7 - Radical Legal Geographies of the Food Desert Spatial Imaginary

Summary

Sitting at the intersection of food systems scholarship and radical geographies, a radical food geographies (RFG) praxis tackles questions of power and assemblies of oppression to work towards direct action for social change (Levkoe et al, Chapter 1; Hammelman et al, 2020). This praxis involves drawing attention to places for action, struggle, and remaking our world. In this chapter, we aim to expand RFG through attention to the co- constitutive role law and geography play in maintaining and reproducing food system inequities. In examining the role that US legal institutions and policy have in the reproduction of these inequities, we argue that if food justice is a spatial concern (Reynolds et al, 2020), then RFG must also attend to the very spatial and legal strategies used to address food justice. We critically examine the construction and material consequences of what we call the food desert spatial imaginary. We invoke the term spatial imaginary to mean ‘socially constructed ways of thinking – or schema – about the value, use, and access to places and spaces that authorize, affirm, and validate material practices and policies’ (Jenkins, 2021: 116). This critical approach to the spatialization of the ‘food desert concept’ draws attention to the construction of this imaginary and how it influences the material reality of individuals and communities. Along with other authors in this section, our chapter foregrounds the relationship between the social representations of place and space, their dissemination, and tangible impacts to food systems.

Our analysis builds on critical food scholarship and activist pushback against the food desert concept, its construction, and its use. Community activists and food justice scholars have denounced the ‘desert’ metaphor as creating images of desolation and emptiness while naturalizing oppressions. This obscures community life and practices such as mutual aid and self- subsistence, while also ignoring that these inequalities and certain geographic areas have been deliberately created through racial capitalism and the policies that uphold it (Robeson, 2019; Mishan, 2021; Nargi, 2021; Cook, n.d.). Scholarship also notes how dominant mobilizations of the food desert concept reproduce colonial and racist pathologizations of communities and individuals (Guthman, 2014; Shannon, 2014; Reese, 2019).