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food security
Why Mamdani’s City-Owned Grocery Stores Are an Idea Whose Time Has Come
Rather than accepting that small rural towns and historically marginalized communities go without proper access to affordable and quality food in the pursuit of corporate profit, public ownership reframes the conversation by directly addressing market failure.
Aug 08, 2025
Zohran Mamdani’s surprise win in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City was powered by a focus on affordability. One of his more innovative proposals to help address the city’s growing cost of living crisis is to open a city-owned grocery store in each borough that expands access to good-quality food for residents at an affordable price.
Contrary to the public outcry from critics, city-owned grocery stores are not a novel or radical idea in the United States. The United States military already operates a network of publicly owned grocery stores; rural communities in Kansas have successfully experimented with municipally owned supermarkets; and big cities are exploring their potential and charting plans.
City-owned grocery stores are a promising solution for communities who suffer from the hunger and food insecurity that comes from living in food deserts, urban or rural neighborhoods with limited access to healthy and affordable groceries.
Food deserts exist in part because of misaligned profit motives for private sector grocery companies. Large corporate retailers like Kroger and Whole Foods do not bother to invest in certain communities because, despite demand, low-income neighborhoods lack the infrastructure and purchasing power to sustain their for-profit business. Instead, retailers concentrate or relocate their grocery stores to areas where they can expect a higher rate of return, like wealthier suburban neighborhoods.
That profit incentive creates a harmful cycle that perpetuates a phenomenon known as “supermarket redlining” that leaves thousands of communities underserved.
The real return on investment is improved health outcomes, stronger neighborhoods, greater accountability to your constituents, and the elimination of food deserts for the more than 53 million people who currently live in them.
New York City is home to more than two dozen neighborhoods that are classified as food deserts. These localities are predominantly Black and Hispanic and rely on both bodegas and dollar stores for their grocery needs, creating “food swamps” where unhealthy food options vastly outnumber nutritious ones.
Mamdani’s proposal seeks to fill the void left by the market. He is offering city-owned grocery stores as a public option to low-income residents in neighborhoods that the private sector has abandoned. If elected, Mamdani has pledged to allocate $60 million to support his grocery pilot program with a focus on expanding accessibility and guaranteeing affordability rather than turning a profit. Complaints about profitability are overblown given that public sector grocery stores can manage costs with the elimination of price markups via property tax, rent, and licensing fee exemptions.
The projected savings for consumers from this program has resonated with New Yorkers. Food prices in the Big Apple have increased by more than 25% since 2019. The same cannot be said for workers’ wages, which have stagnated and failed to keep up with grocery costs.
Mamdani’s detractors point to several challenges of running an effective city-owned grocery store. For example, local governments may lack operational expertise or find it difficult to purchase food from wholesalers at a competitive price. But these challenges are not insurmountable.
The Rural Grocery Initiative at Kansas State University provides one-on-one support to new grocery stores—from initial feasibility studies and market research to employee training and operational management—through a statewide healthy food initiative.
“The grocery industry was once thought of as a multigenerational industry where the business was passed down from parents to their kids,” the program’s director Rial Carver told Inequality.org in a recent interview. But with the increased market concentration by a handful of dominant corporate players, “there are grocers [now] entering the business without generational knowledge. The need for technical assistance is great, and we do anything we can to support them.”
State and local governments and institutions can spearhead or partake in programs that assist municipal grocery stores with market expertise, technical support, and state initiatives like Colorado’s Community Food Access Program that help retailers access food at lower prices.
Military commissaries are an excellent example of how storefront collaboration can keep prices competitive. By having their network of stores share suppliers, they are able to maintain prices 25-30% lower than retail stores.
In North Dakota, three grocery stores along with two other entities came together in 2021 to form the Rural Access Distribution (RAD), a purchasing cooperative. One of the goals of the cooperative is for the businesses to collectively purchase food in bulk in order to reap the benefits of wholesale prices. “There is also a restaurant [and] a school district that has bought into the purchasing co-op,” added Carver. “They see the benefits of buying into that wholesaler. It can serve other business types too.”
Mamdani’s city-owned grocery stores can adopt a similar strategy with other New York grocers, forming or joining a consortium, to pool their resources together to purchase food in high volume to access cheaper wholesale prices.
The St. Paul Supermarket, a grocery store owned and operated by the city of St. Paul in Kansas, is a successful example of a city-owned shop. After the retirement of Joe and Sue Renfro, the city government decided to purchase it. The grocery store is now in its 12th year of operation as a city-owned enterprise. The secret, according to the city, is broad community support and an effective leadership team, plus a commitment from the city to continue to provide financial support.
