1385: Food Deserts | Skeptical Sunday

Jordan Harbinger:
Welcome to Skeptical Sunday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Today I'm here with Skeptical Sunday co-host, writer and researcher, Jessica Wynn.

On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. And our mission is to help you become a better-informed, more critical thinker. During the week, we have long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers and performers.

On Sundays, though, it's Skeptical Sunday, a rotating guest co-host and I'll break down a topic you may have never thought about and debunk common misconceptions about that topic, such as why tipping makes absolutely no sense, the lottery, Reiki, healing, ear candling — surprisingly controversial — self-help cults, bottled water and more. If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of some of our favorite episodes on persuasion and negotiation, psychology, disinformation, junk science, crime and cults and more that'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show.

Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today on Skeptical Sunday, we're talking about food deserts. If a neighborhood doesn't have a grocery store, it seems intuitive that people are probably going to eat worse, right?

So you build a grocery store. Problem solved. That idea has shaped public health policy for decades.

It's inspired billions of dollars in spending, thousands of new supermarkets and an entire movement built around solving something called food deserts. There's just one problem. It's not working.

Joining me today to ruin another thing that I thought I already understood is writer and researcher Jessica Nguyen. Jess, start at the beginning. What exactly is a food desert and how did everyone become so convinced that just building more grocery stores was the answer?

Jessica Wynn:
Well, the term food desert was coined in the early 1990s in the United Kingdom. Researchers studying low-income neighborhoods noticed residents often lacked convenient access to affordable, healthy food, so there weren't many supermarkets nearby. Instead, there were mostly convenience stores and takeaways.

That's British for fast food, right?

Jordan Harbinger:
Yes. Takeaway. Yeah.

Any. Well, I guess is it just fast food or is it also any time you actually take food out of a restaurant like delivery?

Jessica Wynn:
I think it's bodega type food that they call takeaway. Sorry if I'm getting that wrong, everybody.

Jordan Harbinger:
Yeah. We'll hear about it from a thousand people. If you get it wrong, don't worry.

Jessica Wynn:
In language we don't understand. But the thinking was simple. If healthy food is far away and unhealthy food is close by, people are going to eat worse.

Jordan Harbinger:
Which makes perfect sense because if healthy food isn't available or it's harder to get than junk food, of course people are going to eat worse. I mean, the only reason I know this so well is because I was once a teenager. And it's not that I couldn't eat healthy food, it's just that when I opened the freezer, there wasn't any in there, but there was a pizza.

So that was what got consumed. I mean, this is kind of common sense, right?

Jessica Wynn:
That's exactly why I bought this whole build a grocery store logic too. I completely believe the food desert narrative when I started researching this. I wasn't looking to debunk anything.

The evidence though, it took me somewhere I did not expect.

Jordan Harbinger:
So somebody who changed their mind because of evidence and not because somebody paid them or showed them a TikTok video, where am I? But if you don't have access to healthy food, you can't eat healthy food. What am I missing?

I mean, the logic seems incredibly simple here.

Jessica Wynn:
It seems very logical. And when the concept made its way to the United States, the USDA eventually formalized it. The current official definition of a food desert is a low-income census tract where at least 500 people or 33% of the population live more than one mile from a large food store in urban areas or more than 10 miles in rural areas.

Jordan Harbinger:
One mile. That's a threshold. I used to walk my dog further than that when it was nice out.

I guess that's my way of saying what's the big deal? You can't walk a mile. I mean, I guess with groceries, it's a pain, but still.

Jessica Wynn:
Sure. And that's actually the first hint that something might be off here because the UK context that gave us this concept looks nothing like the United States. So British cities, they're much denser and car ownership is lower and walking to a local shop is genuinely how most people get their groceries.

So when you import that concept to the United States, where 45% of low-income households own a car, you might already be starting from the wrong premise.

Jordan Harbinger:
You know, it's funny. I know a lot of Brits walk to the store because I saw a horror movie where the killer stalked a bunch of people walking to the store. They were all in the UK.

What was that movie with Scar Jo, where she's like an alien eating people? Do you know what I'm talking about?

Jessica Wynn:
I know exactly what you're talking about.

Jordan Harbinger:
It's not a good movie, by the way. It's super boring. Anyway, who cares?

Jessica Wynn:
It'll come to me halfway through the recording.

Jordan Harbinger:
Right. Exactly. It doesn't matter.

Don't see it. It's lame. How many Americans are we actually talking about who live in these food deserts?

Jessica Wynn:
It's about 20 million. Oh, wow. And that's over, yeah, that's over 6% of the population living in both low-income and low-access areas simultaneously, or what you call food deserts.

And using the 2000 census data and grocery store locations from 2006, the USDA identified more than 6,500 census tracks that met its definition of a food desert.

Jordan Harbinger:
So they have to be low-income and low-access. So we're talking about rich people who live a mile up in the Hollywood Hills. They're not in a food desert because they send their housekeeper down in an SUV to go to the farmer's market and pick up food.

OK, so once the government defined the problem, it had something it could map, right? So you've got the metric and now it's like, all right, let's solve this by plunking grocery stores down in these food deserts, I guess.

Jessica Wynn:
Sure. And on paper, that looked logical. And those maps became the foundation for a lot of federal policy.

The 2008 Great Recession caused more areas to qualify as low-income, so more places met the definition.

Jordan Harbinger:
I see. And did the government respond?

Jessica Wynn:
Well, in 2010, First Lady Michelle Obama announced a goal as part of the Let's Move campaign to eliminate food deserts within seven years.

Jordan Harbinger:
Let's move, preferably to another neighborhood with a grocery store.

Jessica Wynn:
Right, right. But the Obama administration launched what's called the Healthy Food Financing Initiative, offering federal grants and loans to encourage grocery stores to open in these underserved areas. And by 2018, that effort had driven about $220 million in direct funding and roughly a billion dollars in total investment.

Jordan Harbinger:
Wow.

Jessica Wynn:
So, yeah, close to a thousand projects across more than 35 states.

Jordan Harbinger:
Oh, my God. So a billion dollars of activity, a thousand stores, seven-year deadline. Did it work?

Did they eradicate food deserts? Is all everything we're talking about outdated?

Jessica Wynn:
Depends on what you mean by work. So the stores got built. The real question is whether people actually started eating healthier.

Jordan Harbinger:
I see. OK, so that's the outcome anybody actually cares about. Ribbon cuttings are fun, but they don't really matter.

They don't feed people.

Jessica Wynn:
Yeah, exactly. And the theory sounded obvious, right? Make healthy food easier to reach and people eat more of it.

But when researchers measured what people actually bought and ate, the results were surprisingly underwhelming.

Jordan Harbinger:
OK, so what did they find?

Jessica Wynn:
Well, the first thing researchers discovered when they started looking at this carefully was that people in food deserts were already shopping at supermarkets. And not just some, almost all of them. A massive Nielsen dataset, about 60,000 households tracked over more than a decade, found that households in food desert areas were buying nearly 90 percent of their groceries from supermarkets.

Jordan Harbinger:
Wait, so the people in the food deserts were already going to supermarkets. I'm confused. Yeah, almost all of them.

So they had access, it just wasn't close enough to count as nearby per the definition of food desert.

Jessica Wynn:
Exactly. And low income households under twenty five thousand dollars a year travel about five miles each way for groceries. In food deserts, it's closer to seven.

Even households without a car are still traveling about two miles.

Jordan Harbinger:
OK, so they're not trapped. They're inconvenienced. I don't know.

I feel like a dick saying that, but that's what it sounds like.

Jessica Wynn:
No, and they're not isolated. People leave their neighborhoods for other reasons than to just go to a supermarket. So it just might be part of other errands or part of your commute.

But for most people, that's just it. They're just inconvenienced. And that's an important distinction.

