City-owned grocery stores are perhaps the most hotly debated item on New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s proposed affordability agenda. Proponents point 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.

The argument for public grocery stores in New York City goes something like this: A significant number of people across the five boroughs—hundreds of thousands, and up to three million by some estimates—live in so-called food deserts, or areas where fresh and affordable food is unavailable within a mile, potentially leading some low-income families to rely on more expensive or unhealthy food options. This is compounded by rising food costs, driven in part by consolidation and greed on the part of the country’s major corporate grocers. In this context, a public option for grocery stores would challenge corporate dominance and battle food insecurity, treating food as a public good and food provision as something akin to a utility, like “water, transit, or libraries,” per Alex Birnel’s argument in Jacobin: “essential infrastructure that belongs to the people.” Public grocery stores, one influential policy brief argues, could not only provide access to affordable food but act as hubs of well-paid work and “values-based” procurement of high-quality foods, turning food deserts into bountiful gardens of food abundance.

But there’s just not much evidence that food deserts—a concept that implies physical distance is the biggest impediment to an affordable and healthy diet—are a big factor in cities. This idea holds up much better in rural areas, where corporate........

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