long study, two conferences, and a set of commissioned research studies conducted by the USDA, the Economic Research Service (ERS), and the Food and Nutrition Service. These studies and conferences produced the 2009 USDA ERS Study “Access to Affordable and Nutritious Food: Measuring and Understanding Food Deserts and Their Consequences” (Ver Ploeg et al., 2009) and the 2011 unveiling of the “Food Desert Locator Map” (USDA ERS, 2011). These two deliverables represent a moment of redefinition where a new, quantifiable, spatialized, and notably hegemonic food desert emerged, defined as: “low-income census tracts with a substantial number or share of residents with low levels of access to retail outlets selling healthy and affordable foods” (USDA ERS, 2011). This definitional transformation is also significant as the moment the USDA begins to put the metaphor in service of abstract space.

Fragmentation: Census tracts and the making of statistical, objective space

Lefebvre describes fragmentation as the breaking down of space into “facts” and “statistics” (1991: 82), representing these fragmentations as true, objective spaces. In this process, everything “is separated, assigned in isolated fashion to unconnected ‘sites’ and ‘tracts’; the spaces themselves are specialized” (Stanek, 2008: 71). This slicing of space into parcels and the “subdivision of space for purposes of buying and selling” (Lefebvre, 1991: 365) is then further promulgated and reinforced by academic and professional disciplines such as geography, economics, architecture, law, and planning, all of which rely on and, I would add, naturalize this carving up of space to bolster their own specialized interests (Butler, 2016: 8).

The USDA's use of census tracts as the means to map and measure “food deserts” is emblematic of fragmentation within a Lefebvrian notion of abstract space. As “relatively permanent statistical subdivisions of a county,” census tracts “provide a stable set of geographic units for the presentation of statistical data” (United States Census Bureau, 2022). Researchers at the USDA's ERS explicitly chose census tracts “to establish a consistent definition for national comparison” as it is standardized, commonly used, and a consistent mapping and quantification protocol (Dutko et al., 2012: 5). And yet, the reliance on census tracts as statistical, factual, and objective spaces goes without much interrogation.

Through this fragmentation, the food desert metaphor is codified and spatialized onto census tracts, thus represented as statistical, objective, and factual spaces, isolated and bounded for the explicit purpose of specialized examination and study. The consequence of this spatial fragmentation is the erasure of complex social relationships within and throughout space and the resultant commodification of space, both of which set the stage for the entrance of these fragmentary spaces into circuits of capital accumulation (Butler, 2016: 8). Analogous to a Marxian critique of commodity fetishism, fragmentation “obscures the social relationships embodied within it, and introduces a fetishism of ‘space as space in itself’” (Butler, 2016: 8; Lefebvre, 1991: 90). In fragmenting the metaphor into census tracts, any sort of critical interrogation of the constructedness of census tracts themselves ⁶ and how their constructedness informs the materialization and spatialization of the food desert concept is foreclosed. Furthermore, this fragmentation primes “food desert” census tracts to be taken up into capital accumulation circuits through development schemes and improvement projects such as the HFFI.

Homogenization: Measuring “food deserts” and the erasure of particularities

Fragmented space is in the same instance homogenous space, as Lefebvre sees these processes as interdependent and simultaneous tendencies of abstract space: “homogeneity results in fragmentation, and fragmentation determines homogeneity” (Stanek, 2008: 71). Attending once again to process, it is “the submission of fragments of space to the universalizing logic of exchange value [that] provides a dramatic example of a second tendency which is also inherent within abstract space—the drive towards homogenization” (Butler, 2016: 9). The process of homogenization entails erasing, grinding, and crushing differences and peculiarities, a practice that is fostered by fragmentation and its reliance on measurement and quantification of space.

Where the USDA's fragmentation creates statistical, quantifiable, and consistent units of measure, it also foments the twinned drive toward homogenization. Under the USDA's definition, census tracts are demarcated as “food deserts” “if they meet both low-income and low-food-access criteria” (Dutko et al., 2012: 1; Johnson and Stewart, 2021; USDA ERS, 2011; Ver Ploeg et al., 2009). ⁷ To be low income, census tracts must have “a poverty rate of 20% or greater, or a median family income at or below 80% of the statewide or metropolitan area median family income” (Johnson and Stewart, 2021; USDA ERS, 2011). To be considered low access, census tracts must have “at least 500 persons and/or at least 33% of the population living more than 1 mile from a supermarket or large grocery store, or 10 miles in the case of a rural census tract” (Johnson and Stewart, 2021; USDA ERS, 2011).