So if people weren't reaching supermarkets at all, then building one nearby should dramatically change where they buy. But if they're already making the trip, even if it's inconvenient, then a new store mostly changes where they shop or whether they have access in the first place.

Jordan Harbinger:
So then we build the stores anyway. What happens?

Jessica Wynn:
Well, researchers tracked over 6,700 supermarkets which opened across the US between 2004 and 2016, and they measured diet quality before and after a store opened nearby using the Healthy Eating Index. And the finding was almost nothing. Opening a new supermarket in a food desert improved nearby households' diet quality by 0.021 standard deviations.

Jordan Harbinger:
Oh, I remember Chet GPT-ing standard deviation a hundred times in the past couple of years. I don't totally get it, but it's supposed to be a whole number if it's big. And 0.021 is like basically zero, right?

Pretty much. Yeah.

Jessica Wynn:
And what it translates to is about one and a half percent of the diet gap. That's the difference in overall diet quality between lower income and higher income households.

Jordan Harbinger:
That is astonishingly small. So yeah, that's... Functionally invisible, right?

Yes. Yeah. Good way to put it.

So we spent a billion dollars to move the needle, 1.5 percent, 1.5 percent of the gap. That is, after building a whole supermarket and all these, oh, that's so depressing.

Jessica Wynn:
Yeah. Correct.

Jordan Harbinger:
That's being the rounding error, but it's a billion-dollar rounding error. So it's a rounding error in fixing the problem, and it's a billion dollars of just funds lit on fire, essentially.

Jessica Wynn:
And that's the large-scale data. But then you have the real-world case studies. So a real supermarket opens in a real food desert, and researchers go in to see what happens.

It happens in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, New York City. In Philly, a supermarket opened in a low-income neighborhood that had officially been classified as a food desert. Researchers measured diet quality six to 11 months after the supermarket opened.

They found no significant change in fruit and vegetable intake, no significant change in BMI or body mass index among the people living in that neighborhood.

Jordan Harbinger:
So even the success stories weren't really success stories.

Jessica Wynn:
Not really. And New York tells a similar story. They have a program called FRESH, Food Retail Expansion to Support Health, and it subsidized a new store in Morrisonia, which is a low-income neighborhood in the Bronx.

Researchers found that about 90 percent of residents were already shopping at supermarkets before the new one opened.

Jordan Harbinger:
So what actually changed?

Jessica Wynn:
Well, when it did open, it just changed which supermarket they drove to. It didn't really change their relationship with healthy food.

Jordan Harbinger:
Oh, I see. So all we really changed was which parking lot people pulled into to buy their Cheetos or pizzas or whatever.

Jessica Wynn:
Pretty much. And the Pittsburgh case is genuinely fascinating and a little heartbreaking. The RAND Corporation did a long study of a new HFFI-supported supermarket that opened in a neighborhood called the Hill District, and they did find improvements in diet quality in the neighborhood after it opened.

The results were real. People were eating better.

Jordan Harbinger:
OK, so finally it works? I don't know.

Jessica Wynn:
That's what it looked like until researchers looked closer. Diet quality improved by the same amount among people who regularly shopped at the new supermarket and people who never set foot inside it.

Jordan Harbinger:
Wait, the people who never even shopped there improved just as much? I don't understand.

Jessica Wynn:
Yeah, that's what makes this study so important. So if shopping at the new supermarket wasn't what distinguished the people whose diets improved, then the supermarket probably wasn't the thing improving their diets.

Jordan Harbinger:
I see. OK, so what was improving their diets, I guess, is the obvious question here. I don't know.

This is confusing because I don't get how this is possible.

Jessica Wynn:
It's confusing, but the researchers think the improvements may have come from the broader community investment that accompanied the store. Things like new housing developments came in, a community center was built, a workforce development center opened. So the neighborhood itself was getting better.

The supermarket was just kind of along for the ride. You know, the store, it just happened to arrive at the same time, but it wasn't the driver.

Jordan Harbinger:
OK, so the supermarket got the credit for something the neighborhood actually did. That's weirdly hopeful, but it's so annoying. It's deeply annoying, actually, at the same time.

Jessica Wynn:
Right. I mean, that's public health. And here's the kicker.

That Pittsburgh store closed in 2019. Why? That's such a waste.

I know. Yeah, it just closed its doors because not enough people were shopping there to keep it viable.

Jordan Harbinger:
It's almost like the market had already shown that a supermarket needed to be further away to be profitable.

Jessica Wynn:
Right. Right. There was just insufficient local demand and a store that was subsidized by public money to serve a community closed because the community didn't care about it.

They weren't shopping there enough to keep it profitable.

Jordan Harbinger:
So the store wasn't failing because it was a bad grocery store. It was failing because the economics of the area just never changed.

Jessica Wynn:
Right. I mean, the irony of all of this is almost too much. That's what makes it so confusing.

But the underlying issues haven't disappeared. No one addresses these signals, even though the evidence has been getting louder for about a decade. So there's something called Healthy People 2030, the federal government's big public health framework, and that quietly dropped retail food access as a priority from its nutrition and healthy eating objectives.

It was in the 2020 version. It's gone now. No announcement, just they hit delete.

Jordan Harbinger:
It's Homer Simpson sliding into the bushes like we're just going to pretend that ever happened.

Jessica Wynn:
Maybe nobody will notice. Yeah. And the public often misses when policies just disappear.

Right. We only tend to see things that are implemented. So researchers have continued finding that simply improving retail food access produces much smaller dietary changes than policymakers originally hoped.

Jordan Harbinger:
OK, so if proximity to a grocery store isn't what's driving these health disparities, what is driving the health disparities? Because they're real. The disparities are real.

Poor communities really do have worse health outcomes. That's not in dispute. So what's actually causing the disparities?

I mean, it's not just like, oh, doctors are expensive, so they never get health care. Right. It's the diet thing is real.

I hate to use anecdotal evidence because everyone's like you're using an anecdote, which means you don't have real evidence. But when something you're telling me matches an anecdote, I'm going to tell it, which is that Nick Pell, who also contributes to Skeptical Sunday all the time, he's a gigantic meathead bodybuilder type guy who looks like a dangerous biker criminal, basically. And he lives in some part of Arizona that's not near anything, basically.

It's in a small town. And he goes to the store and he loads up his cart with like frozen chicken breasts and steak and eggs and stuff like that. He's always complaining about what other people are buying.

Right. He's like, I can't believe people eat like this. Right.

Because they're eating frozen pizza and frozen lasagna and frozen everything. And I was like, oh, yeah, that reminds me, I'm doing an episode about food deserts and he's like, ah, food deserts, food deserts, right, because it's Nick Pell and he's like, I don't believe it. These people just don't make good choices.

And I felt like, oh, that's kind of a mean thing to say, like maybe they don't know. But he might be kind of on to something because he's like, look, you can get vegetables, you can get chicken. It's just that it's not as tasty as a giant sausage pizza.

I get it.

Jessica Wynn:
I mean, he's definitely on a better track than our policymakers. And this is where the research gets uncomfortable. The most comprehensive study on this came from a team of economists at Chicago Booth, NYU and Stanford who asked a simple question.

What if low income households had the same food environment as higher income households? Would they eat the same? And they use that same enormous Nielsen data set, 60,000 households, a decade of grocery purchases to try to figure it out.

And what equalizing food access and prices completely, the full intervention would only close about nine, maybe 10 percent of the diet gap.

Jordan Harbinger:
So 90 percent of the diet gap is still something else. OK, what is it?

Jessica Wynn:
So 90 percent is what economists call preference heterogeneity. In plain English, differences in what people choose to buy. So high income households were willing to pay nearly twice as much for the recommended daily amount of vegetables and nearly three times as much for fruit.

Lower income households, on average, spent more of their food budget on foods higher in sugar and saturated fat. People usually make the best decision they can inside the environment they're in.

Jordan Harbinger:
Were you the one telling me about $20 strawberries the other day? Or $19 strawberries?

