But nobody is walking in a suburban town. This definition makes basically all suburbs a food dessert, even though the grocery store is only a few minutes from most people's house.
I guess YMMV on this one. When I drive through suburbs, there are always people walking there. Watch especially how the staff arrives at your suburban stores & restaurants.
Okay, to be more pedantic - the vast vast majority of people living in suburbs have access to a car and do not consider a 2 mile drive to the grocery store an inconvenience. To say these people live in a food dessert is silly.
You are very clever to point out that people can actually walk around in a suburb, doesn't change the point.
> the vast vast majority of people living in suburbs
This conversation is by definition about people living on the margins. Similarly, the "vast vast majority" of people do not qualify for SNAP.
Pointing out that most people don't live on the margins is clever, but not particularly relevant, in a discussion about people who live at the very edge of society.
Food deserts are more about human health than people living on the margins. Easy access to healthy food doesn’t guarantee people will eat it, but it dramatically increases the odds. If the closest and most convenient place to buy food is a grocery store then it’s a moot point.
I suspect that food deserts are also an attempt to explain certain health issues in certain areas, but I'm not entirely convinced that "adding grocery stores" will solve those issues.
In other words, we have two things, and want to make one the cause of the other, but that's not entirely clear. Maybe the grocery stores die in areas where the population doesn't frequent grocery stores for whatever reason, or maybe people don't frequent grocery stores because they died, or maybe a mix of both.
Solving isn’t the only possibility, adding grocery stores may improve things without actually fixing things. A 54.3% obesity rate is horrific even if it’s better than a 53.7% one.
In public policy the question is generally if something has a measurable impact, and if that impact is worth the investment. Multiple small but very cheap improvements may be better than large but extremely expensive ones.
