Surveillant Metrics: Technologies of Whiteness and the Production of Food Insecurity

In this research I interrogate how metrics of food insecurity rely on indexes of deprivation, of which Indigeneity is deemed an indicator of social deprivation. I engage the fields of critical Indigenous studies, critical whiteness studies, and Indigenous science, technology, and society argue that social deprivation indexes produce and surveil “deprived” geographic food zones according to metrics of whiteness. I make three central arguments through the empirical context of food insecurity interventions for Indigenous people in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. First, accounting for food insecurity through social deprivation indexes produces food insecurity because it does not accurately depict sources of food outside of what has been deemed appropriate (see: “healthy”) through logics of whiteness. Second, solely imagining food insecurity through logics of social deprivation results in interventions of whiteness, which overdetermines how inner-city urban space is designed, surveilled, and made carceral. Third, if food studies does not interrogate and make serious efforts to undo its own whiteness, it will continue to be deficient in its renderings and understanding of food geographies beyond whiteness.

Metaphors of food deserts, swamps, and mirages have become cemented in everyday discourse to talk about food insecurity. Food deserts and swamps narrowly focus on the presence of appropriate grocery stores to access food, with food deserts referring to a perceived lack of grocery stores, and food swamps referring to a perceived overabundance of corner stores or fast-food restaurants (Kolavalli 2019, 100; Reese 2019, 6). The food mirage, on the other hand, is a geography that has come to signal a population of deficient individuals who can simply not afford the food in their neighborhood (Paulsen 2017). I do not take the existence of food deserts, swamps, or mirages as a given. The colonial logics at work with these metaphors situate deserts as devoid of life, and swamps as places of danger. In reality, deserts and swamps are vital ecosystems. The failure to recognize abundance in both deserts and swamps is relevant to both the ecological metaphor and the rendering of food geographies. The continued use of the desert, swamp, or mirage metaphor furthers the practice of colonial domination over Indigenous bodies and territories, specifically as these metaphors mediate knowledge production and policy interventions that render neighborhoods, stores, or food items as unhealthy, and thereby situating Indigenous people as incapable of achieving health or food security, and in need of intervention by knowing experts who will fix bodies, behaviors, and geographies.

These metaphors locate food access as an individual condition to be solved through better budgeting or better dietary choices, instead of as an issue of structural inequality, or what some scholars have referred to as supermarket redlining or food apartheid (Kolavalli 2019, 100; Reese 2019, 6-7). Colonial logics, and whiteness, demarcate the desert as terra nullius, a zone where peoples and their ways of being are rendered not white, in need of improvement or replacement. The swamp is also demarcated as unproductive land through the logics of whiteness, whereas Indigenous and Black onto-epistemologies are instructive for understanding the swamp as a site of abundance, agency, and fugitivity; just as food swamps are (Harney and Moten 2013; Tonumaipe'a et al. 2021; Vickers 2023). It is particularly generative to think through the swamp as a site of fugitivity, as a means of evading governance (Harney and Moten 2013, 64), and of rejecting “swampification,” in which swamps are socially and methodologically rendered uninhabitable, “to justify their destruction” through intervention (Vickers 2023, 1674).

Yet habitability is contextual. Although whiteness renders swamps (whether ecological or food geography metaphor) uninhabitable, swamps are also sites where governance can be evaded, where agency occurs, and abundance exists if we understand these sites with an ontological lens other than whiteness. Interrogating the racialized logics that undergird these geographies is necessary, but it is equally as necessary to interrogate how food deserts, swamps, and mirages are produced through technologies that measure deprivation. In attending to these metrics, I aim to denaturalize whiteness, identify the technologies of whiteness that produce and define how food insecurity is understood, and to do so with place-based attention to how whiteness operates in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, to better understand the implications of relations of whiteness in place.

It is urgent to consider what is at stake with imagining neighborhoods as barren, deficient, and void of health and well-being when we render them as food deserts or, in the case of food swamps, overburdened by “unhealthy” foods and similarly void of health and well-being, and importantly, how food geographies come to be produced as deprived. Food insecurity is geographically imagined and mapped through the use of social deprivation indexes, which correlate “deprivation” with a geographic area. These indexes have become a central mechanism for understanding food insecurity through the measure of variables, or markers of “deprivation,” such as income, unemployment, education, and even Indigenous identity. In Winnipeg, which is home to the largest urban population of Indigenous people in Canada, social deprivation indexes have been used to account for individual characteristics that are determined to be a barrier for individuals' to successfully achieve food security (Wiebe and Distasio 2016, 4). While such studies indicate the importance of accounting for Indigenous identity to ensure “culturally sensitive approaches” when considering food environment interventions, correlating Indigeneity with deprivation operates to locate deprivation with the individual (Wiebe and Distasio 2016, 10). How food insecurity is rendered by disaggregating population data sets based on social and health deficiencies overly determines how responses to food insecurity are rationalized. Food deserts yield responses that are focused on geographic deficits, food mirages yield responses that are focused on identifying geographic zones of abundance that are home to deficient individuals, and food swamps yield responses that are focused on identifying deficient geographic zones and individuals.