Yeah, I was.

Jessica Wynn:
I did it. I bought the $20 strawberry at Erewhon because it was curiosity, not because I thought it was going to be a miracle strawberry.

Jordan Harbinger:
But you got taller, so it was worth it. I know.

Jessica Wynn:
I'm like 6'6 now.

Jordan Harbinger:
Yeah. That's actually insane. When you told me that, I was like, how rich would I have to be to buy a strawberry for $19?

Like, at what point are you just like, screw it. I'm so rich. It'll never make a difference.

I want a bucket of $19 strawberries. I just don't think I ever get that.

Jessica Wynn:
I just want to be clear. I bought one $20 strawberry.

Jordan Harbinger:
Of course. That's worse, by the way. That's actually worse than buying a bunch of them.

You actually just ate one. I mean, at least drop a grand and have like a strawberry cake or something.

Jessica Wynn:
Spoiler, everybody.

Jordan Harbinger:
It was like a strawberry.

Jessica Wynn:
It didn't change my life.

Jordan Harbinger:
So on average, lower income households really were choosing those less healthy foods. And I know people are like, you're poor shaming or fat shaming, but it's like, this is what the data says, right? I'm not just being a dick here.

Jessica Wynn:
Sure. Yeah. I mean, this is a delicate thing to discuss, but I mean, at that moment in time, yes, that was true.

But we have to really understand the nuance here that preference isn't the same thing as people naturally like junk food. So economists use the word differently than we do. Preferences are shaped by culture, advertising, prices, stress, time, and what food was available growing up, what we were used to eating.

So they're learned. They're not fixed.

Jordan Harbinger:
That kind of data can lead people to some pretty bad conclusions, which leads to very bad policy. And it's exactly the kind of finding people here and immediately turn into, well, those people just don't care about eating healthy. But also that's kind of get why somebody might think that.

Jessica Wynn:
Yeah. I mean, of course, that's exactly right. But that's not what the research is actually saying.

So the mistake is treating preferences as though they appeared out of nowhere and people just don't care about their health. That's not what happens. Preferences have causes.

They're the product of decades of food marketing, agricultural policy, family tradition, economic constraints and just the environment people grew up in. So when economists say, quote unquote, preference gap, they're describing the outcome, not assigning blame. So building a supermarket doesn't undo 30 years of learned behavior.

You know, geography doesn't automatically change diets.

Jordan Harbinger:
OK, but if the culture is really that powerful, what does that actually look like in the real world?

Jessica Wynn:
So there's a real striking illustration of this that John McWhorter wrote about. West Harlem has had a full service supermarket called Fairway Market for over 15 years. It's well stocked, has great fresh produce, good prices, and it's right there in the middle of a really dense neighborhood.

It's not hidden. It's not hard to get to.

Jordan Harbinger:
Yeah, I've actually been there. My buddy lives in Harlem and I always love to go up there and eat Peruvian food or Dominican food or whatever with him because he can go. He's got that street cred to go into like the good place and get the good stuff with the special treatment.

And if somebody comes around yelling and screaming at people, he gives them the Harlem stink guy and they go away. But actually, Harlem is bougie now. When's the last time you were there?

Some parts of it are bougie.

Jessica Wynn:
I was there a couple of years ago. I mean, I've been there since the after the pandemic, which is, I guess, how I distinguish time now. But yeah, it's different.

It's definitely been, yeah, upgraded, I would say.

Jordan Harbinger:
I mean, when I lived in New York, it was in the early aughts, right? So like 2004-ish, you know, and on. So I met my buddy and he worked at the same law firm as me and he's like, come up to Harlem.

And I was like, oh my God, Harlem. And he's like, chill out, dude, it's fine. And he's like, I'll meet you on, I don't know, like 101 or something.

So I was like, okay. And then I would walk up there and I was like, okay, yeah, it's a little bit like, you know, I don't know, I probably wouldn't walk here alone at night, but it's fine. And he's like, it's also fine at night, dude, calm down.

And then I walked up last year when I went to visit him and I was like, hey, um, what the heck happened to this place? He's like, oh yeah, because he's like, meet me at Chez Mama on 103. And I was like, uh, what?

Because the last time I walked up there, it was like a little rough, a lot of bodegas and nail salons and stuff like that, like businesses, normal ones. Now it's like bougie coffee shop and another bougie place at the valet and then a new housing thing and a brand new this and a brand new that. And then we were having Dominican food and we were sitting outside.

This guy is like yelling and screaming, not like violently, just like across the street at his boy. And I was like, I wasn't expecting that. He's like, oh no, that guy, that guy's been here for a while.

You could tell he's, he's still got the old Harlem in him, right? Because he's like having a conversation with a dude across the street by screaming next to a cafe and everyone's like, how dare you? And my buddy Kerwin's just like, nope, that's just kind of how I grew up.

That's uh, that guy lives here. You can tell like this is his neighborhood. So yeah, Harlem's actually awesome.

Like I'm sure if you move to New York now and you get a chance to live there, it's probably one of the best neighborhoods, like one of the most interesting neighborhoods.

Jessica Wynn:
Oh, it's so fun. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger:
But yeah, 25 years ago, I don't know. You might want to be a little bit careful about where you live if you're like a blonde white dude running down the road to your stockbroker job. I don't know.

Jessica Wynn:
Right. Right. You might, you might get the Harlem stink eye then.

Jordan Harbinger:
Yeah, exactly. You might be on the receiving end of that. Anyway.

So yeah, I've been to that fairway market. It's nice.

Jessica Wynn:
But yeah, and you can see it in the obesity rates in West Harlem. They remain dramatically higher than those in Greenwich Village, even though the neighborhoods have changed so much. And that's just a few miles downtown.

That store is there, but the health gap still persists.

Jordan Harbinger:
Yeah. Same access, different outcomes. So what is driving the difference?

Because it's like you said, it's not just the grocery store anymore. This thing is two blocks away. So what's the deal?

Jessica Wynn:
Right. Not at all. And this is where John McWhorter's point is really important.

So food culture is real and it's durable. McWhorter was writing about black communities, but this applies broadly. Southern black food culture was shaped by slavery and sharecropping or salt and fat were lifestyle choices.

They were survival. And those food traditions didn't disappear once circumstances changed. They became family traditions just like they do in every culture.

The same way Italian-Americans still eat a ton of pasta three generations after immigration.

Jordan Harbinger:
Or Jewish people still eat gefilte fish, even though nobody actually enjoys it. Right. You just have to do it.

Yeah, exactly.

Jessica Wynn:
And this is where the food desert narrative can just quietly go wrong. At its worst, it implies that low-income families just lack the knowledge or desire to eat well. What the evidence actually shows is that they face real economic constraints, real time constraints and deeply rooted, historically shaped food preferences that a supermarket does not override.

What do you mean by time constraints? So this is the piece almost completely missing from the food access debate. For a working parent with two jobs, multiple kids and no car, the binding constraint isn't always distance to a grocery store.

It's time, right? Cooking a healthy meal might take 45 minutes if you've already bought the groceries. If you have a functioning kitchen and you get home at a reasonable time with the energy, a frozen meal or fast food run takes five minutes.

So time is a form of privilege we often forget about. And no grocery store, however close, will solve that problem.

Jordan Harbinger:
That is a really good point. So we've been solving the geography of hunger when it's a clock problem sometimes.

Jessica Wynn:
Yeah. And policy definitely does not reflect that because it measures everything in miles to the nearest store.

Jordan Harbinger:
Yeah. It just seems like flawed economic theory. You know, it's interesting.

When I worked in Detroit 30 years ago, I remember I drove my mom's, I think at the time, Ford Taurus down there. Every dad had a Ford Taurus. Yeah.

I mean, everyone's dad had a Ford Taurus, right? So I would drive that down there and you'd see these women who are like outside of the bodega, the convenience store or walking by and they go, hey, honey, you driving? And I would be like, why?