Public groceries do not have to be uniform. They can take on different organizational structures depending on the desires of community stakeholders, the level of support from residents, and local governments. Models range from worker-owned cooperatives and nonprofits to public-private partnerships where operations are outsourced.
For example, the city of Atlanta is planning to open two municipally-owned grocery stores in partnership with the organic food market Savi Provisions later this year to tackle food insecurity. The stores will be more than just a place to shop for groceries; they will also be a community and cultural hub with workshops and classes.
Rather than accepting that small rural towns and historically marginalized communities go without proper access to affordable and quality food in the pursuit of corporate profit, public ownership reframes the conversation by directly addressing market failure. City-owned grocery stores also have the potential to generate new debates on the high levels of market concentration in the industry and revive the enforcement of the Robinson-Patman Act to reverse price discrimination of wholesalers towards smaller and municipal grocers.
It is possible that Mamdani’s city-owned grocery stores may run at an economic loss in the first few years, but public options are not designed to make a profit. They are designed to provide adequate access to groceries at an affordable price to customers.
The real return on investment is improved health outcomes, stronger neighborhoods, greater accountability to your constituents, and the elimination of food deserts for the more than 53 million people who currently live in them. City-owned grocery stores are a step towards transforming food access and full-service groceries from a privilege into a community right.
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The GOP Is Taking Food From Kids to Give Billionaires a Tax Break
Trump’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” will result in the largest cut to SNAP in history, at $186 billion through 2034.
Jul 24, 2025
What do Louisiana, West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Alabama have in common? For one thing, they’re red states. For another, they’re poor states. Each has among the top 10 highest percentages of residents on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps.
And finally, every one of their Republican lawmakers voted for U.S. President Donald Trump’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill”—which will result in the largest cut to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in history, at $186 billion through 2034.
The bill doesn’t just cut federal SNAP spending. It also, for the first time, shifts much of that burden to the states. So state governments will need to raise taxes, cut spending, or further slash benefits to meet these added expenses. Others may eliminate their SNAP rolls entirely.
SNAP offers taxpayers a tremendous return on investment. “One study estimates that every SNAP dollar invested in children returns $62 in value over the long term,” the Center on Policy and Budget Priorities reports.
Whether we live in red states or blue states, all of us need to speak out against this cruelty.
So GOP lawmakers aren’t making these cuts because we can’t afford SNAP. They’re doing it to offset some of their deficit-busting tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy. Taking food from kids to give billionaires a tax break? Talk about Robin Hood in reverse.
In an open letter to congressional leaders, 23 state governors—including the leaders of historically red states like North Carolina, Kansas, and Kentucky—call these SNAP cuts “unrealistic” and warn they will “result in too many Americans forced to survive rather than thrive.”
Red states will be among the hardest hit, but it’s a truly national problem. In 2023, the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that 13.5% of U.S households were “food insecure,” meaning they have a “limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods.” SNAP benefits currently serve more than 40 million Americans, almost half of them children.
Between cuts, burdensome new work and reporting requirements, and the cost shifting to the states, the “Big Beautiful Bill” could cause over 22.3 million families to lose most, if not all, of their SNAP benefits, according to the Urban Institute. That includes over 3.3 million children.
Studies show that work requirements don’t result in more employment—they only result in eligible people losing benefits because of the onerous reporting requirements.
Children whose families receive SNAP benefits also qualify for free and reduced school lunch and summer Electronic Benefits Transfer programs. But millions will lose this qualification under Trump’s new law, leaving kids hungry at school as well as at home. And children who are U.S. citizens but who have parents without a Social Security number will be prohibited from receiving food under this bill.
Children aren’t the only demographic at risk of going hungry. The National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) found that 55% of non-elderly adult SNAP recipients in 2023 were women, and one-third of them were women of color. Over half were single parents.
The NWLC also found that SNAP recipients are more likely to report “excellent or very good” nutrition than those who don’t receive benefits in low-income communities, pointing to the difference these benefits make for health. Pregnant mothers and kids in early childhood with access to SNAP also see improved long-term health outcomes.
“Do you know what it’s like to hold two master’s degrees, be called ‘Reverend,’ and still need food stamps?” said Reverend Regina Clarke at a rally led by Reverend William Barber’s anti-poverty group Repairers of the Breach. Clarke is among the demographic of single parents who are SNAP recipients. “When you strip away someone’s food security, you strip away their strength to lift others.”
But lifting our voices and our communities is exactly what we need to do. Whether we live in red states or blue states, all of us need to speak out against this cruelty. Low-income kids and families shouldn’t be going hungry so billionaires can claim another tax break.
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The International Finance Corporation’s Dubious Defense of Factory Farming
Instead of funding industrial agriculture the IFC should help small-scale farmers move to agroecology and regenerative farming which can boost yields, reduce the use of expensive inputs, and improve livelihoods.