It is here that we see the homogenization of what constitutes “low access” through the simplified measure of “distance to the nearest supermarket or large grocery store” (Ver Ploeg et al., 2009: vi). This variable only quantifies access through corporate grocery stores and supermarkets while erasing noncorporate and small food sources such as bodegas, corner stores, community gardens, food pantries, and the like (De Master and Daniels, 2019; Short et al., 2007). In the drive to quantify and measure, these variables erase complex spatial diversities and particularities that are necessary to understanding food inequity. Instead, the lived realities, nuances, particularities, and specificities of lived food geographies are emptied out and flattened, emblematic of the lethal violence of abstract space that “destroys the historical conditions that gave rise to it…in order to impose an abstract homogeneity” (Lefebvre, 1991: 370).

This homogenization entrenches a plethora of flawed assumptions and problems noted in critical scholarship. For one, these measures fail to attend to the historical processes behind the “creation” of “food deserts”; they also erase the noncorporate retail and community assets from the equation while also eliding any consideration of the affordability and quality of the foods within food retailers; and finally, they dismiss the agency of neighborhood residents through everyday practices and quiet refusals, instead assuming they are passive and immobile consumers unable to travel across census tract lines (Alkon et al., 2013; Cummins et al., 2007; De Master and Daniels, 2019; McClintock, 2011; Reese, 2019; Rosenberg and Cohen, 2018; Shannon, 2014).

The consequence of this homogenization, however, is even more subtle. To Lefebvre, abstract space “simply has homogeneity as its goal” (1991: 287; Stanek, 2008: 78–79) with the purpose of homogenization to “facilitate the manipulation of social space as an exploitable resource” (Lefebvre, 1991: 287, 355; Wilson, 2013: 368). Simply put, the drive to commodify space fosters an intense drive toward fragmentation and homogeneity, as this flattening and erasure of diversity are instrumental to the state's crafted perception of coherence and rationality needed to “perpetuate ‘the relations of domination’” (Butler, 2016: 9; Lefebvre, 1991: 95; Wilson, 2013: 370). It is through the final characteristic in the production of abstract space—hierarchy—that the moralizing violence of this drive to abstraction comes to light.

Hierarchy: Pathologizing “food deserts”

The simultaneous tendencies of fragmentation and homogenization “mutually reinforce each other and are supplemented by a third orientation towards the hierarchical ordering of a space” (Butler, 2016: 10; Lefebvre, 1991: 342) as the process of producing abstract space also seeks to “assign special status to particular places by arranging them in the hierarchy…stipulat[ing] exclusion (for some) and integration (for others)” (Lefebvre, 1991: 288). Lefebvre's example of center and periphery helps to envision this tendency, as he notes how “the centre organises that which is ‘around it, arranging and hierarchizing the peripheries’” (Butler, 2016: 10; 1991: 17).

The USDA's hierarchical ordering of space is a relatively simple process following on the heels of the fragmentary mapping and homogenizing quantification that locates and quarantines so-called “food desert” spaces. Simply, the USDA's hierarchy is an either-or binary: either a census tract is a “food desert” or it is not. If the census tract qualifies as low access and low income then it is demarcated as a “food desert”; if the census tract does not fulfill either of these variables, then it is not a “food desert” (USDA ERS—Documentation, n.d.; USDA ERS, 2011).

The “violence of abstraction” is less obvious within this category as the USDA's mapping and measuring of “food deserts” does not seem problematic when decontextualized from the broader state project of capital development. However, when contextualizing this hierarchy within the moralizing judgments shot through food desert metaphor, the violence of abstraction is visibilized through the pathologization of “food deserts.” As scholarship has noted, “food deserts” are pathologized as places of lack, as devoid of healthy resources necessary to support human life (Cummins and Macintyre, 2002; Morton et al., 2005; Raja et al., 2008; Short et al., 2007; Sparks et al., 2011; Taylor and Ard, 2015) and as problem in need of fixing (Peters, 2013; Shannon, 2014; Walsh, 2011). The pathologization of communities located within “food deserts” is critiqued as reproductive of a Manichean dualism of unhealthy and healthy landscapes which privileges and normalizes white, middle-class foodscapes as the ideal food landscape against which “food deserts” are pathologized (Guthman, 2011; Peters, 2013; Reese, 2019; Shannon, 2014; Walsh, 2011; Zitcer, 2017). The pathologization of supposed unhealthy or obesogenic environments—positioning “food deserts” as the cause for obesity or unhealthy eating habits—again oversimplifies and elides an analysis of how individuals navigate food geographies that are structured by broader processes of class and racial formations (Guthman, 2011; Reese, 2019; Shannon, 2014). Thus, the hierarchy created through the food desert binary—where a census tract either is a “food desert” or it is not—organizes census tracts through a moralization of food landscapes where white, middle-class food landscapes featuring big-box corporate grocery stores are the idealized norm against which “food deserts” are pathologized.

