Abstract
If language plays a powerful role in shaping how we see and think about the world and structuring material practices, then the language that is used to describe inequitable food landscapes demands critical investigation. This article attends to the potency of language by interrogating the metaphorical “desert” within the food desert concept. By mapping the extensive critiques of the food desert metaphor onto longer histories of US settler colonialism and imperialism that leverage imperial ideologies about deserts as empty, barren, lacking, and in need of improvement, this article traces what the author calls a colonial desert imaginary embedded within the food desert. Staying with the problem of the metaphorical desert within the food desert refuses to forgive or look past this problematic connection, but instead tethers it to long colonial histories, imperial logics, and ideologies about arid landscapes. More than just an invitation to think critically about inherited concepts and easy metaphors to describe food inequities, this interrogation of the desert within the food desert metaphor is critically necessary, lest scholars lose sight of the counterimaginaries and alternate modes of relating to and thriving within arid landscapes that refuse these imperial ideologies and colonial spatial imaginaries.
Deserts have borne witness to imperial takeovers and arboreal chauvinism, religious mythologies of redemption and sublime asceticism, civilizing missions and Malthusian anxieties, toxic wastelanding and nuclear colonialism. Beyond mere landscapes, deserts have political lives that are a key component in imperial worldmaking as they have been mobilized—both materially and metaphorically—to bolster imperial ideologies of civilization and justify colonial expropriation and accumulation.1 Numerous scholars have detailed the histories of environmental imaginaries about arid landscapes and excavated the material impacts of ideological orientations toward arid landscapes that facilitate, rationalize, and justify, from nuclear colonialism, militarization, toxic wastelanding, and expropriation.2 From this perspective, deserts offer a unique vantage point to investigate empire. These rich and comprehensive accounts also speak to the reach of desert imaginaries, drawing attention to how these spatial imaginaries “rationalize and facilitate the dispossession necessary to the logic of imperial and capitalist expansion,” even in nondesert spaces.3 I add that this can also apply to metaphorical invocations of deserts to describe nondesert landscapes, as is the case with the food desert.4 In this article I take these literatures a step further to examine the metaphorical desert conjured by the food desert. Inspired by Natalie Koch’s examination of the political lives of deserts and Tanya Titchkosky’s investigation of impairment rhetoric, I explore the persistent use of the desert metaphor in descriptions of inequitable food landscapes to suggest that there is something more behind the rhetorical invocation of the desert—namely, the colonial desert imaginary.5
The food desert metaphor has been subject to considerable and necessary critiques by scholars and activists, alongside calls for conceptualizing food inequities as tethered to the structural processes like uneven economic development and systemic anti-Blackness that cause food inequities—for example, through food apartheid.6 I echo these calls and critiques but also suggest that we must stay with the problem of the food desert metaphor lest we miss an opportunity for deeper interrogation. I fear that in calls to abandon this problematic concept, we miss important lessons about the colonial desert imaginary that has been sedimented into the food desert metaphor.
As “stories and ways of talking about places and spaces,” spatial imaginaries offer a unique analytical vantage point to interrogate how power operates through collectively shared ideas, stories, mental maps, beliefs, and perceptions about spaces and places.7 Attending to spatial imaginaries also provides opportunities to investigate how they travel, in this case through metaphors that become the discursive vehicle to mobilize, naturalize, and depoliticize spatial imaginaries. Therefore not only are metaphors unique convergences of language, imagination, and power, but when conjured through spatial imaginaries they “transcend language as embodied performances by people in the material world.”8 Thus, leaving the metaphorical desert uninterrogated risks ignoring the social and material implications that it would have. I therefore trouble the metaphorical “desert” within the food desert, opening it up to scrutiny and reckoning with the representations, politics, and material futures that are hidden within.9
This approach illuminates the centuries-old spatial imaginary conjured by the food desert, what I call a colonial desert imaginary. At the bedrock of this imaginary are contradictory imperial ideologies about arid landscapes, representing them as simultaneously pathologically deficient and places in need of improvement, as problem and possibility, as ruined and in need of redemption. This imaginary is notably detached from the ecologically complex variegation of arid landscapes, thus ignoring the material realities of desert landscapes while simultaneously invisibilizing other spatial imaginaries about arid landscapes, especially ones grounded in material life. And yet, despite all of the ways to imagine deserts—as ecologically complex and variable, as rich sites for local populations and witnesses to long histories of imperial projects and violences—the food desert metaphor came to draw upon the colonial desert imaginary.