And they're like, can you drop me off at the grocery store? And I remember that I thought that was like a weird pickup line until I heard it the 50th time going to work. And I was I asked my boss, I was like, hey, who lived in the neighborhood, I was like, hey, why are these women constantly like, hey, honey, you driving?

What are they trying to do? And he's like, I think they actually just need a ride, because if you go to the grocery store, you have to wait for the bus with all your bags and then maybe stand. So it's really nice to get a ride to the grocery store or a ride back from the grocery store.

Like, it's really, really a luxury to not have to tote that crap on the bus and then walk from the bus stop to the and I was like, oh, man, I'm so sheltered.

Jessica Wynn:
Yeah. A gallon of milk's heavy. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger:
So imagine what you have a bunch of people in your family. So you have four gallons of milk and cereal and chicken and pasta like you're carrying six bags in summertime and you're on the bus. Maybe you don't even get a seat.

So, yeah, that sucks. If I were braver slash more reckless, I probably would have given these people a ride to the grocery store. But something about giving a stranger a ride in Detroit in the 90s was not not appealing to me.

Jessica Wynn:
That is such a great example because it is that travel cost. It is the time that's added waiting for public transportation. Or if you do have a car, the gas and just the hassle, you know, that that acts like almost like a shipping fee.

So if you're driving seven miles to a grocery store, that cost applies to everything in your cart. So relatively speaking, the healthier, more expensive items get cheaper, which means people who travel farther may actually buy better groceries than people who have a store down the block because they're putting more thought and time and energy into their shopping list.

Jordan Harbinger:
I want to go back real quick to measuring everything by miles to the nearest store, because that just seems like flawed economic theory.

Jessica Wynn:
Yeah, well, economists developed the theory in 1964. It's called the Alchian-Allen theorem, sometimes nicknamed shipping the good apples out. So say regular coffee costs a dollar fifty a pound and premium costs three dollars at the store.

The premium costs twice as much. But now imagine both have to be shipped somewhere and shipping adds a dollar to each pound. Regular coffee becomes 250 and premium becomes four dollars.

So premium coffee is still more expensive, but the difference between them suddenly feels smaller. Since you're already paying the same extra cost either way, spending a little more for the better coffee, it starts to seem worth it.

Jordan Harbinger:
So in some cases, the inconvenience is doing nutritional work.

Jessica Wynn:
Yeah, in a way, yes. And if you remove that fixed cost by putting a store right next door, you can actually make cheap, unhealthy food relatively more attractive again. There's even some evidence of small negative effects on diet quality when the new store is open.

Jordan Harbinger:
I see. That's an interesting wrinkle. So we tend to think convenience is always a good thing, but convenience cuts both ways.

Is it ever the case that the store is there, but what's inside isn't what we think? Like what? Maybe it's a food mirage to go off the metaphor.

Jessica Wynn:
Yeah, I mean, this is an important concept that the standard food desert metrics, they completely miss that, too. A food mirage, it is a thing. And it's when a neighborhood technically has a supermarket, but the in-store environment is skewed and effectively stocked differently.

There could be fewer fresh options, more processed foods at eye level and more aggressive junk food promotions. So the store counts as healthy food access on the government's map, but inside the store, not so much. I mean, I think we've all been to those little grocery stores where the produce section is just surprisingly small, you know?

Jordan Harbinger:
Yeah, well, again, in New York, they don't have a lot of space. So you'll go to some bodegas and there's fruit and vegetables and you're like, oh, OK. But obviously it's probably more bang for the buck space wise if they just sell Doritos, right?

So exactly.

Jessica Wynn:
And it's easier for the store to stock because they don't have to worry about shelf life, right?

Jordan Harbinger:
Because Doritos last, they're like cockroaches. They're still good after survive the apocalypse. They'll survive the apocalypse.

The coloring will be faded off the package and it'll still be crunchy and delicious inside. So, OK, yeah. The map says Oasis and the aisles say Cheetos.

Jessica Wynn:
Yeah. And there's research suggesting that large discount stores in low income areas may promote less healthy food more aggressively because that's what sells. So the store arrives and brings targeted junk food marketing with it.

So the desert was filled with a pool, but the pool is filled with Sprite.

Jordan Harbinger:
Gross. My eyes hurt. I know, right?

Man, the tingliness, though. Hmm. Do dollar stores make food deserts worse?

I feel like we have a zillion of those around here, too. And there's there's an argument that they're making things worse. Right.

I feel like I've read articles where it's like, oh, the dollar general or whatever is the reason that there's no Kroger in this neighborhood. I don't know.

Jessica Wynn:
The dollar stores are brilliant. You know, they are incredibly efficient businesses. They go into low income areas.

They capture the staples market like cleaning products, canned goods and snacks. But they carry almost no fresh food, no meaningful produce. There's really limited dairy.

There's no meat counter.

Jordan Harbinger:
So you can get a can of something. You can't get fresh vegetables. You can survive there.

But you can't really eat well there unless you're hamming it up on creamed corn and bacon bites or something like that.

Jessica Wynn:
Right. But if it's on your block, it's going to be much easier to forget about produce and buy the processed food. And once a dollar store moves in, it can siphon off just enough local spending to make a full service grocery store financially unviable.

Jordan Harbinger:
OK, right. Because if they're selling all the junk food and the junk food is the highest margin or whatever, and then people only go to the grocery store for an onion, a grocery store says, look, man, we're not we're not selling the stuff that we need to stay open. So they close and then nobody sells onions anymore.

They're not filling a gap, the dollar store. They're locking it in and sort of locking out fresh produce business or the fresh food business.

Jessica Wynn:
Absolutely. There's a report from the Institute for Local Self Reliance, which is a nonprofit research group that studies local economies and competition, arguing that dollar stores aren't just a symptom of economic distress. They can actually contribute to it.

So cities have started responding. In 2018, Tulsa, Oklahoma, created what's called a healthy food overlay district in North Tulsa, which is a predominantly black neighborhood where dollar stores had become so concentrated that some were less than a block apart from each other. That's insane to me to just even think about.

And under the new rule, any new dollar store has to be at least a mile from the next one. So Birmingham, Alabama adopted a similar policy. The following year and since then, Oklahoma City, New Orleans, Cleveland and more than a dozen other cities have passed measures to limit how densely dollar stores can open.

Jordan Harbinger:
Wow. So not banning them, but spacing them out a little bit.

Jessica Wynn:
Yeah, right. I mean, it's dispersal rules, one per mile, not three per block.

Jordan Harbinger:
Is that working?

Jessica Wynn:
I mean, it's too early to know how well these policies work. My guess would be probably if you can't go to one, then that's good news. But the idea is straightforward.

Instead of spending public money trying to lure a grocery store into a neighborhood, these cities are trying to stop dollar stores from crowding out grocery stores in the first place.

Jordan Harbinger:
I see. But dollar stores are popular. They're cheap.

They're convenient. Who are you to take that away from people?

Jessica Wynn:
I mean, that's a real concern. You know, dollar stores do provide value on staples. But the argument is that they provide that value at a real cost by preventing something more comprehensive from taking root.

So a grocery store would sell the same staples plus fresh food. So the question becomes, should local governments shape that tradeoff?

Jordan Harbinger:
It's like getting really good, fast, free shipping. But the only things you can buy are cigarettes and vodka.

Jessica Wynn:
Some people would love that.

Jordan Harbinger:
Well, yeah, that's true.

Jessica Wynn:
Jessica, 10 years ago, totally into it. Oh, my gosh. I'd be their best customer.

Yeah. But there's there's also the racial dimension to consider. And this is where it gets complicated.

So health disparities are real and they're not evenly distributed amongst communities. So black and brown communities are disproportionately affected.