Identifying the metrics used and rationalities that guide resulting interventions activates necessary interrogation—namely, what are the liberal logics of whiteness and colonialism embedded in how food security is rationalized this way? To attend to this question, I draw on a theoretical framework of white possessive securitization to understand how food spaces are surveilled and securitized (Daborn 2022). In extending Geonpul critical Indigenous theorist Aileen Moreton-Robinson's crucial theorization of white possession and possessive logics, I consider how maintaining the security of white possession is an integral undertaking of white possessive logics (Esposito 2013; Estes 2019; Foucault 2009; Hage 2000; Harris 1993; Kolopenuk 2020; Leroux 2019; Moreton-Robinson 2015; Rose 2004; TallBear 2013). White possessive securitization is a process that operates individually, structurally, and systemically, and as a theoretical framework it aids in analyzing how whiteness structures possession and securitization of food. White possession operates through logics of capital and property, thus broadening participation beyond just white citizens to include any citizens who choose to invest in possession. White possessive securitization is a rationality that circulates within the population, within bodies of subjects, and especially amongst those with investments in property, a process that forecloses access to space for those deemed non-white or perceived as threats to white property and life.

I work predominately with Moreton-Robinson's definition of whiteness, which is “the invisible norm against which other races are judged in the construction of identity, representation, decision-making, subjectivity, nationalism, knowledge production and the law” (2006, 388). Moreton-Robinson further conceptualizes white possessive logics as a mode of rationalization that is invested in “reaffirming the nation-state's ownership, control, and domination” (2015, xii). Moreton-Robinson traces how race and gender are constitutive of patriarchal white sovereignty, which, as a regime of power, is derived from “the illegal act of possession,” and is evident in “everyday cultural practices and spaces” (2015, 34-35). Race and gender are central to the function of patriarchal white sovereignty, particularly in “determining who rules and who accumulates property and wealth” (66). It is necessary to extend the analysis of who rules and accumulates property and wealth, to health as well. I argue that property and health are co-constitutive processes through white possessive ontologies. Health functions as a driving rationality of patriarchal white sovereignty and white possessive logics, in which whiteness is the invisible norm constructing what is healthy and who is deemed healthy, while operating through raced and gendered bodies that are meant to function to preserve patriarchal white sovereignty above all else. In this way, white possessive securitization is always a gendered project.

In this research, I interrogate how metrics of food insecurity rely on indexes of deprivation, of which Indigeneity is deemed an indicator of social deprivation. I write this article as a white Indigenous studies scholar who lives in Winnipeg, and I engage the fields of critical Indigenous studies, critical whiteness studies, and Indigenous science, technology, and society to argue that social deprivation indexes produce and surveil “deprived” geographic food zones according to metrics of whiteness. I make three central arguments through the empirical context of food insecurity interventions for Indigenous people in Winnipeg. First, accounting for food insecurity through social deprivation indexes produces food insecurity because it does not accurately depict sources of food outside of what has been deemed appropriate (see: “healthy”) through logics of whiteness. Second, solely imagining food insecurity through logics of social deprivation results in interventions of whiteness, which overdetermines how inner-city urban space is designed, surveilled, and made carceral. Third, if food studies does not interrogate and make serious efforts to undo its own whiteness, it will continue to be deficient in its renderings and understanding of food geographies beyond whiteness. I argue that the technologies of whiteness used in food studies research to measure food geographies and insecurity is cohered through the parallel processes of health and property, both of which are rationalized and made common sense through white possessive logics. Social deprivation indexes, which I identify as technologies of whiteness, have been employed to measure food geographies and behaviors against the “invisible” norm of whiteness. When behaviors and geographies do not meet an appropriate threshold of whiteness, such indexes deem individuals, and indeed entire populations, deprived or deficient. I begin with an introduction to social deprivation indexes, in which I intervene through critical Indigenous studies and Indigenous science, technology, and society before turning to three case studies of social deprivation indexes at work in Winnipeg to produce food deserts, swamps, and mirages.

What I refer to throughout this article as social deprivation indexes are technologies of whiteness that are prevalent amongst researchers and policymakers. These indexes are referred to by differing names, such as social deprivation index, index of socioeconomic deprivation, material and social deprivation index, area-based deprivation indices, small-area composite measures, marginalization index, and index of multiple deprivation, just to name a few. Regardless of the name, these indexes tend to share a common aim of accounting for measures that are determined to indicate some form of social “deprivation” or marginalization through measures of employment, social class, education, housing, family composition, and race. These measures are then correlated with a geographic location. Such indexes have been used to understand regional health inequalities (Allik et al. 2020; Matheson et al. 2012), contribute to the development of policy planning, and resource allocation (Statistics Canada 2019).