Turning to environmental histories and colonial conceptualizations of arid landscapes, I offer a brief introduction to the ideological positionings, treatments, and narratives that shape the colonial desert imaginary. Through this discussion I draw out the colonial practice of representing arid landscapes as both problem and possibility, where deserts are simultaneously pathologized through a “regime of emptiness” that contains within it the seeds of the imperial impetus to improve these pathologized places.10 As this article delineates, this twinned process has uncanny similarities to how the food desert metaphor pathologizes food landscapes and communities, creates an imperative to map and quantify pathological spaces, and contains an impetus to improve food landscapes through capitalist development schemes. I argue that these commonalities show how the metaphorical desert within the food desert conjures colonial desert imaginaries that are freighted with colonial narratives, imperialist ideologies of improvement and accumulation, and hierarchies of humanity that are predicated on anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity. Far from a mere discursive matter, this gives credence to the extensive critiques of the metaphor—for example, helping to illuminate why it is that food deserts are pathologized as they are, why this pathologization is naturalized and rendered common sense, and why the solutions to improve so-called food deserts are limited to corporate grocery store development. Through this analysis, I argue that refracting inequitable food landscapes through a colonial desert imaginary does significant ideological and moral work. Staying with the problem of the metaphorical desert within the food desert refuses to forgive or look past this problematic connection; instead it yokes the food desert metaphor to long colonial histories, imperial logics, and ideologies about arid landscapes.
Constructing the Colonial Desert Imaginary
Despite the ecological complexity and sheer variety of the landscapes that are collapsed under the moniker, deserts are overwhelmingly represented as empty, worthless, absent of life, unproductive, morally repulsive, and pathologically deficient. At the same time, this “regime of emptiness,” as Sami Henni terms it, rationalizes and co-constructs the representation of deserts as places in need of domestication, human industry, civilization, and improvement.11 While these representations have been seemingly naturalized and rendered commonsensical through popular culture and temporal distance from the histories that shaped them, the reality is that these moral and ideological treatments are centuries old and yet omnipresent.
Less a sedimented reality, this representation of deserts is a historical and imaginative construct that has morphed and changed over time and space.12 Despite the shifting orientations toward arid landscapes, the colonial desert imaginary prioritizes an Anglo-European tradition that simultaneously pathologizes arid landscapes and glorifies them as the site of potential improvement. This draws from Greek and Roman perspectives that saw riches in the fertile and ecstatic space of deserts and the environmental determinism of Hippocrates and Aristotle, which bolstered the notion of torrid zones that saw the earth as divided into different zones of habitability. The emergence of Christianity entrenched this dual connotation, where the desert was the divine retribution doled out as a result of man’s original sin but was also a redemptive site for human stewardship in attempts to recreate the Garden of Eden.13 Under this rubric, the desert represents the site of a Christian cycle of condemnation and devastation and, in the same instance, atonement and redemption.14 Altogether, these environmental imaginaries set the groundwork for the belief in the construction of difference of peoples through the environment and landscapes, setting root for moral judgments about arid landscapes and their inhabitants as uncivilized, barbaric, abnormal, defective, and dangerous.15
The pathologization of arid landscapes also contained and co-constructed the twinned imperial impetus toward productivity and cultivation. The ideology of improvement is long forged through the centuries, but the colonial desert imaginary was uniquely crystallized in the Malthusian agricultural cult of improvement within the English enclosure movement. The English enclosure movement brought increasing anxieties around agricultural productivity, a project that was just as much religious as it was scientific and economic, as well as equally a domestic imperative as it was a tool of imperialism.16 As part of the enclosure movement, deserts were collapsed under the broader category of wastelands, ideologically positioning them as one of many types of landscapes lacking agricultural productivity, cultivation, and civilization.17 This fostered an ideological transformation wherein notions of productivity demarcated all lands not “properly used” toward agricultural improvement as “wasted” land.18 In this new colonial ideological formulation, deserts (and notably all landscapes collapsed under the banner of “wastelands”) became places defined by their perceived lack—as lacking civilization, cultivation, or productivity, thus prefiguring deserts as a host of problems to Anglo-European sensibilities.