Jordan Harbinger:
Ah, OK. So the food desert narrative was in part kind of a racial justice narrative. So if we're saying the mechanism is wrong, are we letting what do you call structural racism or whatever off the hook?

Jessica Wynn:
No. And this is critical because the disparities are real. The structural causes are real.

What the evidence challenges is which mechanism matters most.

Jordan Harbinger:
So, OK, what do you mean by that?

Jessica Wynn:
So there's research looking at something called food swamps. So they're areas with a high concentration of fast food and convenience stores relative to healthier options. So in a cross-sectional study of more than 3000 US counties with the highest food desert scores, they did have significantly higher rates of obesity related cancer mortality. But the association was even stronger in counties with the highest food swamp scores, about 77 percent higher rates. That's huge. And those counties were disproportionately in the south and southeast with higher black populations.

Jordan Harbinger:
OK, so both limited access to healthy food and heavy exposure to unhealthy food were associated with worse outcomes.

That's what I'm understanding here. So the swamp effect is strongly. That's interesting that it's just like you're around it and it's so easy to get.

And it's like, all right, fine. This is what we're all eating now.

Jessica Wynn:
Of course, you know, so the research doesn't say food deserts are meaningless. It suggests that focusing only on what a neighborhood lacks may miss something important. What's already there, how concentrated it is and how constantly people are exposed to it.

Jordan Harbinger:
So the policy response can't just be, well, at a grocery store, everything's fine now because people aren't going to buy the healthy stuff.

Jessica Wynn:
And that's the problem, which is what seems so logical to us at the beginning. Right. Improving access may still matter.

But if a neighborhood is saturated with fast food, convenience stores, targeted promotions and drive throughs, adding one supermarket may not be enough to change the overall food environment. So the evidence suggests the concentration of unhealthy food may be the more important mechanism. And that changes the policy response.

A food desert solution is to build a grocery store. A food swamp solution is to regulate fast food density, change marketing and address targeted promotion.

Jordan Harbinger:
And fast food chains also tend to cluster more heavily in lower income neighborhoods, correct? But isn't that kind of just the market responding to demand? Like nobody forced McDonald's or Taco Bell to open up over there.

And if people are buying the food, what are policymakers supposed to do about that? I mean, you could regulate fast food, you could tax it, you could ban new restaurants. But where does the logic end?

So, OK, we ban Taco Bell. OK, I guess we're all driving further to go to Taco Bell then. Like if that's what they want, that's what they're going to get.

Jessica Wynn:
Nobody's driving further to go to Taco Bell this week. That's true.

Jordan Harbinger:
Well, maybe not this week with the deadly lettuce explosion, explosive diarrhea lettuce that they've been placing on everything.

Jessica Wynn:
So locked into that story. But anyway, I mean, not necessarily. So the point isn't that fast food restaurants shouldn't exist.

It's that demand. It doesn't develop like we're thinking. It doesn't develop in a vacuum.

Companies don't survive by selling food nobody buys. But if one neighborhood has twice as many fast food restaurants, they have constant promotions, billboards and drive throughs on every major road. That's a different food environment than another neighborhood where healthier options are just as visible and just as convenient.

Jordan Harbinger:
I see.

Jessica Wynn:
So the relationship goes both ways. Right. Businesses respond to demand and the environment shapes which choices are affordable, familiar and practical in the first place.

If you grow up next to a Taco Bell, you're going to most likely go there while you're growing up. If you grow up next to a farm stand, you're probably going to grow up eating more apples, you know?

Jordan Harbinger:
Yeah. So you're saying it's not either or. It's not simply exploitation.

It's not also not simply a choice.

Jessica Wynn:
It's feedback. Businesses open where they expect strong sales. So once they're there, they make those foods more visible, more convenient and more familiar through sheer repetition.

That, in turn, encourages more sales, which attracts more businesses selling the same kinds of food. And over years, supply and demand start reinforcing each other.

Jordan Harbinger:
So it's less about blaming Taco Bell and more about recognizing that the environment itself nudges behavior.

Jessica Wynn:
Nobody's arguing people lose free will when they drive past a Burger King. The point is that environments influence behavior. So the research finds worse health outcomes in neighborhoods where fast food is much more common than healthier options, not because one burger changes your life, but because those cues and choices add up over time.

Jordan Harbinger:
OK, that makes a lot more sense than just saying fast food causes obesity and you have no choice but to eat a ton of it. So, sorry.

Jessica Wynn:
Yeah. And that's one reason researchers have shifted from talking about food deserts to food swamps. So the evidence suggests the concentration of unhealthy choices may matter more than simply the absence of a grocery store.

Jordan Harbinger:
And there's also a measurement issue here, right? The definition of what counts is like a healthy food store is built around a USDA framework that I'm not super confident is going to be complete, right? It could be missing some things.

Actually, do you know anything about this? Because I feel like that's also always flexible, right? Like, of course, it must sell produce.

So they keep an onion on the counter and they're like, here's your Cheetos. I don't know.

Jessica Wynn:
I mean, well, the standard definition looks for large supermarkets aligned with USDA guidelines, which they change, too, and they're not perfect. But a Vietnamese fish market with fresh veggies, a Mexican taco stand with fresh meat and produce or a West African grocery carrying plantains and fermented fish and greens, these offer fresh, nutritious food and still might not qualify under the official definition, even though they provide real, nutritious, culturally appropriate food.

Jordan Harbinger:
So a neighborhood could be counted as a food desert while actually having rich, healthy food options that the government maybe doesn't see because they're measuring with the wrong ruler.

Jessica Wynn:
Exactly.

Jordan Harbinger:
Because it doesn't look like whole foods.

Jessica Wynn:
And if your map ignores farm stands, farmers markets and other local food sources people actually rely on, it's going to miss parts of the real food environment. And those blind spots aren't culturally neutral. So now we've got misdiagnosis, mismeasurement and misdirected policy.

Jordan Harbinger:
That is a tough combo.

Jessica Wynn:
Yeah, it is. And the result is communities getting these ribbon cuttings instead of solutions that actually make an impact.

Jordan Harbinger:
What would make a real difference here? Because now we just subsidize the problem and that's it.

Jessica Wynn:
Yeah. So in 2024, the federal government spent about nine point three billion dollars on commodity crop subsidies. Corn alone accounted for about three billion, roughly a third of the total.

Soybeans were next at one point nine billion, followed by cotton, wheat and rice.

Jordan Harbinger:
And what are those crops become?

Jessica Wynn:
I mean, you know, we all pretty much know corn becomes high fructose corn syrup or livestock feed, cornstarch, corn oil and ethanol. Soybeans become soybean oil, which is another major ingredient in processed and ultra processed foods and livestock feed. And the most heavily subsidized crops in America are the raw ingredients for ultra processed junk food and cheap meat.

Jordan Harbinger:
And what happens to the prices of this?

Jessica Wynn:
From the mid 1980s through the 2010s, the real price of fresh fruits and vegetables rose substantially, while the real prices of sugar sweetened beverages and other processed food ingredients generally fell. So at the exact same time, we're building grocery stores to improve diets.

Jordan Harbinger:
Yeah. Oof. We were making unhealthy food cheaper the whole time with federal policy.

That is that's terrible. Oh, my gosh.

Jessica Wynn:
Yeah. And fruits and vegetables receive less than 10 percent of farm subsidies. Wow.

What? Why? I know the crops that become junk food receive most of it.

So we've engineered a system where the unhealthy choice is often the affordable one. Then spend more money trying to fix the consequences through programs aimed at the resulting health crisis.

Jordan Harbinger:
This is interesting because I went to Norway, I've been to a bunch of European countries and stuff like that, Germany, France, Italy, whatever. And I was young, so I would go to McDonald's because I'm like, I don't need to eat at a fancy restaurant, but I'm hungry right now and I'm getting what I know because I'm in high school or college. And it's freaking expensive over there, man.

