The market is not the problem, its people's choices.

I have been skeptical of the food desert movement since 2014. The idea that the poor are obese because they do not have access to good food options. That they live in food deserts where all they can purchase are calorific processed food.

Lots of government money has gone into trying to come up with solutions to this non-problem. Since the very beginning of the effort to get government to solve the proposed problem of food deserts, researchers have been providing evidence that food deserts don't exist. Virtually everyone has access to good food choices.

They also keep providing evidence that obesity rates are not driven by relative access to food choices but are in fact driven by personal choices about food (which foods and how much) in combination with personal choices about exercise.

Here is the most recent research out of the University of Chicago. From Food deserts not to blame for growing nutrition gap between rich and poor, study finds by Sandra M. Jones.

or decades, the conventional wisdom has been that people living in food deserts—defined as areas lacking in supermarkets with fresh produce and other nutritious items—have little choice but to buy unhealthy food at drugstores or convenience stores. But the data tell a different story.

A new Chicago Booth study finds that food deserts have no meaningful effect on eating habits. Exposing low-income households to the same products and prices as those in high-income households reduces nutritional inequality by only 9 percent while the remaining 91 percent of the nutrition gap is driven by difference in what shoppers prefer to buy, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper published recently.

“One of the conclusions in our study is that opening a supermarket in a food desert has very little impact on the nutritional composition of households’ shopping baskets,” said Jean-Pierre Dubé, the Sigmund E. Edelstone Professor of Marketing at Chicago Booth, who co-authored the research along with New York University’s Hung Allcott and Stanford University’s Rebecca Diamond. “People in food deserts shop in supermarkets almost as frequently as people living in higher-income neighborhoods. They just travel longer distances to stores.”

[snip]

Two decades later, with the help of big data, the researchers Allcott, Diamond, and Dubé decided to design a study that relied on actual grocery purchases to determine why the wealthy tend to eat more healthfully than the poor in the U.S.

The researchers worked with data from the Nielsen Datasets at Chicago Booth’s Kilts Center for Marketing, which include grocery purchases by some 60,000 households per year and grocery sales at about 35,000 stores nationwide from 2004 to 2015. They also included the locations of 1,914 supermarkets to study the impact that new supermarkets have on healthy eating in food deserts.

They tested whether a household’s geographic location drives food shopping preferences, to understand whether living in a food desert causes residents to purchase less nutritious food. In fact, they found almost no effect of location on purchases. Then they developed an empirical method to estimate the preferences that the households in the panel had for fruits and vegetables, as well as various nutrients such as saturated fat, sugar and salt.

[snip]

As part of the study, the researchers also developed a health index to measure the nutrition content of households’ grocery purchases. The index improved five times more for high-income households than it did for low-income households between 2012 and 2015, compared to 2004 through 2007—indicating the nutritional gap between the rich and the poor is growing.

The authors also found that education and nutrition knowledge are strongly associated with the differences in preferences across income groups. While these findings are not causal, they may suggest that policies aimed at nutrition education may be more effective at closing the nutrition gap than subsidies and grants meant to encourage building more supermarkets and farmers markets in food deserts.

No, food deserts don't contribute more than 10% to the obesity problem.

Yes, people's personal choices drive their health and obesity outcomes.

It is disheartening that the primary policy tool to address obesity is improved nutrition education and knowledge. Education campaigns can occasionally work. But usually do not.

UPDATE: Henry David Thoreau had something to say about this in Walden.

Be sure that you give the poor the aid they most need, though it be your example which leaves them far behind. If you give money, spend yourself with it, and do not merely abandon it to them. We make curious mistakes sometimes. Often the poor man is not so cold and hungry as he is dirty and ragged and gross. It is partly his taste, and not merely his misfortune. If you give him money, he will perhaps buy more rags with it. I was wont to pity the clumsy Irish laborers who cut ice on the pond, in such mean and ragged clothes, while I shivered in my more tidy and somewhat more fashionable garments, till, one bitter cold day, one who had slipped into the water came to my house to warm him, and I saw him strip off three pairs of pants and two pairs of stockings ere he got down to the skin, though they were dirty and ragged enough, it is true, and that he could afford to refuse the extra garments which I offered him, he had so many intra ones. This ducking was the very thing he needed. Then I began to pity myself, and I saw that it would be a greater charity to bestow on me a flannel shirt than a whole slop-shop on him. There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.