Ethnicity is regularly used as a variable when measuring deprivation, which belies that ethnicity as a category to denote belonging to a population group does not necessitate any inherent measure of deprivation. The use of ethnicity as a deprivation marker situates populations as already and always vulnerable, rather than populations that may be made vulnerable or face vulnerabilities through specific factors (e.g., institutional racism, colonization, redlining, etc.). Mirjam Allik et al. have warned against using ethnicity as a variable, noting that it is important to “distinguish between deprivation and the people experiencing this” (2020, 21). Even though populations may experience material deprivation, this does not mean they are deprived. What is more troubling is the slippage that happens between ethnicity and race, and the concealment of whiteness that occurs through this process. I consider social deprivation indexes in relation to whiteness to do the work of making visible whiteness where it operates, particularly through the presumption of whiteness as a norm or appropriate comparison for those deemed deficient.

Critical Indigenous studies scholars have interrogated how Indigenous Peoples have been quantified as deficient or in deficit through the measurement of indicators of financial standing, health, or educational outcomes (Tuck and Yang 2012; Walter and Andersen 2013; Walter and Suina 2019; Willmott 2023). As I assess and interrogate the use of deprivation indexes, I have been careful to attend to how an ontological framing of whiteness operates from the presumption (and maintenance) of “a norm of Indigenous deficit” (Walter and Andersen 2013, 35). In their formative text Indigenous Statistics, Maggie Walter and Chris Andersen call for a reversal of the ontological lens that narrowly focuses on Indigenous difference (and consequently, deficiency through a white ontological lens) to compel different questions and a transformed research agenda. In doing so, Walter and Andersen contend that such questions would “resituate the problematic from the 'deficit' Indigene to ask how the processes of colonization remain inextricably entwined on contemporary patterns of settler privilege” (35).

I do not reverse the ontological lens in this research, but I do reorient the object of study away from Indigenous Peoples and towards those who study them. Interrogating who measures, and how, is a central facet of the work being done by critical Indigenous studies scholars studying the quantification and representation of Indigenous Peoples and populations. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang have argued that Indigenous Peoples are codified in research “as 'at risk' peoples and as asterisk peoples” (2012, 22). Tuck and Yang contend that such codification comprises a settler move to innocence, which “erases and then conceals the erasure of Indigenous peoples within the settler colonial nation-state and moves Indigenous nations as 'populations' to the margins of public discourse” (22). Ontological orientations of whiteness use technologies and metrics of measurement that presume and maintain Indigenous deficit, while concealing, invisiblizing, and normalizing whiteness. In this article, I aim to extend analysis of the concealment of whiteness through metrics such as social deprivation indexes.

The use of deprivation indexes is prevalent within food security research through the use of both census-based deprivation indexes as well as other indexes that conceptualize and measure deprivation through behavioral habits and consumer environments. A common use of social deprivation index in food security studies measures social deprivation (with a variety of variables such as ethnicity, marital status, education levels), material deprivation (with variables such as employment status and average income), with these measures then corresponding to a dissemination area to identify neighborhoods with high deprivation rates (Apparicio et al. 2007; Balcaen and Storie 2018; Cushon et al. 2013; Del Canto et al. 2015; Engler-Stringer et al. 2014; McInerney et al. 2016; Wiebe and Distasio 2016). Some studies, however, have limited their measures of deprivation to solely material deprivation (Fuller et al. 2015). These measures are then used to identify food deserts, mirages, or swamps based on the determinations made that identified areas of deprivation and deficit. Other studies have simply started with the baseline assumption that communities in need of food security supports are “deprived populations” (Lotoski et al. 2015, e147). Further to the common indexing of social deprivation using census measures, some studies have also indexed eating behaviors and “diet quality” by pairing a measurement using the Canadian adapted Healthy Eating Index with walkshed food environment variables and socioeconomic status (McInerney et al. 2016). Studies that have avoided measuring population deprivation have turned their focus on deprivation to food environments instead by indexing areas of food deprivation by having dietitians approve retail food stores as appropriate food sources (Slater et al. 2017), measuring how low-income neighborhoods score in relation to a healthy eating index (Allcott et al. 2019), and using a retail environment index to measure the association between obesity rates and food swamps (Cooksey-Stowers et al. 2017).

Deprivation indexes require two mechanisms to work: experts, and what Tania Murray Li (2007) refers to as a “will to improve.” Indexes that measure deprivation in relation to health require not only the acceptance of a dominant ideology of health, but biopolitical interventions that can be made in the name of health improvement. In her theorizations of improvement, Li argues that improvement requires two key mechanisms—problematization and “rendering technical” (7). Problematization identifies deficiencies in need of being rectified, whereas “rendering technical” involves “the bounding and characterization of an 'intelligible field' appropriate for intervention,” which subsequently determines who has the power to determine deficit, and who is deficit and in need of intervention (7). This practice of improvement is apparent in responses to food insecurity, especially when food insecurity gets framed in terms of deficiencies that need to be rectified through expert diagnoses. When it comes to dominant approaches to food insecurity, this process occurs when “solutions” to food insecurity focus on individuals to implement self-regulation and discipline to change their circumstances.