You Norway, everything is expensive. But I remember going to McDonald's and I spent like twenty eight dollars on the big value meal. What was it called?

Value meal there. But it was like the Big Mac thing. And I remember going at the checkout.

I go, what? Oh, my God. In the checkout girl goes, oh, yeah, you're used to American prices, huh?

And I was like, yeah, I can't believe it. She's like, everything here is expensive, but your fast food is so cheap. I guess she had gone to visit the United States with her cousin or friend or something.

I forget the story that the woman working at McDonald's and she was like, I couldn't believe that this meal was like six dollars in America. I just couldn't believe it. And I thought, how is this possible?

But it never occurred to me that, oh, yeah, the raw ingredients are basically free because they're subsidized into oblivion in the United States and they have to pay real prices for everything over there, theoretically. Right. And they have to import a bunch of stuff, too, probably.

Jessica Wynn:
Yeah. I mean, you've probably seen all the the reels and things of people coming from overseas for the World Cup. Just amazed at what's going on with our food supply and costs and choices.

I have seen that.

Jordan Harbinger:
I've seen a lot of reels also where they're asking them, like, do you think Americans could handle the heat wave that's going on in the UK right now? And they're like, no way, no way. The Americans could never handle it.

And then the guy's like, do you realize that it's 10 degrees to 20 degrees hotter in America right now and every year than it is right here? Because it's like 84 in London and everyone's like, oh, my God, it's so hot. And it's like, yeah, I'm in Austin, Texas right now.

And it's 104. Right.

Jessica Wynn:
But they don't have air conditioning like we do either. They don't. Or even even in the Pacific Northwest here, Seattle, the air conditioning business is booming because nobody used to have it.

Jordan Harbinger:
Yeah. Global warming. Good for the HVAC guys.

Jessica Wynn:
Yes.

Jordan Harbinger:
So let me make sure I understand this. The federal government spends billions of dollars making junk food cheaper than it spends millions trying to undo the consequences by building grocery stores in neighborhoods where junk food is still the cheaper option. So a pint of blueberries costs more than a family sized bag of purple Takis or whatever.

I don't even know what those are. I've seen them. And then we're surprised that people buy the purple Takis.

That's not a nutrition policy. This is an administrative nervous breakdown that failed Econ 101.

Jessica Wynn:
Right, exactly. And what makes it worse is that the food desert solution, it's politically easy. You fund a supermarket, you get a ribbon cutting, a press conference, a grateful mayor, maybe the first lady.

Reforming the farm bill means taking on some of the most powerful agricultural lobbying interests in Washington, corn, soybean and sugar producers. The commodity crop associations, the people who've been shaping agricultural policy for generations, they don't lose. And then the general public, who doesn't take this deep dive into research like we are, just thinks, oh, food desert, build a store.

That's the solution, you know?

Jordan Harbinger:
Sure. Oh, they can't drive to the whole food. So get them one that's closer.

Yeah. Problem solved. So we do the easy, visible thing that doesn't even work rather than the hard and visible thing that might actually make a dent in the problem.

Jessica Wynn:
I mean, that seems to be the pattern of a lot of public health policy, unfortunately.

Jordan Harbinger:
Totally. So if building grocery stores is not the answer, what is the answer? What actually works?

Jessica Wynn:
Price. That's the clearest answer. Studies found that subsidizing healthy foods for low income households specifically, like making fruits and vegetables financially competitive with junk food, could close the nutrition gap entirely.

Their estimate was about eleven billion dollars a year, roughly 15 percent of the SNAP budget at the time.

Jordan Harbinger:
SNAP is that's food assistance in the United States. Can you define SNAP for anyone listening who might not know? I don't even I just call it food stamps.

Is that even a thing anymore? Probably not.

Jessica Wynn:
It is food stamps. It's just we don't use the physical stamps anymore because, you know, tech took over. So SNAP is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

But yes, essentially it's food stamps. The USDA says federal SNAP spending was about ninety nine point eight billion dollars in the twenty twenty four fiscal year. So we're talking about a meaningful number here, but not some unimaginable number, especially compared with years of spending on place based retail strategies that produced tiny effects.

Jordan Harbinger:
That is not a hard calculation.

Jessica Wynn:
It's not. And there's another intervention here that I think is genuinely promising online grocery purchasing with SNAP. So instead of building a store and hoping the people who face the biggest mobility barriers can get to it, you let them use benefits for pickup or delivery.

The SNAP benefits traditionally could only be used at physical stores. The USDA has recently allowed online SNAP purchasing to expand nationally, and both DoorDash and Instacart now support SNAP and EBT purchases with participating retailers. This targets the mobility constrained, the car free and low income households who face the most real geographic barriers.

So instead of hoping they will come to the new store, you can bring the groceries to them.

Jordan Harbinger:
OK, but online grocery shopping isn't some futuristic government innovation. My neighbors are all using Instacart that my kids could use DoorDash. I don't let them, but they could.

And people use Uber Eats. Grocery delivery already exists. Target comes over a bunch of times when my wife isn't like, I need to go to Target.

I'm like, have them drop it off. And she's like, I need to leave the house and go to Target for one hour. And I'm like, ah, OK, got it.

But why isn't that just the answer? Does that not exist everywhere? Am I just living in some sort of weird delivery bubble?

Jessica Wynn:
No, definitely not. But access is not the same thing as affordability. So one Brookings Institution study looked at grocery delivery in 2021 and found that 93 percent of Americans, including about 90 percent of people living in these USDA defined food deserts, had access to fresh groceries or prepared food through at least one of four major delivery platforms.

Amazon Fresh, Instacart, Uber Eats or Walmart. And that's actually a higher share than households with broadband Internet, which is only about 86 percent. So, yes, the digital reach for delivery is real.

Jordan Harbinger:
Wait, more people could get groceries delivered than had Internet to order them.

Jessica Wynn:
Right now, delivery markets have changed since 2021, with some areas expanding and others contracting. So those exact numbers have almost certainly shifted. But the broader point still holds.

For many Americans, physical proximity to a grocery store is no longer the only way to access one.

Jordan Harbinger:
I see. OK, so problem solved by Silicon Valley and apps. Pat's cell phone back, I guess.

Jessica Wynn:
I don't know. I mean, not quite, but here's where it gets complicated, of course. Yes, the delivery zone coverage is extraordinary.

DoorDash alone says it reaches over 11 million people living in USDA defined food deserts. And then you look at what it actually costs and see a price problem. Here it comes.

Yeah. So Instacart says directly on its help pages that some retailers charge higher item prices on the platform than they do in stores. What I've read, that seems to me to mean every store charges higher.

And then you have the fees we've all seen on these apps, and that applies on top of the higher prices. So Snap can cover eligible food items, but it does not cover delivery fees, service fees or tips, which means a Snap recipient using delivery is actually spending their food budget on food and spending their limited cash on fees. So when researchers and journalists have done side by side comparisons of the same grocery cart bought in store versus ordered through Instacart, the total comes out to roughly 35 to 50 percent more expensive all in.

Jordan Harbinger:
So the groceries are covered, but the logistics still aren't. And a $30 grocery run turns into 50 bucks, which is probably the same as an Uber or Roundtrip public transit to the store anyway.

Jessica Wynn:
Yeah, I mean, it's probably cheaper. And yeah, that all matters because those logistics costs hit low income households hardest.

Jordan Harbinger:
Sure, of course. Yeah.

Jessica Wynn:
A delivery surcharge is annoying if you're affluent.

Jordan Harbinger:
If I notice it, I get angry. That's why I just have Jen order.

Jessica Wynn:
And you might tip the driver a little less because you're paying all these fees, but it doesn't. Yeah, it's prohibitive if you are living paycheck to paycheck. So the people with the strongest reason to use delivery are the least able to absorb the extra cost.

Jordan Harbinger:
So what we really need is a federally subsidized dash pass. Is that a thing?