The production of abstract space is not an ahistorical process but is “strategically pursued by the combined force of juridical and political institutions and processes of capital accumulation” (Butler, 2016: 10). Attending to the co-constitutive nature of these tendencies visibilizes the production of abstract space as a process of a “complex institutional ensemble” facilitated by the state to “break up social space in the service of commodification” (Butler, 2016: 19). The production of abstract space writ large, then, is simultaneously a historical, spatial expression, a concretization of capitalist relations, and a technology essential “for the state in the accumulation of capital and the consolidation of the national territory” (Wilson, 2013: 376). As Chris Butler points out, this importantly identifies a correlation between state interventions and the tendencies toward fragmentation, homogenization, and hierarchical ordering that produce abstract space (2016: 19). Especially important for Lefebvre, then, is attention to the economic, technological, and administrative institutions and powers that foment this process (Butler, 2016:10). Therefore, the above accounting of how the food desert concept is abstracted by the USDA's mapping and quantification initiatives provides a powerful observation of the process of producing abstract space.

Materializing the food desert abstraction

As the above makes plain, the USDA captured an already-existing metaphor and rendered it a useful tool in the production of abstract space, exemplified through the key tendencies of fragmentation, homogenization, and hierarchy. The question remains, then, to what end is the food desert abstraction materialized? How, if at all, is the food desert metaphor imbricated in the production of space for domination? In what follows, I return to a legal geographic analysis to examine how the USDA's use of the metaphor is made materially meaningful and thus is imbricated in the production of space.

The food desert abstraction in US policy

As of spring 2023, there are 20 unique legislative proposals and three farm bills that invoke the food desert, beginning with the 2008 Farm Bill. Shortly after the 2009 USDA ERS report that codified the USDA's food desert abstraction, initiatives and programs to address the problem of “food deserts” proliferated. This report and the reconceptualization of food deserts it contained would serve as the impetus for future programs to address “food deserts,” with the most notable being the HFFI and Michelle Obama's Let's Move campaign, both announced in February of 2010. These two initiatives directly cite the 2009 USDA ERS report, suggesting the arrival of the food desert abstraction into material programs and policies. Together, these programs came with a $400 million pledge to “lure retailers of healthy foods into the so-called food deserts of America” (Holzman, 2010: A156).

Logistically, the HFFI recruits multiple federal departments—the USDA, the Department of the Treasury, and the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS)—to “help bring grocery stores to underserved areas and help places such as convenience stores and bodegas carry healthier food options” in order “to eliminate food deserts across the country within seven years” (Office of the First Lady, 2010). At its inception, each department would adopt a different approach: the USDA would expand farm products and locally produced foods at retail outlets in underserved communities; the Treasury would provide grants for private sector financing for healthy food projects; and the HHS would finance community projects (Benson, 2022). Although the USDA did not receive HFFI funding until 2017, the Treasury and DHHS developed competitive grants and technical assistance within their existing Community Development Financial Institution Program and Community Economic Development Program, respectively. These competitive grants claim to increase access to healthy foods in low-income and underserved areas, although in practicality they finance loans for local development projects and grocery stores and other retail outlets without much by way of reporting back or quantifying how these development projects logistically increase access to healthy foods in “food deserts.” Instead, they rely on “if you build it, they will come” mentality, assuming that financing food retail projects will lead to improved food access (Short et al., 2007: 363; see also Chung and Myers, 1999; Guthman, 2011).

