Food Desert Imperialism

Abstract

If language plays a powerful role in shaping how we see and think about the world and structuring material practices, then the language that is used to describe inequitable food landscapes demands critical investigation. This article attends to the potency of language by interrogating the metaphorical “desert” within the food desert concept. By mapping the extensive critiques of the food desert metaphor onto longer histories of US settler colonialism and imperialism that leverage imperial ideologies about deserts as empty, barren, lacking, and in need of improvement, this article traces what the author calls a colonial desert imaginary embedded within the food desert. Staying with the problem of the metaphorical desert within the food desert refuses to forgive or look past this problematic connection, but instead tethers it to long colonial histories, imperial logics, and ideologies about arid landscapes. More than just an invitation to think critically about inherited concepts and easy metaphors to describe food inequities, this interrogation of the desert within the food desert metaphor is critically necessary, lest scholars lose sight of the counterimaginaries and alternate modes of relating to and thriving within arid landscapes that refuse these imperial ideologies and colonial spatial imaginaries.