Jessica Wynn:
Yeah, I mean, that's a good idea. It's not exactly a thing, but some SNAP recipients can get discounted memberships through certain delivery services. But there isn't some universally federal funded dash pass.

And even with those programs, delivery fees and markups, there's still a barrier.

Jordan Harbinger:
Yeah, that's not really solving the problem is just changing who gets charged for it.

Jessica Wynn:
Right. And to be fair, the platforms are not completely indifferent to this. DoorDash does have a program called Project Dash.

We're partners with food banks and charitable organizations to deliver food to food and secure households at no cost. And since launching in twenty eighteen, they've powered more than five million deliveries and more than one hundred million meals. They did a lot of really good work during the pandemic.

Instacart offers a discounted Instacart Plus membership for eligible SNAP users. So when the federal government briefly threatened to freeze SNAP payments in late twenty twenty five, DoorDash and Instacart both stepped up with emergency fee waivers and discounts for SNAP users. But those are patches.

They're not a structural fix.

Jordan Harbinger:
Of course, those are charitable gestures. But charity from big tech companies is not a sustainable policy.

Jessica Wynn:
Of course not. And there's another issue coming fast behind this one. If more low income households are getting groceries through delivery apps, then the app itself becomes part of the food environment.

So DoorDash's own data shows that lower income consumers use the platform at similar rates to wealthier ones. What does the algorithm show you first when you open the app? What gets promoted on the home screen in a low income zip code versus a wealthier one?

You know, are the sponsored products chips and soda or produce? What gets discounted? You know, is it buy one, get one free candy or is it fresh fruit?

And it's just like any other algorithm. It's based off if you're only DoorDashing fast food, it's always going to promote fast food, not, you know, produce at the market.

Jordan Harbinger:
I'm looking at mine right now and it's basically just stuff I've recently ordered. And then it's like clearly targeting me for Asian food because we order a bunch of that for my kids. So it's like, oh, you haven't tried this udon place.

You haven't tried this place. And then if you scroll a little further, the constant advertisers are 7-Eleven and McDonald's and Burger King and stuff like that. And then, yeah, there's a lot of like, hey, did you forget?

And it's like, order some Twizzlers. But I think everyone probably gets that because I've never DoorDashed anything like that in my life. But they're the ones who have these huge chains are the ones that have a budget to advertise nationally on DoorDash.

Jessica Wynn:
Think about that. 7-Eleven is already more expensive than a regular grocery store. So then all those fees on top of it.

I mean, they're making bank, I bet.

Jordan Harbinger:
So we basically taught the food swamp how to use an algorithm. That's not good.

Jessica Wynn:
Yeah, that's exactly the concern. We may be moving from a physical food swamp to a digital one.

Jordan Harbinger:
Now, for the rest of Skeptical Sunday. So the old problem was that the store was too far away.

Then it turns into the store that comes to you, but only if you can afford the fees. And now it might be that the store comes to you, charges you extra, and the algorithm may be nudging you towards junk and crap food the whole time. That's worse, actually.

Jessica Wynn:
Yeah, it is. It's hard to design policy for a world that didn't exist 10 minutes ago, you know.

Jordan Harbinger:
But all of this kind of assumes people can even get online broadband. Is that universal now? I remember my cousin who lived up north in Michigan didn't get it.

He took like 20 extra years to get Internet. That wasn't dialogue.

Jessica Wynn:
I think it's still about 15 percent of the United States doesn't have broadband, which is shocking. I mean, it sounds small, maybe at the surface, but that's a shockingly large amount of people who don't.

Jordan Harbinger:
But how big of a problem is that? Because don't most people then have smartphones in those areas? So, yeah, they can't play Call of Duty at a reasonable speed on Xbox, but like their phone still works for Internet and ordering, right?

Jessica Wynn:
Of course. But it also changes every day. I don't know.

Actually, I don't know what the connection is between crummy Wi-Fi service and broadband and your ability to get groceries delivered. I'm not really sure if there's any research on that whole connection. But, you know, it's the last mile problem of the last mile solution.

We've dramatically expanded delivery coverage, but Internet access hasn't always kept up the pace in places. So while 93 percent of Americans have delivery coverage, like I said, I think only around 86 percent have really good broadband and it's significantly lower in certain low income urban and rural communities. So you can live in a food desert where Instacart delivers, but 25 percent of households might not reliably access the app.

Jordan Harbinger:
OK, so but still delivery works for the people who can access it. A smartphone, reliable Internet, a payment method and enough extra cash to absorb the fees.

Jessica Wynn:
Right. But take away just one of those and the solution becomes theoretical. You know, it's kind of a gated solution.

Jordan Harbinger:
Yeah. OK. All right.

So what about the other political instinct here, which is just to restrict what people can buy with Snap UK? Maybe you can't buy soda and junk food. Problem solved.

And I know people get really angry about that, but like, OK, how else are we supposed to nudge behavior? We don't want kids smoking. So we make it illegal for them to buy the cigarettes.

Jessica Wynn:
Right. And a lot of people look at it the same way because it does seem like it's almost a compassionate kind of logic. Right.

But the evidence there is very mixed. Some studies show modest improvements. Others show substitution.

People just shift how they spend and overall diet doesn't improve much. There are the tradeoffs like stigma, administrative complexity and the basic question of whether restricting choices works if you haven't changed the underlying drivers of those choices.

Jordan Harbinger:
I don't know. I'm kind of torn on this one. On the one hand, it feels really it does feel paternalistic to tell adults what they're allowed to eat.

And on the other hand, I don't know, man, if taxpayers are funding a nutrition program, isn't it reasonable to expect that the money goes towards nutritious food? I mean, I don't maybe I care less about what adults eat, but like it's child abuse what you're feeding your kids at this point. You know, maybe I don't let you buy that with my tax dollars.

I don't know. We already limit Snap to food purchases. Right.

You can't buy smokes and stuff with Snap. So why not limit it to healthier food? I understand why people hear that and think, yeah, what's the problem?

Come on, man.

Jessica Wynn:
But it assumes the problem is the shopping cart.

Jordan Harbinger:
OK, well, forget politics for a second. If Snap recipients could only buy healthier foods, would that even improve diets or is that not also going to work?

Jessica Wynn:
It wouldn't improve diets very much. According to the evidence, the shopping cart is the end of the story, not the beginning. So if unhealthy food is still the cheapest option, it's the easiest option, the most heavily marketed option and the most familiar option, restricting a handful of products doesn't change the forces that got people there in the first place.

Plus, you're telling people what not to buy while leaving everything that made them want to buy it in the first place intact.

Jordan Harbinger:
OK, but we got to start somewhere. So what does shake things up on something like this?

Jessica Wynn:
It really all comes down to education and education done well, not generic nutrition advice, but culturally competent programs that work without people actually eat. So you don't tell someone to abandon their food. You help them adjust it.

Ingredients, methods, substitutions. You teach someone why olive oil is different from corn oil. Some people don't understand the difference of when they're looking at the shelf of what all that is.

And then you show them how to make the food they already love slightly healthier. You may get further than any supermarket ever could because knowledge shapes preference over time. And preference is the thing the supermarket never touched.

Jordan Harbinger:
What about community input here? Because one thing that keeps coming up is that maybe people didn't actually want the solution we built for them.

Jessica Wynn:
Yeah, I mean, that's a big blind spot. Some communities have pushed back on chain supermarkets, not because they oppose healthy food, but because of what those stores bring with them. So profits leave the neighborhood.

Local businesses get displaced. The store stocks national brands instead of the food people actually prepare locally. Meanwhile, the local bodega, imperfect as it is, knows the community.

They often extend credit. They stock culturally relevant foods. That matters, and it matters a lot.

This all reframes something like the Pittsburgh store closing. Maybe it wasn't just a failed intervention. Maybe it was feedback.

