After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region in August 2005, black communities were often left out of decisions about which stores should reopen. Ten years after the storm, residents of the Lower 9th Ward, a predominantly black community where most homes and businesses were destroyed by flooding, had no grocery store. Burnell Cotlon, a resident, explained that those who live in the area couldn't even "buy a loaf of bread" nearby. Determined to address the problem, Cotlon decided to open a grocery store. While he faced challenges, including purchasing and refurbishing an extremely old building, "seeing the people that was walking by with the groceries and seeing them get off the bus with all of those bags," kept him motivated. Once open, Burnell's Lower 9th Ward Market became a beacon of hope in a community struggling to rebuild amid a slow, meandering recovery. Still, more than twenty years later, there's still no chain grocery store in the community, no Walmart, Rouse's, or Winn-Dixie. This scarcity persists throughout the country, in cities such as Chicago, Memphis, and Atlanta. On the West Coast, in Los Angeles, White neighborhoods have nearly three times as many grocery stores as Black neighborhoods.

While a full-service grocery store carries eggs, bread, milk, and other staples at market prices, corner stores typically have limited selections, and their products tend to cost more and be of poorer quality. At one spot I visited this month, the cabbage looked discolored, some of the tomatoes looked bruised, and the French bread felt hard as stone. Last month, a close friend purchased a bag of chips in Algiers, another New Orleans neighborhood, and discovered they were stale after a few bites. When he returned to request a refund, the clerk gave him his money back, but he did not remove the remaining chips from the shelves, potentially exposing others to expired products. Since items sold at corner stores are typically more expensive, they stay on the shelf longer, exposing those who do buy them to lower-quality items. And shopping elsewhere may be easier said than done. Approximately 17% of Black households throughout the country don't have access to a car, compared to 6% of white households.

Whether intentional or not, stores offering these low-quality products in predominantly black communities cause harm. In a qualitative study published in Health and Place, a Black participant shared their experience of shopping at stores in their community. "They don't have the fresh meats — fresh poultry or fresh fish, where you can say I want that one, and that one. It's not like that, they're already packaged, sealed, with price, and a deadline for when it's supposed to be no longer sold, but you know, that may or may not be checked (Kumar et al., 2010)." Black people are more likely to live in what sociologists have referred to as food deserts. In these neighborhoods, residents have limited access to healthy food options, such as fruits and vegetables.

This racial disparity can be explained in part by this country's legacy of racial redlining and other policies that isolated many Black families in lower-income communities, marked as "high risk" for investors, which limited the number of grocery stores built there. But research suggests this is not something attributable only to class. For example, one study found that "predominantly Black neighborhoods have tended to have fewer supermarkets regardless of economic composition," so that even wealthier Black people are more likely to face this problem than their white counterparts. A Preventing Chronic Disease study, researchers found “mixed-race or white high-poverty areas and all African American areas (regardless of income) were less likely than predominantly white higher-income communities to have access to foods that enable individuals to make healthy choices. Fast food, corner stores, and gas stations are more readily available in their communities than full-service grocery stores. And what may seem like an oasis after a long walk often turns out to be nothing but a mirage, given the low-quality food sold to consumers.

The Trump administration placed new restrictions on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) that now prohibit recipients from using their food stamps to purchase soft drinks, energy drinks, and candy, according to the Louisiana Department of Health. Some places have posted notices on their front doors informing customers of this policy change. But the irony isn't lost on Black customers that they haven't shifted toward carrying more fresh fruits and vegetables. As it stands, the government has prohibited families facing food insecurity from buying soft drinks, energy drinks, or candy without addressing the scarcity of healthy food alternatives in their communities. "African Americans perceive that they are discounted, their voices not heard, and that the consumer nutrition environment available to them is poorer because of a lack of attention to stores that cater to a predominantly low-income, Black consumer base (Kumar et al., 2010)."

On a surface level, poor-quality food in convenience or corner stores has nothing to do with the color of someone's skin, since anyone can shop there. After all, racial segregation and discrimination were banned in 1964 through the passage of the Civil Rights Act. But, given that much of America remains de facto segregated, Black people are more likely to live in areas where residents have less access to fresh fruits and vegetables. While there are many corner stores, fast-food restaurants, and gas stations in black communities, Tach and Amorim (2015) found that this amounted to a "food mirage," since "food seems plentiful, but high prices limit affordability." Also, Americans should be cautious about assuming this is strictly a socioeconomic issue, because doing so overlooks the racial factors contributing to these disparities. For instance, in a Johns Hopkins Magazine article, Brooks (2014) noted: "The poverty level of a neighborhood certainly matters, but even beyond poverty, the racial composition matters." To improve access to quality fresh fruits and vegetables, we have to consider how racial disparities of this kind were created, and by what means they are maintained.

According to an article published by the National Resources Defense Council, many advocacy groups have moved away from using terms like "food desert" in favor of "food apartheid" to "correctly highlight how racist policies shaped these areas and led to limited access to healthy food. While a food desert may accurately describe the scarcity of healthy food options within a community, some may assume this scarcity is a naturally occurring phenomenon rather than a byproduct of racist policies and practices. The authors noted, "Apartheid is a system of institutional racial segregation and discrimination, and these areas are food apartheids because they too are created by racially discriminatory policies." In another article, Zurawski (2023) noted that the "use of the food desert would be uneventful if it did not become the dominant conceptualization that underwrites laws and legislative proposals," referring to this technique as "violence of abstraction." Despite the limitations of this metaphor, the term continues to appear in research studies. In the Journal of Nutrition, for instance, researchers noted: "In food deserts, groceries are more expensive — milk prices are 5% higher and cereal 25% higher than in other areas (Levy & Pérez-Velazco, 2026)."

When it comes to addressing food scarcity, Black people have demonstrated self-sufficiency. For instance, during the 1960s, the Black Panther Party launched the Free Breakfast for School Children Program to provide healthy meals for students in low-income, black communities. In 1969, Fannie Lou Hamer, a Mississippi voting-rights activist, founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative to support disenfranchised Black sharecroppers. But there are many similar efforts in the modern era aimed at food sovereignty, of a community controlling the food system. In 2006, activists founded the Detroit Black Community Food Sovereignty Network. Dreaming Out Loud was founded in 2013 by Washington D.C. activists and expands access to healthy food for low-income residents. In Los Angeles, California, Feed Black Futures is a group that buys directly from Black and Brown farmers and delivers them to Black mothers impacted by the criminal justice system. In New Orleans in 2008, three years after Katrina, the Sankofa Community Development Corporation was founded in the Lower 9th Ward. In addition to the group’s goal of combating climate change and flooding, it feeds over 800 households.

The creation of the Burnell's Lower 9th Ward Market and other black-owned grocery stores, community gardens, and farmers' markets throughout the country demonstrates that Black people are willing to do what they can to improve conditions. Yet, while these grassroots projects serve a vital role, they do not fully solve the problem. These groups often can’t compete with large grocery chains and depend on temporary grants rather than long-term funding to serve the community. And minority-led nonprofit organizations often receive less financial support, according to the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly. There’s also the issue of zoning policies that restrict the use of available land needed for farming co-operatives. What black communities need is long-term, sustained commitment to addressing the impacts of systemic racism. While the federal government has launched initiatives aimed at eliminating food deserts, such as the Healthy Food Financing Initiative, Freedman et al. noted that these only led to "small improvemenets in availability in food items.” This suggests more should be done to ensure Black people and others living in marginalized communities have access to the food they need to be healthy.