Key to this ideology of improvement is a Lockean notion of private property that pivoted on an assumption that land is improved through man’s own labor.19 This procures both a moral and legal right to private property that rested on a particular notion of labor and improvement, one that valorized specific types of use while bracketing off others.20 When seen in this light, the desert is undeniably “a construct, [that] fulfills certain cultural, social, and psychological needs, most centrally that of providing a foil to the notion of benevolent, tractable, or pleasing landscape” that then “aids in the creation of a hierarchy, or scale of values.”21 This valuation, as Danika Cooper shows, “is tied directly to a set of colonial beliefs and material manifestations that have registered the desert’s value in terms of how effective it is when put to use towards imperial ambitions.”22 The prioritization of value creation is seen in the “Myth of the Great American Desert,” which portrayed the Great Plains as a vast, barren, savage, uninhabitable place also in need of redemption by “making it ‘valuable’ to an expanding capitalist society” through mining, agriculture, and livestock production.23 Poignantly, these natural and ecological deserts were not seen as the result of thousands of years of natural aridification but rather were viewed through an arboreal chauvinism that interpreted arid lands as ruined and desiccated.24 This begins to articulate how the desert was called upon to bolster Anglo-European hierarchies of use and value based on imperial ideologies and colonial practices of cultivation and supposed proper use. Put simply, the desert “wasteland is the ‘other’ through which the treadmill of production is constituted.”25
And yet this still doesn’t get to the totality of the reach of the colonial desert imaginary. The pathologization of arid landscapes also pathologizes those who occupied arid landscapes, ascribing a sort of moral failure to arid populations. Drawing on notions of proper use, the valuation of land through agricultural production “linked improvement of land through particular kinds of use (cultivation for commercial purposes) to improvement of populations who were not capitalist tenant farmers or engaged in waged labor within emerging capitalist agrarian markets.”26 Additionally the imperial crisis narratives around deforestation, desiccation, and environmental collapse influenced the blaming of local and Indigenous peoples for supposed improper and damaging use.27 In this imaginary, deserts “were a sign of divine retribution against immoral and destructive natives who ruined the land.”28 As Brittany Meché demarcates through colonial representations of arid environments, “Arid landscapes served as a key site in the imaginative geographies of the grotesque associated with ‘the dark continent,’ . . . link[ing] ideas of racial inferiority to the inferiority of” arid landscapes.29 Brenna Bhandar likewise traces this through the development of legal forms of private property relations in settler-colonial Canada, Australia, and Palestine, noting that the quantification of improvement and productivity attributed value to both people and land, creating “an ideological juggernaut that defined people and land as unproductive in relation to agricultural production.”30
The colonization of the United States likewise demonstrated a notable link to the European colonial experience: “American approaches to the arid West and its non-Anglo peoples entailed most of the policies used in European colonial settings, including fire suppression policies, reforestation and the creation of forest reserves, sedentarizing mobile pastoral peoples, controlling or eliminating grazing, and expanding dry-land and irrigated agriculture.”31 These settler-colonial logics relied on a narrative of Indigenous Americans as “savage” peoples who were mismanaging and desiccating land in a manner incompatible with imperial notions of civilization, an ideology that was weaponized to justify the removal and murder of Indigenous peoples.32 In this way civilizing missions and improvement imperatives in the United States exemplified how the colonial desert imaginary braids together moral and ideological valuations of land and people that reinforced and solidified Anglo-European hierarchies of humanity and racial superiority to justify the violence of enclosure, expropriation, displacement, denomadization, sedentarization, and land theft—all in the name of colonial cultivation, productivity, improvement, and civilization.33 At the bedrock of colonial conquest and the expansion of racial capitalism, then, is the colonial desert imaginary.