This programming format—providing loans, grants, and technical assistance to finance food retailers and local development—would also carry over to the USDA's branch of the HFFI program, authorized by Congress through the Agricultural Act of 2014 (2014 Farm Bill). This authorization created the USDA's HFFI as a stand-alone project to “provide loans, grants, and technical assistance to food retailers to help them place grocery stores and other healthy food retail outlets in underserved communities” (Benson, 2022). The 2014 Farm Bill is also important in its explicit codification of the USDA's food desert abstraction into public law. In the following years, most legislative proposals invoke the same abstraction, ⁸ however, brunt of these proposals have since died on the floor. This leaves the HFFI as the legal precedent, codifying the concretization and materialization of the food desert abstraction, exemplifying how state power consolidates through the manifestation of the food desert abstraction.

Translating the food desert abstraction into material projects

As the federal government's most prolific initiative to target “food deserts,” the HFFI has financed $500 million since 2011. Most recently, Congress allocated $155 million to the USDA HFFI program, which is more than 30 times what the USDA received for this program in any previous fiscal year (Benson, 2022). Specifically, the HFFI is meant “to improve access to healthy food in underserved areas, to create and preserve quality jobs, and to revitalize low-income communities” (Dept. of Agriculture Reorganization Act of 1994, PL 113-79 §4206). Logistically, the HFFI does this by establishing a national fund manager (currently the Reinvestment Fund) to: raise private capital; provide financial and technical assistance to partnerships; and fund eligible projects to attract fresh, healthy food retailers to underserved areas (Dept. of Agriculture Reauthorization Act of 1994, PL 113-79 §4206). In addition to being located in severely distressed low-income communities, HFFI-funded projects must include one or more of the following characteristics: the project will create retail quality jobs for low-income residents in the community; the project supports regional food systems and locally grown foods; in areas served by public transit, the project is accessible to public transit; the project involves women- or minority-owned businesses ⁹ ; the project receives funding from other sources, including federal agencies; and/or the project otherwise advances the purposes of the Initiative (Dept. of Agriculture Reauthorization Act of 1994, PL 113-79 §4206).

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. There are only two available “Impact Reports” published, with the 2020 Impact Report being the most detailed by including award amounts, name of awardee organizations, and project descriptions (Reinvestment Fund, 2020). The 2021 Impact Report is even more vague, including a list of awardee organization names and locations and a brief demographic snapshot (Reinvestment Fund, 2021). According to these two Impact Reports, 67.5% of the 154 awards made between 2020 and 2021 went to grocery retail, while 30.5% went to alternative retail and local food systems such as CSAs and farmers’ markets, and 39% went to supply chain infrastructure.

It is worth noting that not all HFFI-funded projects are corporate food retail development. For example, in 2020 the Reinvestment Fund awarded $182,859 to the California Indian Museum and Cultural Center, a Native-led non-profit working to revitalize traditional food systems in California. This award “develop[ed] a California Indian Traditional Foods Incubator with resilient solar power to increase access to traditional foods for retail sales in Sonoma, Lake, and Mendocino Counties” (Reinvestment Fund, 2020). Certainly, this type of programming is not the target of the critique herein. Rather, the point is to highlight that even with these innovative, necessary, and radical potentialities, overwhelmingly the HFFI continues to prioritize capital food development projects. Put simply, the food desert concept, as embedded in programs like the HFFI, overwhelmingly prescribes and prioritizes a limited range of “solutions” -namely corporate, supply-side food retail development- to fix the problem of “food deserts.”

This prioritization is increasingly ironic considering the long list of critiques outlined above that have problematized this approach. However, when understanding the food desert abstraction and its imbrication in the USDA's production of abstract space, this prioritization is less confounding. As this analysis draws to the fore, the food desert abstraction is put in service of state development projects and capital accumulation, a hallmark of the role of abstract space in the larger process of the production of space.

Conclusion

Both Lefebvre's production of space and legal geographies offer capacious analytical frames to attend to items that may not, at first glance, seem to be spatial. Yet, Lefebvre insists that abstract space can manifest discursively through spatial language and metaphor, and thus spatial language and attendant abstractions—such as the food desert concept—are important sites of inquiry to understand “why this language is so useful” in the production of space (Elden, 2007: 107). Furthermore, a legal-spatial theory of the food desert concept is potent in its ability to illuminate the processes behind the production of space, drawing out the practices, institutions, and projects involved. Therefore, by applying Lefebvre's theory of the production of space to the food desert concept, I visibilize the complex intertwining of discourse, policy, and state institutions. By looking at the process of how the USDA, as a state apparatus, invokes the food desert as a guiding metaphor, and attending to the process of how this concept is imbricated in state and legal efforts, it becomes apparent that there is indeed a “violence intrinsic to [this] abstraction” and this invocation of the concept plays a very particular role in “entrenching and reproducing each of the tendencies that characterise abstract space” (Butler, 2016: 12; Lefebvre, 1991: 289).