In Winnipeg, food insecurity is featured in everyday discourse as stemming from food deserts, mirages, and swamps (Distasio 2016; Frew 2020). While it is worth noting and observing trends regarding the use of social deprivation indexes across food studies research, it is necessary to consider the function of place in how deprivation indexes are implemented, as well as the implications of their use. It is imperative to interrogate social deprivation indexes in relation to the places within which they are situated to attend to differing and specific histories of race relations, whiteness, and varying population compositions. Narrowing analysis to research in Winnipeg brings several things into focus—namely, how food insecurity is geographically imagined. The population at the center of inquiry when it comes to food insecurity in Winnipeg is almost always determined by socioeconomic status, which tends to result in a focus on Winnipeg's inner-city neighborhoods, which are predominantly populated by Indigenous residents, newcomers, or people of color. Despite research situated within Winnipeg's inner city being largely cognizant of the complex social context that sustains food insecurity, health and nutrition consistently overshadow issues of access, justice, and equity when it comes to food. Researchers have detailed colonial interventions of food rationing, nutrition experimentations, and the destruction of Indigenous foodways and how these interventions have affected Indigenous food security (Burnett and Hay 2023; Gombay 2024; Mosby 2013; Mosby and Galloway 2017). Despite this research, food security indexing and intervention continues to operate as if it is not embedded in and reproducing the very same logics of whiteness that produced prior colonial interventions. In the section below, I specifically address how food deserts, mirages, and swamps render and intervene in populations and how they privilege biomedical hegemonic nutrition as a response to food insecurity. I consider what the implications are for how Indigenous people are expected to demonstrate their investment in patriarchal white sovereignty, the health of the white nation, and their individual health by becoming better biocitizens on their way to obtaining food security.

Food deserts are often employed as a tool to geographically locate zones that provide citizens with limited or no access to grocery stores, yet there are increasing trends to equate food deserts with particular populations (e.g., low socioeconomic status or racialized populations) and poor nutrition outcomes. Joyce Slater et al.'s (2017) study of food deserts in Winnipeg illuminates several troubling features of how food insecurity is geographically imagined through the lens of a food desert, including but not limited to what counts as a food access point, how people access food from a variety of sources, and how data sets are aggregated to reify individual deficiencies and risks to be ameliorated. Slater et al. use three data sources to create two scenarios of food deserts that are based on proximity to grocery stores: national chain grocery stores, full-service grocery stores, and 2011 Canadian census data on average household income and total population counts via the 2014 Manitoba population health registry (2017, 351-52). The authors define national chain grocery stores as “large, full-service grocery stores that had stores in Manitoba as well as other provinces” (351). Whereas full-service grocery stores are defined as “large, local grocery stores (not national chains) carrying a good selection of self-serve fresh fruits and vegetables (i.e. more than potatoes, onions and bananas, and not prepackaged), fresh meat and dairy products at reasonable prices (i.e. close to national chain prices), as assessed by local public health dietitians participating in the study, who had excellent knowledge of local stores, food costs and store characteristics” (351). Slater et al. rendered two food desert scenarios: located greater than five hundred meters from a national chain grocery, and located greater than five hundred meters from a national chain grocery or a full-service grocery (351). They indicate that expanding their scope to include full-service grocers, and not just national chain grocers, decreases “the estimate of the population affected by food deserts in the Winnipeg Health Region by 38%, from 104 335 to 64 574 individuals” (354). The data used to geographically locate food insecurity in this study is a narrow and insufficient accounting for what is an acceptable access point for food, and what is acceptable food to access.

Limiting food access points to national chain grocers and full-service grocers that mimic the features of national chain grocers not only fails to account for other points of food access; it serves to overdetermine policy responses to food deserts by limiting them to improving access to nutritious food via approved retailers. Slater et al. note that to compile a database of all food retailers within the Winnipeg Health Region “dietitians were provided with lists of candidate stores, and judged whether they were appropriately classified” (2017, 351). The authors recognize that “in many downtown areas, smaller local grocery stores may play an extremely important role in providing easy access to a wide range of affordable food products,” yet they do not include these sources in the scope of their study (354). They couple lack of proximity to national chain grocers and full-service grocers with low socioeconomic status as creating a “double burden for a significant number of Winnipeggers living in food deserts” (2017, 353). They argue that such a burden results in individuals relying on “alternate food sources such as convenience stores, food banks and low-cost fast food options such as 'dollar' pizza and other bargain fast food outlets; or rely on taxis (which are expensive) or personal networks (which can be inconvenient and unreliable), if available, for rides to and from larger grocery stores” (353). The narrow focus on large chain grocers that meet the approval of dieticians eliminates all of these options that Slater et al. have sweepingly rendered as unhealthy, and as simultaneously an insignificant source to contribute to food security. Small grocery stores (like the three locations of Pal's Supermarket) have a wide variety of “nutritious” foods; convenience stores cater to community needs and stock many essentials; food banks offer necessary assistance to get many families through the month; bargain fast-food outlets similarly help people make ends meet and provide quick, easy, and delicious meals; and personal networks should be viewed as an asset, particularly when communities organize to create grocery shuttles.