Through narratives of desertification, desiccation, and environmental determinism the colonial desert imaginary is baked into today’s understandings of deserts through an ongoing ideology of improvement that continually seeks to make the desert “blossom as the rose”34 through antidesertification projects, agricultural development, and forestation efforts.35 The increase of contemporary anxieties over environmental decline, growing populations, and insufficient food supplies saw the emergence of the concept of “desertification,” which solidified the connotation of deserts as problem spaces through narratives of moral failing, environmental destruction, evil, environmental sin, and moral disorder.36 Intensifying Western imperialism and colonialism continued to spread these ideas such that “desiccation became imbricated in dominant ideology of global environmental decline.”37 Elucidating the history of the desertification narrative, Davis demonstrates the importance of colonialism and the expansion of capitalism in augmenting theories of desiccation and desertification narratives to justify and excuse forestation projects during the French invasion of North Africa, the British canal colonization of Egypt, and the removal of Indigenous peoples and theft of land in the settlement and colonization of the United States.38
With this the ideological underpinnings of the colonial desert imaginary “began to be writ into laws and policies on agriculture, forest, and environmental management” and “restricted and criminalized local land uses and appropriated lands” while facilitating colonial activities and filling the coffers of European settlers.39 These include, but certainly are not limited to, the British Forest Act of 1878, the British 1871 Criminal Tribes Act, and in the United States the 1862 Homestead Act, the 1877 Desert Land Act, and the 1902 Newlands Reclamation Act.40 Enduring into the twenty-first century, desertification was propped up as a severe global crisis, as Diana Davis shows, through the UNESCO Arid Zone research projects and antidesertification projects, which “relied on old, colonial notions of worthlessness of arid lands and of subsistence production, and the common belief that pastoralists overgraze and cause desertification.”41 More recently, this is seen through attempts to “forest” the desert in British colonies in South Africa and the conversion of deserts to fuel and fodder producing areas in the northwestern arid regions of India. Even contemporary neo-Malthusian rationales and anxieties around agricultural productivity are found in treatments of arid landscapes, such as Valerie Kuletz’s observation of nuclear internal colonialism in the Southwest, where environmental science was imbricated in the support of these desert narratives, which “organizes land according to productivity.”42 Even more, programs also manifested a new wave of colonial civilizing missions through international development projects, many of which ironically took advantage of a food system made fragile by colonial expansion that demanded increased productivity to expand exports.43 Indeed, Vittoria di Palma points out that an unwavering belief in improvement “tended to obscure any awareness or acknowledgement of the negative consequences of improvement,” pointing to the enduring perceived moral beneficence at the bedrock of improvement projects.44
This discussion demonstrates how the colonial desert imaginary has endured through centuries, recursively entrenching the representation of deserts as a problem that valorizes projects to “transform the barren into the productive, to domesticate the wild, to redeem the fallen.”45 Far from a discursive matter, the colonial desert imaginary demonstrates the staying power and protean tendencies of long-standing imperial notions of environmental determinism, desiccation, and proper use that foster the “centuries old drive to extract ‘value’ out of even the most ‘worthless’ deserts” which “ignores that many indigenous communities have been living in arid landscapes for centuries.”46 At the bedrock of it all is the colonial desert imaginary that represents arid landscapes as ruined, worthless, pathologically deficient, and in need of development that prioritized a white, Anglo-European relationship to land, and thus that reproduces hierarchies of humanity predicated on anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity.
On the “Desert” in the Food Desert
So what are we to make of the “desert” within the food desert metaphor? An interrogation into the metaphorical desert invoked, however unintentional such invocations might be, is especially urgent considering the overtures made to the colonial desert imaginary—for example, in describing food deserts as “nutritional wastelands” in the launching of Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign, or in persistent calls for and celebration of turning food deserts into food oases or food forests.47 More than a discursive connection to the colonial desert imaginary, the food desert metaphor draws upon and embodies the logics, ideologies, and practices that the imaginary contains, first and foremost by pathologizing places marked as food deserts.
A food desert is not defined by what it has but fundamentally by what it lacks. Relying on a deficit-centered framework, places mapped as food deserts are marked as devoid of healthy food resources.48 Critical scholarship notes that lack of food access is measured solely through the availability of corporate grocery stores and supermarkets, which fails to consider noncorporate food retail outlets like bodegas, corner stores, or household food sources such as backyard gardens.49 This creates and frames the problem of food deserts as a supply-side deficiency while also eliding more comprehensive understandings of the complex sociopolitical process that create food inequities. By only quantifying corporate grocery stores and supermarkets, the same pathologizing colonial narratives surrounding deserts are suffused in the spaces mapped as food deserts, inflecting the marking and mapping of the food desert problem with the same culturally and morally inscribed notions of good and proper use. In the case of food deserts, this means invisibilizing noncorporate food resources while valorizing corporate food retail.
