ABSTRACT
Editors’ Note: This chapter links with three themes: access, discourse and science. Shannon questions the geographic and social science behind research on food deserts – that is, areas where fresh, nutritious food is difficult to find – calling us to question whether current research tends to ‘fix’ these areas as objects of study in particular ways. The chapter explores how the definitions and analyses involved in food desert research may deviate researchers and activists from more complex scrutiny and solution-finding that could take into account mobility, diverse market types, difference and social stratification. One of the contributions the chapter offers to ‘doing nutrition differently’ is to insist on more specificity and sensitivity in geographic and social science analyses of nutrition’s spatiality. Further, he argues that we will not solve the dilemmas of access to nutritious foods if we only focus on the kinds of conspicuous, large-scale solutions (like bringing in supermarket chains) that current analyses favor.