Accounting for greater sources of food access could undoubtedly lower the estimated numbers of people living in food deserts. However, it could also result in renderings of food insecurity that are not solely focused on neighborhood and individual deficiencies, and instead look to larger structural determinants that produce community food insecurity. By not factoring in further population data in their study, the research produced by Slater et al. is lacking. The failure to think about structural determinants in shaping food environments while also expecting individuals to be better biocitizens through their nutrition and economic choices, without actually providing corollary health and socioeconomic resources will result in differential governance of food insecure populations. Slater et al. leave us with an inaccurate rendering of food environments that prioritize biomedical hegemonic nutrition, while negating individual agency, networks, and preferences. Biomedical hegemonic nutrition operates to standardize relationships with and knowledge of food and nutrients, while simultaneously severing such knowledge from social, cultural, political, and economic contexts that might offer alternative knowledge of food (Kimura et al. 2014; McKeithen 2022). If nutritional knowledge informs and works to secure state security through the hegemonic quantification of nutrition, and the subsequent governing of bodies through logics of health remains uninterrogated, then whiteness remains concealed.

The focus on an absence of large food retailers that offer a set variety of “nutritious” foods to determine food deserts is troubling when it requires situating communities and individuals as deficient in relation. Slater et al. contend that “residents of food deserts may effectively be dependent on small retailers, such as convenience stores, with limited selection and typically higher prices, for the bulk of their food purchasing” (2017, 350).¹ Slater et al. do not identify this as a mere issue of access; they argue that “the lack of full-service, fair-priced grocery stores in a community may therefore promote inequities by leaving residents at increased risk of comprised diet quality, negatively impacting long-term health” (350). The crux of concern here is that Slater et al. recommend that “future studies should examine the impacts of food deserts on dietary behaviour and health outcomes, as well as residents' experiences of living in food deserts” (355). Research on residents' experiences of their food environments is absolutely necessary. The suggestion to examine the impacts of food deserts on dietary behavior and health outcomes is misplaced and refracts risk and deficiency onto individuals who live in geographies that have been identified as food deserts, and identifies behavior as the target of intervention.

Geographic imaginings of food security through the framing of a food mirage ameliorates some of the troubling aspects of food desert research—namely, what food access points are included in data sets—but it is still beholden to hegemonic biomedical nutrition, and thus whiteness. Kyle Wiebe and Jino Distasio identify food deserts as being concerned with “physical and economic barriers to accessing healthy food,” which they argue fails to account for areas where “individuals live close to healthy food sources but face serious economic hardship that prevents them from accessing those healthier food choices” (2016, 1). Wiebe and Distasio identify the latter as “food mirages,” which can “equally contribute to negative health outcomes but present unique challenges to meeting local food needs” (2016, 1). Wiebe and Distasio use similar methods to Slater et al. to identify food deserts and mirages in Winnipeg, including identifying a data set of supermarkets, calculating distance to supermarkets,² but where they differ is through the inclusion of identifying “areas of deprivation by constructing a social deprivation index,” to ultimately distinguish “problematic food environments by linking an area's distance to a supermarket with its social deprivation score” (1). The methods and data sets used by Wiebe and Distasio raise similar concerns to those that emerged from Slater et al.'s research, most notably what food access points are accounted for. Wiebe and Distasio only account for national chains (e.g., Real Canadian Superstore, Safeway, Walmart, Costco, etc.) and regional chains (e.g., Food Fare, Family Foods, and Red River Co-op), and they recognize that a limit of their research is “the exclusion of independently owned large grocery stores, large grocery stores specializing in imported-goods or 'ethnic foods,' small grocery stores, and convenience stores” (4). Despite noting this limitation, Wiebe and Distasio justify it by arguing that “supermarkets offer consumers a greater diversity of healthy products...and generally offer products at more competitive prices” (4). It is true that large chain supermarkets offer a great diversity of healthy products, but reducing acceptable access points solely to chain retailers provides inaccurate renderings of food environments and presupposes several things—that individuals are not accessing “healthy” foods elsewhere, that accessing marked up foods closer to home would not outweigh the time and travel costs for some individuals to make their way to larger supermarkets, and that individuals need to access a “great diversity” of healthy products to meet nutrition guidelines and thus expectations of what food security should look like as well.

The addition of a social deprivation index to geographically render food deserts and mirages extends the gaps in Slater et al.'s research that failed to account for population data beyond socioeconomic status. Unfortunately, rather than assist the researchers to demarcate larger determinants of health, the social deprivation index is employed in really troubling ways that mark individuals and communities as deficient. Wiebe and Distasio implement the social deprivation index to account for variables that “represent socio-economic characteristics that may present barriers to an individual's ability to travel to supermarkets and purchase healthy foods” (2016, 4). They note that the variables were drawn from the 2006 Census and include “(i) percentage of low income families; (ii) unemployment rate; (iii) population aged 25-64 with no high school certificate, diploma, or degree; (iv) percentage of recent immigrants (immigrants labour arriving between 2001 and 2006); (v) percentage of lone-parent families; (vi) percentage of the labour force that does not drive; and (vii) percentage of the population that identifies as Aboriginal” (4). Moreover, Wiebe and Distasio contend that “it is important to note that one-quarter of the population in high deprivation areas are of Aboriginal ancestry and 7% are recent immigrants,” which they highlight to note “the importance of culturally sensitive approaches to addressing food environments” (10). Culturally relevant programming is indeed important, but culturally sensitive approaches (whatever that means) seems insufficient for addressing the structural determinants of food environments. More than anything, the social deprivation index indicates a statistical deprivation. The social deprivation index disaggregates data sets to aggregate a portrait of deprived and deficient individuals and communities in Winnipeg's inner city. Rather than render portraits of deficient individuals and populations living in food deserts and mirages, researchers could do well to turn a social deprivation lens onto the structures and modes of governance that result in low incomes, underemployment, underfunded education, lack of supports for newcomers, lack of supports for families, and the differential governmentality of Indigenous populations.