Twinned with the pathologization logic of the deficit framework is the imperative to locate, map, and quantify these problem spaces so as to eradicate or improve them. Through the prevalence of mapping initiatives, best exemplified by the USDA’s ERS Food Desert Locator Map, the food desert concept was swiftly spatialized and mapping proliferated, identifying places as devoid of healthy food resources.50 The irony in this comes from the potentially potent origins that the food desert had, emerging on the heels of the proliferation of food access and food security discourses. The first use of “food desert” is attributed to a Scottish public housing resident in the 1990s, describing “the experience of what it was like to live in a deprived neighborhood.”51 In this context, the food desert offered a potentially crucial intervention away from the individualizing gaze of healthism, toward more pervasive and systemic questions of food access that could actually illuminate spatial inequalities such as processes of devaluation, capital retreat, redlining, and deindustrialization.52 Arising amid the visual turn of the 1990s, the proliferation of GIS mapping within sociological scholarship and an increasing emphasis on visualization in agri-food studies, the food desert metaphor instead became easily mappable and visualized, proving attractive to activists and nonprofits by helping make legible their needs and to secure funding.53 Nathan McClintock notes the potential of food desert maps to illuminate and visualize spatial inequalities, tracing process of devaluation, capital retreat, redlining, and deindustrialization; however, in practice, “few studies move beyond a geospatial or statistical inventory of food deserts to unearth these historical processes.”54
Ever the double-edged sword, this type of visualizing and GIS mapping was heavily critiqued for its “god trick” sensibility, which marks “food deserts as objective, calculable spaces rather than everyday practices.”55 These critiques stem from broader critiques of GIS itself for its selective vision, its failure to interrogate power dynamics within visual interventions, and its inability to reflect on the “relations of power and partiality [that] the map itself produce[s].”56 There is also a more trenchant critique that points out that the paternalism and pathologizing deficit framework embedded within these mapping practices are tethered to forms of colonization and imperialism.57 I emphasize this critique as a potent connection to the colonial desert imaginary. As Diana Davis notes, the creation of supposedly “scientific” maps proffered significant authority in rationalizing policies and justifying agricultural development, forestation, and other colonial improvement projects on arid landscapes.58 The claimed objectivity of these [food] desert maps and the measurements of desertification/food deserts do significant work to obscure the power dynamics, subjectivities, and ideological inflections bundled into their own creation.59 Therefore these seemingly benign maps reproduce and augment the colonial and racist pathologization of communities located within the physical boundaries of the census tracts from which food deserts are defined, demonstrating the colonial desert imaginary at work.60
Akin to the colonial desert imaginary’s pathologization of arid landscapes and their inhabitants, the food desert’s pathologization of space is also inscribed onto communities and individuals who live in that space, evinced by the tendency to portray food desert residents as lacking agency or as having deficient knowledge of how to feed themselves. While the food desert concept originally emerged as an important intervention away from the individual pathologization of blame, critical scholarship has noted that in practice, it has failed to shift “the public health conversation away from personal responsibility and individual choice.”61 As Ashanté Reese demonstrates, the deficit framework of the food desert reinscribes narratives of nothingness, which “ignores how residents understand, critique, and navigate absence.”62 This speaks once again to the tendency of this deficit framing to foreclose any meaningful consideration of the agency of neighborhood residents in navigating inequitable food landscapes, drawing in a broader trajectory of scholarship and public sentiment that “looks to deficits in Black people and culture despite the materially produced inequity.”63 The result is the neoliberal prescription of individual choices and personal responsibility through education-based solutions, which “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.64 Problematically, this “blames the victims of underdevelopment rather than supporting their coping strategies and their preferred ways of living and eating.”65 Through this analytic we can see how this characterization of communities and individuals as dysfunctional and mismanaged is akin to what Jerry Shannon has outlined as a spatialized form of neoliberal paternalism that aims to produce new kinds of citizens that make healthy food choices.66
By conjuring a specific colonial desert imaginary, the food desert metaphor also parallels the imaginary’s twinned logic where arid landscapes are in the same instance an imperial problem and possibility. Akin to the imperial ideology of improvement, the food desert metaphor props up a prescribed set of solutions to fix and improve food deserts, exemplified through the prioritization of corporate food retail development and tongue-in-cheek calls to “turn the food desert into the food oasis.”67 This portrays food deserts as landscapes of wasted yet potential capital to be seized through improvement, to which capitalist development and specifically corporate, supply-side food retail development is the solution. As many scholars have pointed out, pathologizing food deserts as a dearth of corporate food retail ushers in economic development projects to bring in supermarkets and grocery stores as the solution, tapping into the political appeal of capitalist development.68 The magnitude of this approach cannot be understated and is most readily evinced by the Healthy Food Financing Initiative, an Obama-era initiative that utilizes community developing financing and enterprise grants to lure food retailers into food deserts and that has supported over $317 million in grocery store development in the past ten years.69 On the surface, the intention of bringing more food options into communities seems well and good. However, when done without critical awareness of the complexities of food inequities, it tends to mirror what Garrett Broad describes as a broken windows approach to remedying food disparities where superficial improvements to neighborhoods—like renovating grocery stores or planting urban gardens—can ignore, excuse, or reproduce economic inequalities and racial injustices.70 Scholarship has also noted that this approach prioritizes top-down educational, technocratic, and aid-based solutions from outside actors and especially from largely white nonresidents, which invites gentrification and white, middle-class food solutions to the displacement of already-existing food geographies.71
The laundry list of problems regarding the mobilization of the food desert concept makes sense when considered under the rubric of the colonial desert imaginary. A far cry from the ecologically vibrant and complex physical deserts across the world, the food desert draws from the imperial ideologies of the colonial desert imaginary to refract a lack of food access through a “regime of emptiness” that pathologizes even nonarid landscapes marked as “deserts” as barren, lacking, and uninhabitable. Where the Anglo-European imaginaries claimed arid regions as misused, improperly used, and in need of improvement, the food desert concept similarly inscribes morally and culturally inscribed notions of proper and healthy food landscapes that privileges a white, middle-class foodscape as the ideal to be achieved.72 Thus while the food desert concept had the potential to illuminate trenchant spatial inequalities, in practice, it became a tool of pathologization that marked places and communities as deficient, mismanaged, lacking, and in need of improvement.
