Local governments readily looked to these studies to justify new programs and initiatives to support efforts to address food access issues locally. And yet, some researchers were more concerned with the conceptual basis of the term ‘food desert,’ which failed to account for the ways that poor communities have managed to cope in spite of grocery stores or supermarkets. For example, some argued that areas defined as food deserts in fact are replete with smaller food retailers, which contribute to food security and may present future opportunities to do so . Others—particularly the mass media—also questioned the still inconclusive connection between the development of supermarkets and improved health outcomes.Overall, food desert research made a strong public health case for developing new grocery stores in under served communities, despite sometimes conflicting, and inconclusive evidence. As community-based food projects continued to expand through the early 2000s, a new generation of food activists sought to reframe the community food security movement to encompass social justice, human rights, and economic self-reliance through food systems . Inspired by international peasant farmers and environmental justice movements, “food justice” activists approached food access issues through programs and entrepreneurial activities focused on engaging disenfranchised populations in directly revitalizing their communities.
As such, ‘food justice’ is more squarely premised in “ensuring the benefits and risks of where,hydroponic growing what and how food is grown and produced, transported and distributed and accessed and eaten are shared fairly .” Frequently cited examples of the distinctive “food justice approach” include People’s Grocery in West Oakland and Growing Power in Milwaukee. People’s Grocery was established in 2002 with the goal of “build[ing] a local food system that improves the health and economy of West Oakland” . Its foundational programs comprised a youth-run community garden, nutrition education programs, Community-Supported-Agriculture, and a mobile grocery market—all pursued with the ultimate goal of developing a grocery store in West Oakland. Although this program was discontinued in 2009, a for-profit subsidiary of People’s Grocery is developing plans and securing financing for a new grocery store in West Oakland. Established in 1993 by former professional basketball player, Will Allen, Growing Power is an organization that whose mission is “to grow food, to grow minds and to grow community” . Initially focused on vermiculture and aquaponics, the organization has expanded to include a community center, grocery store, and fourteen greenhouses in both Milwaukee and Chicago. These models of “food justice” have been readily replicated across the country, with a distinct focus on connecting food production and retail to serve broader community goals. Organizations such as People’s Grocery also define their work explicitly as a response to food deserts. Alongside of these activities, Philadelphia-based CDFI, The Reinvestment Fund initiated the Pennsylvania Fresh Food Financing Initiative , the first statewide financing program specifically designed to attract supermarkets and grocery stores to under served urban and rural communities. The program was established in 2004 through a public-private partnership between non-profit organization, The Food Trust and The Reinvestment Fund following dissemination of a 2001 report “Food For Every Child: The Need for More Supermarkets in Philadelphia” confirmed the findings of other studies of food deserts.
As a response to the findings, the Philadelphia City Council convened a task force, which recommended the creation of a statewide initiative focused on incentivizing grocery store development. Eventually in 2004, state representatives and then Governor Ed Rendell enacted an economic stimulus package, which allocated $30 million for the creation of the FFFI. The Reinvestment Fund then leveraged another $120 million through the New Markets Tax Credits program and private banks . Since its inception, the program has offered grants of up to $250,000 and loans ranging from $25,000 to $7.5 million primarily to independent, locally owned businesses including green grocers, food cooperatives, and full-service supermarkets. These grants and loans primarily support predevelopment, acquisition, equipment, construction costs, start-up costs, and employee recruitment/training . As of June 2010, the FFFI financed 88 grocery stores comprising $73.2 million in loans and $12.1 million in grants . Overall, community food security movements combined with the growing body of research on food deserts represented the beginnings of a strong public health agenda around the development of grocery stores in low-income communities and communities of color.And yet the limitations of this early research began to exhibit the very complexity of food access issues in low-income communities of color understated by the simplicity of the term food deserts. Still the emergent public health voice around food deserts served to reinvigorate old discussions about the urban grocery gap to new ends. Accordingly, the “metaphor” of the ‘food desert’ provoked both a community-based and local government response, which marked the beginnings of an expanded set of social and economic goals around grocery development as evident in today’s context. By the late 2000s, food deserts captured the attention of researchers, journalists, policymakers, the grocery industry, and the general public. food deserts would enter into federal policy agendas provoking a new set of research and local accounts calling the basis of food deserts into question. And yet, despite debates over the characterization of supermarkets as a proxy for “healthy food access,” grocery stores would form the basis for the federal program devoted entirely to the subsidization of grocery stores in under served areas.
