City-owned grocery stores are perhaps the most hotly debated item on New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s proposed affordability agenda. Proponentspoint to runaway food prices and the need to provide fresh groceries to the Big Apple’s underserved communities. Critics argue that the public sector should stay out of the food business, or else risk Soviet-style bread lines and rampant shoplifting.
The reality is more complicated than either side is letting on. Perhaps we should have a public option, if you will, for staple groceries. But to fight food insecurity, a public grocery option would need to be reinforced by policies that don’t, at first glance, seem to have much to do with food.
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…