Food Desert Imperialism: Toward Disrupting the Colonial Desert Imaginary
Mapping the prominent critiques of the food desert onto the ideologies, practices, and moral orientations of the colonial desert imaginary, this article shows how the imaginary manifests through the metaphorical desert within the food desert. This is not to invisibilize or diminish the very real problems of food injustice and inequitable food landscapes. Rather this is a cautionary tale regarding the easy metaphorization of such inequities and injustices, as the stories told, symbols created, and imaginaries invoked through metaphors shape the stories we tell and “move us and make place.”73 Nor is this a mere discursive oddity or curious coincidence. Rather, visibilizing the durabilities of the colonial desert imaginary is necessary as it is precisely the type of environmental imaginary that constitutes “the West and the Rest,” Orientalism, and the coloniality of being.74
To be clear, the point is not to “move beyond” or “forgive” the food desert concept but to understand how it works as it does.75 To continue to label the food desert as a problem in turn leaves the desert it metaphorically invokes as a problem and therefore leaves the colonial desert imaginary untouched. This becomes even more urgent as the desert metaphor continues to gain traction in other discussions about access-based issues such as pharmacy deserts, childcare deserts, maternity care deserts, banking deserts, college deserts, legal deserts, transit deserts, or book deserts.76 More than anything, I hope that yoking the dominant critiques of the food desert metaphor to the colonial desert imaginary brings attention to why we must stay with the problems of this easy metaphorization, lest we risk forgetting how casual nature-based metaphors can be a vehicle through which the colonial desert imaginary gets embedded into discourses about inequitable food landscapes and food injustices. Instead, I aim to stay with the problem of the food desert metaphor by tethering it to a long history of enduring racial-colonial-capitalist representations of deserts and imperial ideologies about productivity, proper use, accumulation, and hierarchies of humanity that are predicated on anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity. This means that however innocent the food desert metaphor’s origins may have been, in practice it is a new avenue through which racial capitalism, colonial projects, and imperial worldviews are composed, reproduced, and naturalized, even in nondesert spaces. More than just an invitation to think critically about the concepts and easy metaphors we inherit to describe food inequities, this analysis demonstrates the potency of metaphors, ideas, and imaginaries and how they are made materially significant through the treatment of food inequitable landscapes and the communities and individuals that survive despite food inequity. By staying with the trouble food desert imperialism, I echo the choir of voices that demand an analysis of inequitable food landscapes that stays attentive to the racist-colonial-capitalist systems that shape lived experiences of food inequity, a choir that demands a refusal of analyses that begin and end with lack.
Still, the project at hand is not just about tracing imperial durabilities or continuities of the colonial desert imaginary. It also seeks to free the desert from the imperial grip of the colonial desert imaginary. It is about bringing to light the contradictions, the discontinuities, and the constellation of factors that converge to reproduce the colonial desert imaginary that marks arid landscapes as barren, lacking, and empty so as to confront them, untangle them, and disrupt them. For, if narratives and imaginaries are reproduced through a constellation of factors and convergence of discourses that mobilize them, then imaginaries can also be unraveled and exposed as the contingent set of stories and ways of speaking out places that they are. Therefore the interrogation of the desert within the food desert metaphor is critically necessary, lest we lose sight of the counterimaginaries and alternate modes of relating to and thriving within arid landscapes that refuse these imperial ideologies and colonial spatial imaginaries. Acknowledgment of this contingency makes space for other ways of being in relation to, imagining, and valuing arid lands that are grounded in lived reality and that unsettle the coloniality of being, destabilize hierarchies of humanity predicated on anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity, and make space for a more just world.
