Inspired by Stacy Mitchell’s viral article “The Great Grocery Squeeze,” Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison convened a landmark conference on “Price, Access, and Power: Exploring Grocery Costs, Food Access, and Competition.”
The gathering brought together leading voices in the anti-monopoly movement — including Lina Khan, Zephyr Teachout, and Claire Kelloway — as well as local farmers, grocers, statte lawmakers, and community leaders, including the folks who run the tribally owned grocery store in Leech Lake, Minn.
Mitchell opened the conference with a keynote that laid out the link between food deserts, soaring grocery prices, fraying communities, and the long-neglected Robinson-Patman Act. Watch the video of the keynote below. She also gave this talk to a packed room at the national grocery co-op conference (CCMA) in May.
Stacy Mitchell“These problems are not inevitable and they’re not natural. They’re the product of a policy decision to weaken enforcement of our antitrust laws. It’s a decision that’s in our power to change, and indeed there’s a great movement underway now to change it.”
How a federal policy change in the 1980s created the modern food desert.
The decision to stop enforcing a single law decimated the independent grocery market and led to the dominance of big chains.
99% Invisible, with Stacy Mitchell's help, devotes an episode to the relationship between food deserts and the federal government's abandonment of Robison-Patman Act enforcement.
The government's decision to stop enforcing the law in the 1980s fueled the collapse of Main Street. Now a revival is imminent.