It is ironic that in research about food mirages—where individuals live close to food sources but are prevented from always accessing those sources—that the authors fail to account for anything more than those mirages. Wiebe and Distasio note that “nearly 85,000 people live in inner city neighbourhoods classified as severely unsupportive food environments—either food mirages or deserts” (2016, 14). By only including national and local chain retailers in their data set, Wiebe and Distasio effectively position small grocers, “ethnic food” grocers, dollar stores, convenience stores, food banks, community food organizations, personal networks, and local food vendors such as Eadha Bread (2020), who offer no questions asked prepaid food vouchers to increase “access to fancy tasty goodies to anyone who walks in,” as part of what Wiebe and Distasio refer to as an unsupportive food environment. Of course, narrowing food environments to solely factor in large retailers because of their economic affordability and variety of health foods indicates that individuals should only be spending their money in a particular way (e.g., getting the best deal), and that if they are food insecure, they should only be making efforts to increase their access to approved nutritious foods so as to not further burden society with poor health outcomes from their perceived diet-related risk factors.

The requirement that individuals living in food deserts or mirages overcome their poor diets to purchase nutritious foods from approved grocers is biocitizenship in action. Food security, and increased access to food resources, will only be approved at the cost of disciplinary power and self-regulation of behavior to meet hegemonic biomedical nutrition guidelines. Wiebe and Distasio connect eating behaviors, poor health, and food environments, noting that “unhealthy diets are known causative risk factors for multiple chronic health problems including heart disease, diabetes, and obesity,” which they relate to “different food consumption habits between socio-economic groups, with low-income individuals tending to consume lower nutritional value foods...and having lower-quality diets” (2016, 1-2). Instead of undertaking an analysis of how increased income or resources could transform purchasing capacities for food insecure communities, Wiebe and Distasio situate the burden of poor health on individuals. Whiteness, and expectations of citizenship through the logics of patriarchal white sovereignty, are concealed through the measurement of and focus on the individual who fails to be responsible for their health.

Wiebe and Distasio contend that “since accessing healthy food for people in food deserts can be difficult, timely, and expensive, individuals may then turn to closer, less healthy options at nearby corner stores” (12). They further note that “individuals in food mirages may actually be able to walk to healthy food sources but face socio-economic challenges to obtaining a healthy diet,” which tells us that to better support food environments, it will be necessary to have “programs that target socio-economic issues, such as poverty, as well as the cost of food” (16). Increasing individual purchasing power seems like a promising approach to respond to mirages—increased resources could very well allow food insecure individuals to access food from previously unaffordable access points. Despite this, Wiebe and Distasio conclude that addressing issues of food accessibility in deserts and mirages “requires either bringing healthy and affordable food into an area, or bringing individuals to healthy and affordable food,” by which they mean nutrition education (16). According to Wiebe and Distasio, these interventions “must be done in conjunction with efforts to ensure the availability of culturally sensitive foods and the promotion of nutritional and food skills education in order to fulfill a holistic understanding of food security” (16). The inclusion of culturally sensitive foods indicates that they recognize that the food deserts and food mirages they have rendered are home to high populations of Indigenous people and newcomers—and presents a culturally sensitive veneer on disciplinary and regulatory education programs to educate food insecure individuals into better biocitizens by healthy eating their way out of food insecurity.

The final geographic imagining of food insecurity in Winnipeg is the food swamp. The swamp extends many of the problematic aspects of the food mirage, reifies expectations of hegemonic biomedical nutrition, and perpetuates solutions to food insecurity that are rooted in healthism. In short, food security requires accessing appropriately healthy foods as determined through expertise meant to preserve patriarchal white sovereignty, with interventions that are constrained through the problematization and responsibilization of individuals to self-regulate and change their own health circumstances. Interrogating how the swamp intersects with hegemonic biomedical nutrition is necessary to unpack the invisibilization of whiteness as a norm in nutritional standards (Azzarito 2009; Freeman 2013; Guthman 2011; Lyons et al. 2021), as well as the whiteness of nutritional authorities that position racialized people as not having adequate knowledge to eat properly (Lyons et al. 2021; Overend 2021).

