I remembered when I first heard of the phrase “food desert” it entertained me a great deal because whomever coined the phrase really tried to compare blighted, impoverished areas to like, the Mojave or Sahara deserts, gigantic wastelands of sand and heat. And it immediately brought to my mind a desert in an early Final Fantasy title and of course I made a post about it back then, complete with the corresponding Final Fantasy screen grab.
But basically, food deserts were communities that were statistically past a certain distance threshold to the nearest grocery store or market where fresh produce and other perishable goods could be purchased, as well as just food in general. And being so far from such then makes them the equivalent to floundering in the desert without edible resources.
In other words, it was basically used to describe rural areas or ghettos, where grocery stores don’t want to build in, because there’s not nearly as much money to be made there, regardless of the demographics of those areas that are conveniently zeroed in on as reasons for such invention of terminology.
Anyway, just today I learned that a new term was invented at some point: food swamp.
Kind of along the same base as a food desert, but except that in spite of the difficulty in being able to procure fresh produce and perishable goods, they have an abundance of options when it comes to fast food, prepackaged garbage food and other unhealthy options.
The irony is that food swamps can be used to describe, basically the same conditions that make a food desert a food desert: remote areas and/or ghettos that have the access issues when it comes to being able to get fresh, healthy foods, but in a lot of cases, they’re areas where there’s also an abundance of shitty fast food options.
So despite the fact that new terminology has been invented, the places that they describe seem to have a tremendous overlap. Funny how things work out like that.
But more importantly, it allows me to once again use old school Final Fantasy screen caps, to best describe the words being used, and like the subject of the post says, given the criteria of what makes a food swamp a food swamp, I guess it really could be said that pretty much most of ‘Murica, is just one giant fucking food swamp after all.
