What Everyone Gets Wrong About Mamdani’s Public Grocery Store Idea

When studying food insecurity, scholars distinguish between “availability” (what is actually on the shelves) and “access” (what shoppers can afford). Particularly in American cities, it is overwhelmingly access, not availability, that drives food insecurity: There’s plenty of food on the shelves where food-insecure people shop; there’s just not always enough money in their pockets. That, paradoxically, can make it hard to address food insecurity with solutions that focus primarily on food. It’s actually Mamdani’s other policies—not public grocery stores—that may offer more useful policy models for municipalities looking to take a bite out of food insecurity.

The argument for public grocery stores in New York City goes something like this: A significant number of people across the five boroughs—hundreds of thousands, and up to three million by some estimates—live in so-called food deserts, or areas where fresh and affordable food is unavailable within a mile, potentially leading some low-income families to rely on more expensive or unhealthy food options. This is compounded by rising food costs, driven in part by consolidation and greed on the part of the country’s major corporate grocers. In this context, a public option for grocery stores would challenge corporate dominance and battle food insecurity, treating food as a public good and food provision as something akin to a utility, like “water, transit, or libraries,” per Alex Birnel’s argument in Jacobin: “essential infrastructure that belongs to the people.” Public grocery stores, one influential policy brief argues, could not only provide access to affordable food but act as hubs of well-paid work and “values-based” procurement of high-quality foods, turning food deserts into bountiful gardens of food abundance.

But there’s just not much evidence that food deserts—a concept that implies physical distance is the biggest impediment to an affordable and healthy diet—are a big factor in cities. This idea holds up much better in rural areas, where corporate consolidation has led to the closures of local grocery stores, forcing consumers to rely on scant local options like the Dollar General or travel prohibitively long distances for fresh food (the USDA defines a rural food desert as any area where a significant part of the population lives more than 10 miles away from a grocery store). In the countryside, the case for public grocery stores is strong—although the success rate in experiments so far is mixed.