Acknowledgments
An abundance of gratitude to Dr. Julie Guthman, Dr. Savannah Shange and the Afterlives of Slavery Seminar, and Dr. James Doucet-Battle and the Writing Practicum, whose teaching, guidance, and feedback sparked and refined the ideas present in this article. Thank you also to the two anonymous reviewers and the editors of Environmental Humanities for the generous and generative comments in support of this article.
Notes
Baka, “Political Construction of Wasteland”; Baka, “Making Space for Energy”; Davis, Arid Lands; Di Palma, Wasteland; Baltensperger, “Plains Boomers”; Henni, Deserts Are Not Empty; Kuletz, Tainted Desert; Meché, “Black as Drought”; Tynan, Desert in Modern Literature and Philosophy; Voyles, Wastelanding.
Davis, Arid Lands, 167. See also Voyles, Wastelanding.
While I refuse to uncritically refer to a “food desert” as a sedimented reality or geographic fact, this article deals with the material impact of its treatment as such. Many scholars indicate their rejection of the concept with scare quotes when using the concept. This article forgoes the use of scare quotes as an aesthetic choice to spare the reader from the distraction of their overuse. This should not be read as acceptance of its uncritical use nor acceptance of the concept as hegemonically mobilized. For further reading on the problems of uncritical uses of the food desert, see, for example, Howerton and Trauger, “‘Oh Honey, Don’t You Know?’”; Reese, Black Food Geographies; Karen Washington (personal website), FAQ, https://www.karenthefarmer.com/faq-index (accessed August 20, 2022).
Reese, Black Food Geographies, 7. This article is not meant to provide an exhaustive review of these critiques; however, for succinct summaries of these critiques see De Master and Daniels, “Desert Wonderings”; Shannon et al., “More Than Mapping”; Reese, Black Food Geographies.
Driver, “Imaginative Geographies”; Martin and Simon, “Formula for Disaster”; Jenkins, “Unspoken Grammar of Place.”
McKittrick, Dear Science; Smith and Katz, “Grounding Metaphor.”
Extensive discussion of these histories is beyond the space that this article allows. While I focus on the particularities that constitute the colonial desert imaginary, there are exceptional works that provide nuanced and thorough examinations of these histories. See, for example, Davis, Arid Lands; Di Palma, Wasteland; Conroy, “Great American Desert”; Henni, Deserts Are Not Empty; Koch, “Political Lives of Deserts”; Baltensperger, “Plains Boomers.”
Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property; Wood, John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism; Locke, Two Treatises of Government.
Wood, John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism; Locke, Two Treatises of Government; Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property.
Meché, “Black as Drought,” 62–63. Importantly, Meché contests these representations by looking to African eco-critical and Afro/Africanfuturist texts that offer alternate modes of encounter of actual and imagined deserts forged through Black/African ecological thought.
Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property; Goldstein, “Terra Economica”; Davis, Arid Lands; Di Palma, Wasteland; Henni, “Against the Regime of ‘Emptiness,’” 13; Ranganathan, “Rule by Difference.”
This phrase demonstrates the mixing of biblical symbolism with the moral imperative to improve deserts through agriculture or irrigation. Connecting deserts to redemptive practice of recreating the Garden of Eden, the notion of the “divine mission” in “making the desert bloom as a rose” was mobilized to rationalize the colonization and agricultural development of deserts across the world. For further reading on this phrase see, for example, Koch, “Political Lives of Deserts”; George, “‘Making the Desert Bloom’”; Heslop, “Making the Desert Blossom”; Molle and Floch, “‘Desert Bloom’ Syndrome.”
Davis, Arid Lands, 102. For an exceptional review of the concept of desertification and its relationship to imaginings of arid landscapes and the Sahelian drought, see Meché, “Black as Drought.”
Obama White House, “Eliminating Food Deserts in America,” February 24, 2010, YouTube video, 2:19, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8My-iWjTBQ8; Bassford, Galloway-Gilliam, and Flynn, Food Desert to Food Oasis; Peters, “Change through Food”; Helmer, “Can Food Forests Fight Hunger?”
Cummins and Macintyre, “‘Food Deserts’”; Morton et al., “Solving the Problems of Iowa Food Deserts”; Raja, Ma, and Yadav, “Beyond Food Deserts”; Short, Guthman, and Raskin, “Food Deserts, Oases, or Mirages?”; Sparks, Bania, and Leete, “Comparative Approaches to Measuring Food Access”; Taylor and Ard, “Food Availability and the Food Desert Frame.”