A food swamp is a “spatial metaphor to describe neighborhoods where fast food and junk food inundate healthy alternatives” (Cooksey-Stowers et al. 2017, 2). In their research on identifying food swamps in Winnipeg, Martine Balcaen and Joni Storie define food swamps as “the marginalized neighbourhoods whose food environment are dominated by restaurants,” as well as convenience stores (2018, 15). Balcaen and Storie employ similar methods to previous studies we have reviewed by undertaking a “geographic assessment of food swamps using (1) a Socioeconomic Deprivation Index (SDI) based on seven Census variables, (2) distance to restaurants, and (3) clustering of restaurants, to identify at-risk locations and populations” (15).³ Balcaen and Storie found that dissemination blocks “with high deprivation levels, close restaurant access, and significant clustering of restaurants were identified as food swamps...[and] the most socioeconomically deprived populations in Winnipeg has easier access to highly clustered restaurants” (14). Similar to the mirage, swamps do not suffer from a lack of available food access points; they are just not the right kind that can be approved through hegemonic biomedical nutrition standards.

In addition to the lack of appropriate food access points, the food swamp is employed to identify points of intervention—both geographically and behaviorally. Balcaen and Storie posit that “to evaluate community-level nutrition environments, this model measures geographic food access in combination with the socio-demographic factors associated with eating patterns” (2018, 15). While Balcaen and Storie identify the need to address food insecurity in Winnipeg, their model conflates food insecurity with “nutrition environments” and “eating patterns,” making food security conditional by conduct. That is, access to food security is conditional on the individual's ability to self-regulate and change their eating behaviors. Balcaen and Storie emphasize a focus on self-regulation of health and nutrition, noting that “if an area is a food swamp, the policy should be on deterrents to unhealthy food choices” (15). Ultimately, Balcaen and Storie argue that “policies need to address zoning restrictions on restaurants, establish tax incentives to grocery stores, provide grants and loans to service high-risk populations, offer alternative strategies to curb poor dietary consumption patterns or further refine initiatives to support retail food projects in underserved areas” (21). The geographic rendering of Winnipeg neighborhoods (particularly those with low socioeconomic status and Indigenous and newcomer populations) as food swamps by Balcaen and Storie opens two particularly problematic avenues for addressing food insecurity. First, interventions aimed at self-regulating individuals invariably have disciplinary outcomes in instances of differential governmentality for Indigenous people. Second, rezoning interventions deem inner-city neighborhoods as nutritionally deficient in order to have a hand in the pie of rezoning and redeveloping brown neighborhoods into white and green spaces that espouse health and wellness through the removal of the foods and businesses that communities have relied on to feed themselves when they have been profiled, surveilled, and barred from other “healthy” sources of food throughout the city.

What these three modes of indexing social deprivation have in common is how they reify whiteness, particularly through the maintenance of health as a priority and a focus on large retailers to ensure individual fiscal responsibility. Meanwhile, these indexes negate many factors that make inner-city neighborhoods livable and contribute to food security; small grocery stores, convenience stores, bargain retailers, “ethnic” grocers, fast-food outlets, personal networks, grocery shuttles, community organizations, and local food venders all provide different levels of food access that are rendered invisible through these metrics.

Solely imagining food insecurity through logics of social deprivation results in interventions of whiteness, which overdetermine how inner-city urban space is designed and surveilled. Examples of this kind of intervention include establishing epicurean grocery stores, rezoning neighborhoods with too many convenience stores into “healthy zones,” and the policing of private-public space due to perceptions of criminality and food theft. Improvements are not necessarily inherently problematic, but when they occur at the cost of existing community capacities, or to merely improve predominantly Indigenous and people of color neighborhoods to bring them up to the standards of middle-class whiteness, then it should be seriously interrogated who improvements are for. The identification of food swamps serves as a baseline to justify interventions that promote restrictions on fast-food restaurants and convenience stores with the aim of improving food environments by intervening in individual health behaviors (Cooksey-Stowers et al. 2017, 13; Mah et al. 2017, e320). Rezoning interventions are particularly problematic and demonstrate how whiteness operates through the twin processes of health and property. Such interventions should be closely followed with attention to whether rezoning or business support is directed to existing community owned business, or whether it opens neighborhoods to gentrification in the name of health.

By attending to the parallel processes of health and property that are present in how food insecurity is produced through social deprivation indexes, white possession is brought to the forefront. The crux of this work for me is to make legible the ways in which whiteness operates through, and is secured by, these technologies. I see this work as rooted in Indigenous science, technology, and society, which, in addition to building capacity for Indigenous technoscientific governance, is also a project that Jessica Kolopenuk identifies as “disturbing the territorial, political, and morally inflected claims of nation-states and their citizens, research institutions and their researchers, and bioeconomies and their consumers to continue to possess Indigenous territories and to study Indigenous bodies” (2020, S28). I identify how whiteness is secured at many levels—at the level of individual researchers in how they utilize technologies of whiteness in the production of research, and at the broader state level in terms of how and why food security has come to hinge on issues of health, due to growing concerns about the threat to settler economic sovereignty as a result of expenditure costs on Indigenous health issues.