Apr 30, 2025
The International Finance Corporation’s website brands many of the well-founded criticisms of industrial animal production as “myths.” This reflects the regrettably polarized debate between those who believe that industrial agriculture is needed to feed the growing world population and those who, like me, argue that a far-reaching transformation of our food system is needed.
The International Finance Corporation (IFC) website states that it is a myth that industrial animal production is bad for food security. The truth, however, is that factory farming diverts food away from people; it is dependent on feeding grain—corn, wheat, barley—to animals who convert these crops very inefficiently into meat and milk. For every 100 calories of human-edible cereals fed to animals, just 7-27 calories (depending on the species) enter the human food chain as meat. And for every 100 grams of protein in human-edible cereals fed to animals, only 13-37 grams of protein enter the human food chain as meat.
The scale of this is massive. International Grains Council data show that 45% of global grain production is used as animal feed, while 76% of world soy production is used to feed animals. The inefficiency of doing this is recognized by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), which states that it is “essential to fight food insecurity and malnutrition… Reducing the use of much of the world's grain production to feed animals and producing more food for direct human consumption can significantly contribute to this objective.” I calculate that if the use of cereals as animal feed were ended, an extra 2 billion people could be fed even allowing for the fact that if we reared fewer animals we would need to grow more crops for direct human consumption. My figure is very cautious; other studies calculate that ending the use of grains as animal feed would enable an extra 3.5-4 billion people to be fed. Moreover, industrial livestock’s huge demand for these cereals pushes up their price, potentially placing them out of reach of poor populations in the Global South. So, sorry IFC, but it really is not a myth to say that industrial animal production is bad for food security.
To dismiss the harsh suffering endured by industrially farmed animals as a myth is extraordinary
The IFC website dismisses as a myth the argument that industrial animal production is bad for the environment. However, factory farms disgorge large amounts of manure, slurry, and ammonia that pollute air and watercourses. When ammonia mixes with other gases it can form particulate matter; this is a key component of air pollution, which can lead to heart and pulmonary disease, respiratory problems including asthma, and lung cancer.
Industrial livestock’s huge demand for cereals as feed has been a key factor fuelling the intensification of crop production. This pivotal link between the livestock and arable sectors is often not recognized. With its monocultures and high use of chemical pesticides and nitrogen fertilizers, intensive crop production leads to soil degradation, biodiversity loss, and overuse and pollution of water. In short, it erodes the key fundamentals—soils, water, and biodiversity—on which our future ability to feed ourselves depends.
Arjem Hoekstra (2020) calculates that animals fed on cereals and soy (industrially farmed animals) use 43 times as much surface- and groundwater and are 61 times as polluting of water as animals fed on grass and other roughages. Its adherents claim that factory farming saves land by cramming animals into crowded sheds. But in reality it eats up huge amounts of cropland for feed. European Union studies show that feed production accounts for 99% of the land use of the pig and broiler sectors. It is feed production—not the tiny amount of space given to animals on the farm—that makes factory farming so land-hungry.
The contention that industrial systems undermine the socioeconomic potential of small-scale farmers in the developing world is also branded a myth by the IFC. The World Bank, however, takes a different view. Its 2024 report Recipe for a Liveable Planet states, “The global agrifood system disproportionately and detrimentally affects poor communities and smallholder farmers who cannot compete with industrial agriculture, thereby exacerbating rural poverty and increasing landlessness.” Instead of funding industrial agriculture the IFC should help small-scale farmers move to agroecology and regenerative farming which can boost yields, reduce the use of expensive inputs, and improve livelihoods.
Also swatted aside as a myth is the mountain of scientific evidence that industrial livestock production results in poor animal welfare. To dismiss the harsh suffering endured by industrially farmed animals as a myth is extraordinary. In its own Good Practice Note on animal welfare the IFC lists what are commonly recognized to be the key characteristics of factory farming—confinement in narrow stalls, overcrowding, barren environments, painful procedures, hunger, and breeding for high yields leading to health disorders—and identifies them as “welfare risks” that need to be tackled. But now, in a remarkable volte-face, the IFC airily dismisses these problems as a myth.
IFC’s position stands in sharp contrast to UNEP, which states that “intensive systems deprive animals of some of their most basic physical and psychological needs.” World Bank economist Berk Özler has written about the value of policies under which low-income countries can grow without causing massive increases in suffering among farmed animals. He writes, “Perhaps many low-income countries can leapfrog the stage of industrial animal farming, towards something more sensible.”
I urge the IFC to recognize that industrial animal agriculture is destructive—destructive of food security, the environment, small-scale farmer livelihoods, and the well-being of animals.
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