Alkon et al., “Foodways of the Urban Poor”; Short, Guthman, and Raskin, “Food Deserts, Oases, or Mirages?”
Cummins and Macintyre, “‘Food Deserts’”; Morton et al., “Solving the Problems of Iowa Food Deserts”; Raja, Ma, and Yadav, “Beyond Food Deserts”; Short, Guthman, and Raskin, “Food Deserts, Oases, or Mirages?”; Sparks, Bania, and Leete, “Comparative Approaches to Measuring Food Access”; Taylor and Ard, “Food Availability and the Food Desert Frame”; USDA ERS, “Food Access Research Atlas,” last updated November 21, 2024, https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-access-research-atlas/go-to-the-atlas.aspx.
Cummins and Macintyre, “Systematic Study of an Urban Foodscape,” 2115.
Beaumont et al., Report from the Policy Sub-group; Clarke, Eyre, and Guy, “Deriving Indicators of Access”; Cummins and Macintyre, “‘Food Deserts’”; Rosenberg and Cohen, “Let Them Eat Kale”; Whelan et al., “Life in a ‘Food Desert’”; Wrigley, “‘Food Deserts’ in British Cities”; Crawford, “Health as a Meaningful Social Practice,” 409; Guthman, Weighing In; Martin, Flexible Bodies; McClintock, “From Industrial Garden to Food Desert.”
Shannon, “Food Deserts”; Pickles, History of Spaces; Rose, “On the Need to Ask”; Thornes, “Visual Turn and Geography”; Gillespie, “Visual Sociology and Food”; Horst and Gaolach, “Potential of Local Food Systems”; Howard, “Visualizing Food System Concentration”; Kloppenburg, Hendrickson, and Stevenson, “Coming in to the Foodshed.”
Shannon, “Food Deserts,” 225; de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life; De Master and Daniels, “Desert Wonderings”; Elwood, “Beyond Cooptation or Resistance”; Haraway, “Situated Knowledges”; Harris and Hazen, “Power of Maps”; Sheppard, “Knowledge Production.”
De Master and Daniels, “Desert Wonderings”; Elwood, “Beyond Cooptation or Resistance”; Harris and Hazen, “Power of Maps,” 101; Sheppard, “Knowledge Production”; Shannon, “Food Deserts.”
Crampton and Krygier, “Introduction to Critical Cartography”; De Master and Daniels, “Desert Wonderings”; Galt, “Counting and Mapping”; Sheppard, “Knowledge Production.”
Peters, “Change through Food”; Reese, Black Food Geographies; Shannon, “Food Deserts”; Walsh, “Retailers Pledge to Open Stores.”
Alkon et al., “Foodways of the Urban Poor,” 128.
Alkon et al., “Foodways of the Urban Poor,” 133; Alkon and Guthman, New Food Activism; Guthman, Weighing In; Reese, Black Food Geographies; Shannon, “Food Deserts.”
Alkon et al., “Foodways of the Urban Poor,” 133.
De Master and Daniels, “Desert Wonderings”; Pudup, “It Takes a Garden”; Shannon, “Food Deserts” citing Soss, Fording, and Schram, Disciplining the Poor.
See, for example, Bassford, Galloway-Gilliam, and Flynn, Food Desert to Food Oasis; Peters, “Change through Food”; Helmer, “Can Food Forests Fight Hunger?”
Rosenberg and Cohen, “Let Them Eat Kale”; Shannon, “Food Deserts.”
Alkon, Kato, and Sbicca, Recipe for Gentrification; McClintock, “Radical, Reformist, and Garden-Variety Neoliberal”; Reese, Black Food Geographies; Shannon, “Food Deserts”; Short, Guthman, and Raskin, “Food Deserts, Oases, or Mirages?”; Figueroa, “Food Sovereignty in Everyday Life”; Guthman, “‘If They Only Knew’”; Guthman, “Bringing Good Food to Others”; Raja, Ma, and Yadav, “Beyond Food Deserts”; Taylor and Ard, “Food Availability and the Food Desert Frame.”
See, for example, Ying, Kahn, and Mathis, “Pharmacy Deserts”; Malik et al., “America’s Child Care Deserts”; Uribe-Leitz et al., “Surgical Deserts in California”; Wallace et al., “Maternity Care Deserts”; Hegerty, “‘Banking Deserts’”; Pruitt et al., “Legal Deserts”; Dache-Gerbino, “College Desert and Oasis”; Allen, Lost in the Transit Desert; Neuman and Moland, “Book Deserts.”
