[throwaway0a5e]

You're both kind of right here. The farmers market stuff is mostly BS.

In the rural areas the weekly/biweekly shopping routine involves everyone (rich and poor alike) dragging their butts to the one strip mall in a 1-2hr radius and that strip mall will have at the bare minimum a super-walmart with a good fresh produce section or a Walmart with a grocery store beside it because that's the place where rich middle and poor from the entire area shop and it needs to cater to them all in order to get them to drag their butts there and do business. The poor will buy less and fill in the gaps with Dollar General food (which is bad food at a bad price).

The poor urban areas which can't economically support supermarkets and who's residents can't economically justify traveling the range they'd need to travel to get to those supermarkets (because the run down not always running cars that underpin the transportation of the rural poor are not as economically viable in cities) so they're stuck buying food at CVS, the bodega or whatever convenience store is accessible.

If you draw the food desert line at "no Whole Foods and no farmers market" then they both suck. But if you zoom in on the area below that the rural areas have a slight edge.

[giantg2]

Why are farmers markets BS?

"If you draw the food desert line at "no Whole Foods and no farmers market""

I don't think anyone is claiming that.

[ryanbrunner]

The idea that farmers markets are commonplace in rural areas is mostly BS. They exist in cities for sure, but you pretty much need an urban population (and probably a fairly well-off population) to really support a farmers market.

Just because farms exist in an area doesn't generally mean the people in that area are getting their food from those farmers (at least directly). That's mostly a relic of an old vision of farms that grew every type of produce and had a variety of livestock instead of the corporate monoculture farms that dominate today.

[giantg2]

Sure, the truly rural people aren't going to farmers markets, but the people in small towns and suburban areas do (this is in contrast to the "big city" in the original comment). Most rural people use a store for most stuff and then go to farm stores/stands/neighbors for other things.

There are still farms that produce a variety of produce. Many of them only produce them as a small percentage of their operation. For example, the dairy farm down the road plants sweet corn, tomatoes, peppers, watermelon, cantaloupe, and (not food, but) manure. I know of several other farms that do similar things.