Interrogating and making visible whiteness hinges on how Indigenous populations come to be known for technological intervention. The work of critical Indigenous theorists M. Murphy and Kyle Willmott resonates here. Murphy theorizes epistemic infrastructures to understand “practices of quantification and intervention by multidisciplinary and multisited experts” (2017, 6), while Willmott considers how “aggressive infrastructures of knowing” operate to control and reduce Indigenous sovereignty (2023, 23). Willmott argues that ultimately the objective “is to examine how numbers become colonial technologies of surveillance, categorization, and classification—how numbers become forms of data that make surveillance possible, that justify and intensify existing surveillance imperatives, and that create subjects for surveillance” (17). Tracing how Indigenous bodies and neighborhoods are surveilled, rendered deficient or deprived, and intervened upon through technologies produced by “aggressive infrastructures of knowing” is a necessary task.

Food studies and its corresponding infrastructures of knowing can, and often do, reify and conceal whiteness by placing whiteness as an invisible norm, as health. However, an emerging cohort of food studies scholars have produced incisive analyses spanning areas of intervention ranging from the surveillance of non-white bodies deemed at risk for health abnormalities (Azzarito 2009; Valdez 2020), the maintenance of boundaries of whiteness through food (Anguelovski 2015; Cohen 2021; Tompkins 2012), and how whiteness operates in food spaces, not-for-profits, charity, and food justice movements (Chennault 2022; De Souza 2019; Garth 2020; Kolavalli 2019; Power 2022; Slocum 2007). With this research I contribute to this urgent intersection in food studies, particularly at the junction of technology and the measurement of food geographies and insecurity (Lyons et al. 2021; Valdez 2020). Through the surveillance and measurement of deficiency (and thus Indigeneity), food studies surveils how well whiteness is adhered to. As Kristen Lyons et al. have argued “whiteness not only communicates what foods are considered 'pure,' 'healthy,' 'normal' or 'nutritious,' but also produces a body of knowledge that legitimises White omnipotence” (2021, 216). The legitimization of whiteness that occurs through food-related infrastructures of knowing can come at a significant cost to Indigenous people, from indigestion for those who are lactose intolerant to the undermining of Indigenous foodways and sovereignty (Overend 2021, 46).

Not all accounts of food geographies and access are based in deficiency. Ashanté M. Reese's Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C. (2019) is a distinct example of how researchers can move away from renderings of food geographies that narrowly focus on deprivation or deficiency. Reese's framing of “geographies of self-reliance” centers Black agency in how people navigate and make their food geographies (8). Others have accounted for agency and choice amidst austerity and food insecurity, to ensure embodied experiences and lived realities are accounted for in how people navigate food insecurity (Strong 2018). It is also common to find contributions to the field of Indigenous food security and sovereignty that diverge from deficiency narratives and instead focus on Indigenous food systems (Settee and Shukla 2020), collective capacities and continuance in Indigenous food sovereignty (Whyte 2018), food environments that encapsulate safety and refuge (Tonumaipe'a et al. 2021), and relationships that form strong and vibrant foodscapes (Robin and Cidro 2020).

This research aims to contribute to non-deficit food geographies by doing the important work of interrogating how logics of whiteness are central to the seemingly benevolent research and interventions into food insecurity that dominate the study of food geographies. In an ongoing research project, my research collaborators and I created a database of Winnipeg food access points that included national retailers, local retailers, speciality food stores, and convenience stores. From this database, we surveyed retailers and compiled an observation database to record the types of surveillance and policing used in grocery stores, and whether they were compliant with privacy legislation. This ongoing study is meant to understand how grocery stores in Winnipeg are carceral spaces, while also recognizing that some spaces may be sites of reprieve from both carceral and hegemonic biomedical nutrition logics. When whiteness is not the starting point and invisiblized expectation of appropriate food access, space is created to account for geographies of abundance to emerge, rather than deprivation.

Technologies of whiteness that surveil, measure, and produce food insecurity through renderings of food deserts, swamps, and mirages are but one example of how food studies and its infrastructures of knowing serve to further how we understand food insecurity and deficiency. Technologies such as the social deprivation indexes interrogated here are merely measures of whiteness. These technologies tell us a lot about deprivation and deficiency, but not the deficiency intended. Measures of perceived Indigenous deprivation and deficiency used by food studies researchers reveals more about the deficiencies of whiteness than Indigenous food geographies. Surveillant metrics and technologies of whiteness operationalized in food studies will continue to be deficient in their renderings of food geographies if they cannot fathom food choices and access beyond whiteness.

¹ Slater et al. do not contextualize or trouble the fact that while residents of some neighborhoods may pay higher prices to shop close to home, it could significantly outweigh the costs of transportation to a nearby large food retailer. Slater et al. costed public transportation to grocery stores as up to C$14.20 per round trip. For more information on their costing of transportation, see Slater et al. 2017, 354.

² Wiebe and Distasio calculate three distance points (less than 500 meters, 500 to 1000 meters, or greater than 1000 meters) to indicate high physical access, moderate physical access, and low physical access.

³ The seven census variables used to create the social deprivation index were taken from a 2016 study by Wiebe, Distasio, and Shirtliffe (Balcaen and Storie 2018, 17). The index is the same as featured in Wiebe and Distasio 2016.

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Merissa Daborn is a white scholar and an assistant professor in the Department of Indigenous Studies at the University of Manitoba, where she researches at the intersections of food, technoscience, surveillance, policing, policy, and whiteness.