Jordan Harbinger:
Right. The community was saying, this isn't what we need. We never asked for this.

It's a familiar pattern with policy, right? The problem is diagnosed by people far outside the environment in the community, and they prescribe the solution and then they act all surprised when people don't use it, even though the community was never part of the conversation. I feel like we have this conversation about mass transit and stuff, too.

It's like, oh, we need more buses. We need more trains. And then they build a subway in US and people are like, we got a subway in US because no one uses it. It looks it's like so clean you could eat off the floor because it's had three passengers in the past three days.

Jessica Wynn:
Exactly. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger:
Isn't actress slash comedian Tiffany Haddish and she's kind of a champion for building grocery stores where she grew up. So she kind of gets what the problem is.

Jessica Wynn:
Yeah, she is. And that's actually just a terrific example of someone who seems to intuitively understand what all this research is saying. So her loyalty to Compton led her project called Diaspora Groceries.

And it's not just a grocery store. She wants it to become a community hub in South Los Angeles. She's talked about cooking classes because, as she points out, Home Depot teaches people how to use power tools, but grocery stores don't teach people how to use healthy food.

She wants financial literacy classes attached to the store, offer housing advice and then just have shelves stocked with products from local and minority owned businesses. So more of the money stays in the neighborhood. No, it's a much broader vision than simply saying here's a supermarket.

Jordan Harbinger:
That's interesting because it sounds like she's solving more than a food problem.

Jessica Wynn:
She is. She's trying to build community education and economic opportunity alongside access to healthy food. Whether her project succeeds or not, you know, say whatever you want about her, what she's doing, it's much closer to where the evidence points than the old idea that you can just drop a grocery store into a neighborhood and everyone's diet will change for the better.

Jordan Harbinger:
Yeah, that's cool. She's trying to build the conditions that make a grocery store matter in the first place.

Jessica Wynn:
Another thing policymakers get wrong is time. Most of the evidence we've talked about looks at outcomes over a few months or a few years. But there's a researcher named Stefan Hutt who used 11 years of data plus a retrospective survey going back several decades, and he found something remarkable.

People who move into healthier food environments do change their behavior, but it takes decades. We're talking 30 to 40 years. Great.

Jordan Harbinger:
OK, well, womp womp. That actually makes a ton of sense, though. I mean, we know environments can nudge behavior over time.

Cigarette smoking did not collapse overnight. It took decades of changing prices and advertising and social norms and availability before the culture really shifted. And that that still hasn't even happened everywhere.

Jessica Wynn:
Right.

Jordan Harbinger:
Right. And it's a bit like we've known smoking was bad for you since the end of World War Two or something. I mean, come on, man.

So, yeah, that's kind of bad news. Like, hey, nutrition, education. Yeah.

OK, tell your grandkids not to eat that then.

Jessica Wynn:
Oh, that's awful. Right. Well, we just know culture changes slowly.

Habits form slowly. If you grow up in a neighborhood where buying fresh food is normal, expected and easy, that may become part of how you eat as an adult. But easy isn't just about distance.

Like we said, it's also about time. You know, if you're working those rotating shifts and two jobs or you work overnight hours, the grocery store might be closed when you're off work while the gas station, Waffle House or drive through is still open. So there's short term evidence says simply opening a supermarket doesn't meaningfully change diets.

But over a generation, as those environments and routines change, it's possible we're measuring just too early to see the full effect.

Jordan Harbinger:
So we might be right that supermarkets don't change behavior in the short run, but then in the long run, they might actually change behavior.

Jessica Wynn:
So complicated. The short and medium term evidence says that access alone doesn't meaningfully change diets. But long term, it might be it's plausible, but we just don't have definitive answers yet, which is a problem because policy runs on election cycles.

So a lot of these programs have four years to show results, and that might be the single biggest driver of bad public health policy in American history. The mismatch between the pace of political timelines and the pace of social and biological change.

Jordan Harbinger:
But it could take 30 years to see the changes. Democracy is not optimized for slow moving problems. Right.

What can we say to somebody who cares deeply about food justice and sees that these solutions don't work?

Jessica Wynn:
You were right about the problem. You were right that it's structural, that it's unjust, that it demands a response. What the evidence challenges is not the diagnosis, it's the prescription.

So the system is still driving poor health through subsidies that make junk food artificially cheap, through fast food saturation, through targeted marketing, through retail environments that steer people's behavior and through business models that just block better options like the dollar stores.

Jordan Harbinger:
I see. So those are the levers, but they seem harder to pull and they don't they don't come with fancy ribbon cuttings. You don't get a plaque for that.

Jessica Wynn:
Right. But they're the ones that matter.

Jordan Harbinger:
So if you could change one thing tomorrow, based on all your research here, what would it be?

Jessica Wynn:
Well, I think I would change a couple of things if I could. So first, restructure the farm bill and reform agricultural subsidies. So healthy food is the cheap option, not the expensive one.

Second, expand and support delivery access in a way that actually works for low income households, not just theoretically, but financially. And third, invest in community driven, culturally grounded nutrition programs and give communities real authority over what gets built in their neighborhoods. Stop making these decisions in DC and make them with the people in the community.

Jordan Harbinger:
And not one of those involves building a supermarket. And that's coming from somebody who used to think building supermarkets was the solution. Okay.

Yeah.

Jessica Wynn:
This data changed my mind and it should change our policy.

Jordan Harbinger:
I don't know about you, but I'm going to think a lot harder the next time somebody says, oh, just build a grocery store there. There's a food desert over here. It turns out that changing what people eat is a heck of a lot more complicated than changing where they shop.

Thanks, Jess. Those who are hungry for knowledge on this topic should find themselves quite full at this point. And thank you all for listening.

Topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday to me, Jordan at Jordan Harbinger dot com. Advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show all at Jordan Harbinger dot com slash deals. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram.

You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. Jessica is on her substacks Between the Lines and Where Shadows Linger. We'll link to those in the show notes.

Her work is also on Instagram at Never Met Jessica's, plural. And this show is created in association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Tadas Sidlauskas, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, Gabriel Mizrahi.

And our advice and opinions, they're our own. And, yeah, I'm a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer. Also, we try to get all this stuff as right as we can.

Not everything is gospel, even if it is fact checked. So do consult a qualified professional before applying anything you hear on the show, especially if it's about your health and well-being. Remember, we rise by lifting others.

Share the show with those you love. If you found the episode useful, please share it with somebody else who could use a good dose of the skepticism and knowledge we doled out today. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn.

And we'll see you next time. You'd never obey a stranger who called you and told you to commit a crime, right? Javier Leiva uncovers how ordinary, intelligent people were manipulated by fake authority into doing the unthinkable and why the certainty that you'd never fall for it could make you the perfect target.

Javier Leiva:
This is the con, because I interview a lot of con artists. What they do is they overwhelm you. They raise your sense of urgency, which now you're bypassing all your common sense, things that would normally make sense to us.

We're not even thinking about that. Right. Because we're like in a state of alarm.

We're hardwired to trust people. People obey because we're taught to respect authority. I found case after case of people impersonating ICE agents and doing all kinds of stuff, not just rape or violent crime, extortion, like all kinds of stuff.

And I was like, you know what? You could go to Bass Pro Shop and buy your ICE uniform. Right.

And you could pull off whatever you want because people respect authority. People are afraid of authority and they will most likely do what you say and you might fall for it. This is just the tip of the iceberg, man.

When somebody causes a sense of urgency and you bypass your logic, just slow it down, pause it, give yourself some time to think, because when you're acting out of fear, you're making bad decisions. And I think just doing that will save you a lot of grief. This stuff is insane and is probably the most extreme examples, but I think that you just have that in the back of your mind that some people are looking to take advantage of you and just have a healthy dose of skepticism.

Jordan Harbinger:
Find out how to recognize the trap before your judgment and your life unravels on episode 1330 of The Jordan Harbinger Show.