{"id":143869,"date":"2022-01-20T09:44:55","date_gmt":"2022-01-20T14:44:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=143869"},"modified":"2022-01-26T11:36:43","modified_gmt":"2022-01-26T16:36:43","slug":"sociologist-ken-kolb-98-well-intentioned-efforts-to-fix-food-deserts-are-flawed-and-miss-the-point","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2022\/01\/20\/sociologist-ken-kolb-98-well-intentioned-efforts-to-fix-food-deserts-are-flawed-and-miss-the-point\/","title":{"rendered":"Sociologist Ken Kolb ’98: Well-intentioned efforts to fix food deserts are ‘flawed’ and miss the point"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

After doing 100 interviews with residents of two poor neighborhoods in Greenville, S.C., Ken Kolb \u201998 believes that efforts to fix food deserts are \u201cwell intentioned but flawed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kolb, a professor of sociology and department chair at Furman University, shares his findings in his new book, Retail Inequality: Reframing the Food Desert Debate<\/em><\/a> (2022, University of California Press).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Kenneth
Kenneth Kolb, a professor of sociology and department chair at Furman University, is the author of Retail Inequality: Reframing the Food Desert Debate<\/em>. (Furman University) <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The idea that the lives of poor Americans could be improved by better access to better food was a strategy to catch the attention of the foodie movement, Kolb tells the Greenville News<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When solving persistent local problems such as job loss, crime, and poor infrastructure got framed in terms of health and food, \u201cpowerful people started paying attention,\u201d writes Atkins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kolb says that the \u201cfoodie movements that have popped up in the past 15 years…have political capital because they’re largely white middle-class social movements. So when they heard \u2018grocery store,\u2019 they decided, \u2018Well, this is one way I can help, because it caters to my interests, too.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unfortunately, as Kolb tells Furman News<\/em><\/a>, \u201c<\/em>there\u2019s really no evidence that increasing access will actually change the way people eat, and we\u2019ve known that now for about 10 years. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“But the idea that distance determines diet is still very powerful and shows up still in about two-thirds of all media accounts.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Americans in underserved areas mostly want and deserve, he says, is access to better retail<\/em> overall, better than the \u201csubstandard options that cater to vice and exploit the poor.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He tells the Greenville<\/em> (S.C.) News<\/em> that \u201c<\/em>for better or worse, to be an equal member in American society is to have an equal ability to shop at the same venues and for the same goods as everyone else.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Years of racist urban policies have led to a \u201cpublic and private sector abandonment of poor Black neighborhoods across the country,\u201d says Kolb, a sociology major at Bates. Those decisions have stripped these areas of the collective wealth necessary to support high-quality retail close to residents\u2019 homes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Convenience
A convenience store in Buffalo, N.Y. (Photograph by Jonathan Filbert<\/a>) <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In recent months, Kolb has begun presenting ideas from Retail Inequality<\/em> in different forums.<\/em> In an opinion essay for Talking Points Memo<\/em><\/a>, the political news and opinion website, he says that elements of longstanding nutrition-assistance programs only make life tougher for poor Americans. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Designed to help people experiencing food insecurity, such programs are well intentioned \u201cbut they\u2019re either impractical or just cause more problems than they are worth,\u201d says Kolb. The infamous example is that food stamps can\u2019t be used to buy a cooked rotisserie chicken at the grocery store. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such restrictions compound one of the major pain points of being a poor American, Kolb says. As he wrote in Talking Points Memo<\/em>, being poor \u201ctakes forever<\/em>. Whether it is waiting in lines or filling out forms, nothing comes quick: especially rides to the grocery store.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Kate
Kate Marshall \u201904 is a University of California Press acquisitions editor who edited Kolb\u2019s book.\n\n<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

For a food-insecure person, not being able to purchase hot food that could save time at home exacerbates what it means to be poor. And if policymakers better understood how the food insecure manage their multiple needs and their time, Kolb says, \u201cthey would be more forgiving of food insecure people\u2019s desire to have more control over their own diets.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At his publisher, the University of California Press, Kolb worked with a fellow alum, acquisitions editor Kate Marshall \u201904<\/a>, who specializes in the fields of anthropology, food studies, and Latin American studies. In her work as a food editor for UC Press, Marshall says that \u201cit would be easy to cultivate a collection of books that celebrate food and wine.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But as a Bates history major, \u201cmy interests as an editor come out of my education at Bates: I tend to be drawn to authors who take on big problems like food access and inequality,\u201d she explains. \u201cSo perhaps it’s not surprising that Ken and I ended up working together.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kolb, who didn\u2019t know Marshall before she became his editor, credits her with \u201cplaying a huge role in shaping the direction of the book,\u201d including the pivotal suggestion to \u201creframe it around the larger issue of \u2018retail inequality.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thus the book became \u201cless about food deserts and more about systemic inequalities and the lingering effects of past racist urban public policies,” says Kolb.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Access to better food is championed by the foodie movement, says Furman University sociology professor Ken Kolb ’98, but
\n“there’s really no evidence that increasing access will actually change the way people eat.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":148,"featured_media":143884,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[7,175],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-143869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","category-justice-poverty"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/148"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143869"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143869\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":143941,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143869\/revisions\/143941"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/143884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}