Specialty stores are food retail stores that are beyond classification, such as Detroit’s three chitterlings stores, the sweet potato store, and the many spice stores.Produce market: a store selling only fresh fruits and vegetables.Bakeries: a store whose primary purpose was selling bread.Butcher/fish markets: a store selling only fresh meat or fish.Full-service grocery stores: a store that sold fresh produce, dairy, fresh meat, and bread at the same location.Most of these entries are for gas stations, liquor stores, and vending machines.Īccording the State of Michigan, Detroit has 111 full-service grocery stores, 58 butchers/fish markets, 34 bakeries, 20 produce markets, and 35 specialty stores, given the following definitions: Weeding through the 15,000 entries for Wayne County was taxing (I started working on this process in November), but worthwhile. To answer this question, I turned to government licensing data from the Michigan Department of Agriculture, which regulates food retailers in Michigan. Moreover, if it is, how large is our caloric tundra? Longworth’s argument that there are “no supermarkets in Detroit,” I think neither sought to answer the larger question of whether Detroit, on the whole, was a food desert.
More recently, Sweet Juniper’s James Griffioen wrote a similarly insightful piece for Urbanophile, aimed at “eliminating the gross generalization that there are no grocery stores in the city of Detroit.” Its success at combating a tidal wave of journalistic thought, however, remains to be seen.Īlthough Kavanaugh and Griffioen clearly disproved Good Magazine’s Richard C.
In many cases, this type of story is little more than a new form of “ ruin porn." In one of my favorite examples of this trend, CNN reporter Poppy Harlow reported that there are "no places to get fresh fruit or vegetables" in the entire city, while standing only a few blocks from a large chain grocery store.Īlthough Model D’s Kelli Kavanaugh eloquently questioned this view in 2007, this predominant view persisted. Others suggest the city has no grocery stores at all. No shortage of media outlets – such as the Detroit News, NBC, CNN, Good Magazine, the New York Times, Guernica Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and Time Magazine - have run stories casting Detroit as a “food desert." The most common criticism of the city’s food system is its lack of large-scale chain stores, such as Kroger, Wal-Mart, A&P, Costco or Meijer’s. Despite the successes of many of Detroit’s grocery stores, dozens of researchers, journalists and bloggers have helped brand Detroit a “food desert,” a place where residents cannot access fresh food.