In acknowledgement of the contingencies of spatial practices, it is necessary to note that the USDA's use of the food desert would be uneventful if it did not become the dominant conceptualization that underwrites laws and legislative proposals. This contingency brings to focus how the USDA transformed the food desert concept into a spatial instrument that endures as it informs the solutions and projects prescribed by US legislation and policy. Thus, it is through US legislation and policy that the food desert became a socio-spatial-legal instrument that structures space (Delaney, 2016: 268). However, even though the food desert concept has been invoked to justify and guide the production of uneven food landscapes, a legal–spatial analysis of this process cannot end here. According to Lefebvre and the urban and legal geographers that draw on him, space is not a place of pure domination but is the ultimate terrain of struggle. Rather, for Lefebvre and other scholars of the production of space, the project is two-fold: first, we must see space as political and as a site and medium of struggle (Elden, 2007: 107; Lefebvre, 1991: 59); second, we must treat space itself as a product and investigate how competition over the production of space operates and is experienced, and how space is socially constructed and used (Elden, 2007: 109; Molotch, 1993: 888). These investigations bring into view what Edward Soja calls the spatiality of (in)justice, or “how space is actively involved in generating and sustaining inequality, injustice, economic exploitation, racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression and discrimination” (Soja, 2010: 4).

Thus, an analysis of the production of space brings attention to the processes involved in this production, which also means attention to the contingency of these processes. This provides space to acknowledge the constellation of practices, institutions, and representations that would be involved in deconstructing, contesting, and challenging dominant processes (Delaney, 2016: 269). Therefore, while the food desert concept remains a hegemonic spatial representation, there is ample room for it to be contested and challenged. The most poignant example of this contestation is the concept of food apartheid, first coined by Karen Washington as a community-based description of food inequity (Brones, 2018; Washington, n.d.). Food apartheid is a direct confrontation to the many pitfalls and problems with the food desert concept as it stays attentive to the structural causes and processes underlying inequitable food distribution, while also holding onto how this inequitable distribution is a reflection of uneven economic development and systemic anti-Blackness (Reese, 2019: 7). However, food apartheid has yet to fully replace the food desert conceptualization in media, popular discourse, and scholarly writing despite demands from the Movement for Black Lives, community activists, and critical food studies scholars (Washington in Brones 2018; O’Neil-White 2020; Reese 2019). Additionally, there has yet to be a single piece of legislation to mention food apartheid. Thus, if law plays a significant materializing the food desert concept, then it does so by also restricting and excluding the representation of inequitable food landscapes as food apartheid. Although this is emblematic of the persistent invalidation and exclusion of competing visions and counter-representations of unjust food landscapes, it also signals an alternative sociospatial representation that most certainly can disrupt the hegemony of the food desert.

Thus, following a radical food geographies praxis that envisions and strives for more just food futures and more equitable food landscapes, this analysis points to a new terrain of struggle where the discursive comingles and co-constitutes the legal and spatial. This terrain of struggle is especially prescient in this current moment with many new federal initiatives and interest in food access and food justice, such as the 2023 Farm Bill on the horizon and the recent White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health held in September of 2022. The question, then, is how to center the political possibilities and alternative visionings, such as that of food apartheid? How do we confront law in its organization of space to prioritize the visions, imaginaries, and representations of space within of communities most impacted by food apartheid? The easy answer is through attention to the conceptualizations of food inequity used in media, scholarship, and in policy. This analysis brings into view, once again, the need to prioritize and make space for community-based voices and demands, in this instance by centering food apartheid as a more capacious and appropriate conceptualization of food inequity. By attending to how the food desert concept is imbricated in the production of space through US law and policy, this makes spaces to contest this process, which undeniably brings greater questions into view, namely about what food justice means in a system where the law has a hand in reproducing spatial food injustices. Simply, how does the United States legal system constrain, frustrate, or thwart food justice? Or better yet, how could it more directly enact food justice?