The momentum around food deserts in late 1990s to mid 2000s reached a critical point with the 2009 USDA-sponsored national survey, “Access to Affordable and Nutritious Food: Measuring and Understanding Food Deserts and Their Consequences.” Congress commissioned the study as part of the 2008 Food, Conservation, and Energy Act . In contrast to previous studies, this study was the first ever, national assessment of food deserts . Over the course of one-year, the USDA worked in collaboration with the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies for U.S. Census data analysis, interviews, and focus groups. Furthermore, the study found that further research was necessarily “to conclusively determine whether some areas with limited access have inadequate access” . Despite the mixed findings, the authors strongly recommended policies and programs to expand healthy food access in under served communities. This includes: 1) incentive programs to attract new stores and improving existing ones , 2) community-based programs such as corner store conversion, 3) transportation improvements to make supermarket access easier and more affordable, 4) policies that specify healthy food offerings fore retailers authorized to participate in the SNAP program, and 5) the integration of grocery planning with housing and community development. Months prior to the release of the report, Oakland-based think tank, PolicyLink, The Reinvestment Fund, and The Food Trust began working with the Office of the White House to develop a national version of the Pennsylvania FFFI. The release of the USDA study was further affirmation of their efforts. In months following, a series of initiatives laid the groundwork for a comprehensive federal program to address food deserts nationally. The USDA study would provide the evidence base for a “Food Environment Atlas,” an online national food desert locator, designed to identify counties with limited supermarket access. The USDA created the tool specifically to locate priority areas for future interventions. The development of this online tool coincided with the instatement of Let’s Move,mobile vertical farm national childhood obesity prevention campaign launched by First Lady Michelle Obama in early February 2010. In the year that followed, HFFI administered its first cycle of grants to sixteen organizations across the country for initiatives ranging from CDC-chain supermarket partnerships, farmers markets, and business incubation programs . The HFFI inspired newly elected Chicago mayor, Rahm Emanuel convene a ‘Food Desert Summit’ to meet with major grocery retailers to discuss a plan for eliminating food deserts. Soon following in July 2011, the First Lady hosted her own summit with major food retailers, where she secured commitments for store expansion from Supervalu,Walgreens, Walmart, and regional retailers. Together, the retailers agreed to newly develop or expand 1500 stores over a five-year period. Additionally, the First Lady’s summit resulted in the creation of California-based counterpart of the Pennsylvania FFFI, the California Fresh Works Fund. A project of statewide health foundation The California Endowment, the $200 million public-private partnership was created to finance a variety of “healthy food retailing” initiatives . Several subsequent studies further reinforced these critiques. A controversial longitudinal study in the Archives of Internal Medicine questioned the connection between food environments and diet quality . Over a 15-year period, researchers monitored eating habits of thousands of residents in four cities. The study found that proximity to fast food retailers increases the risk for poor dietary quality and obesity .
And yet, proximity to supermarkets did not impact fruit and vegetable consumption . Ultimately, the researchers conclude that supermarkets may not be enough to change unhealthy diets. And yet, a string of subsequent studies similarly refuted the idea that obesity could be combatted through grocery development. A 2012 study by the Public Policy Institute of California found that poor neighborhoods were not all food deserts. While some tended to have a higher concentration of liquor stores and fast food restaurants , others also tended to have a larger concentration of grocery retailers compared to suburban areas . In line with the previous study, this was among research that suggested no correlation between supermarket proximity and dietary patterns . These studies were subject to their own critiques, in part due to the differences in the study populations—be it low income men , children , or young adults . Despite competing claims regarding the efficacy of supermarkets in addressing obesity, grocery retailers have been reentering urban areas for the past decade, with more incentives than ever. Several retailers have created “urban format” stores, such as Walmart Neighborhood Market, Fresh and Easy , and Tesco Express. Community-based organizations have continued to seek out alternatives to these types of stores be it through farmers markets and/or cooperatives. Accurate and high-throughput protein quantification is fundamental to proteomic studies . To provide the highest quantification accuracy when comparing samples one needs to minimize differences introduced in the processing of samples and acquiring the data. This can be best achieved through the introduction of stable isotopes into samples that allow samples to be mixed and then analyzed in the mass spectrometer. The application of metabolic labeling, which uses stable-isotope labeled amino acids in cell culture or 15N nitrogen-containing salts into the whole cell or organism in vivo, enables relative quantifications of proteins on a global scale. In such a quantitative experiment, one sample is labeled with the natural abundance , and the other with a stable isotope of low natural abundance during growth. The samples are mixed, processed, and analyzed by the mass spectrometer. Chemically identical peptides from these light- and heavy-labeled mixed samples co-elute by chromatography into the mass spectrometer, which can distinguish between the light and heavy peptides based on their mass difference, and thereby quantify the difference in peptide, and hence protein abundance between the samples. An alternative stable isotope-based strategy is to chemically tag peptides after enzymatic digestion; the most popular reagents for this strategy are isobaric tagging reagents Tandem Mass Tags . The TMT isobaric tagging reagents allow comparison of a larger number of samples, but the labeling is done at the peptide level after sample digestion and then samples are mixed. In contrast, the metabolic labeling is introduced into the proteins during growth, thus samples can be combined at the beginning, minimizing variations introduced by sample processing that can compromise quantification accuracy . Although SILAC has been widely used in animal cell lines and has been the gold standard for MS-based proteomics quantification , 15N-labeling based quantitative applications are still quite limited in plants despite it being cheaper . This could be due to the complexity of the data analysis. SILAC pairs are easily identifiable because they have well-defined mass differences as typically only lysine and arginine are labeled. In contrast, in 15N labeling, each amino acid in the expressed proteins is labeled, and therefore, the mass difference in 15N pairs varies depending on the number of nitrogen atoms in their composition.