Is “food desert” an honest name for a neighborhood without a grocery store, or does it hide the fact that people made choices that left the neighborhood that way? Dr. Heber Brown, pastor of Pleasant Hope Baptist Church in Baltimore, argues the second. In his Jude 3 Project conversation with Lisa Fields, he says the older term describes something natural, while the conditions it names were produced by policy, planning and business decisions. This guide treats his claim as something to test before repeating it. It then asks what a church can do once it knows what is actually true about its own streets.
You can work through it alone in two sittings or with a group in one long meeting or two shorter ones. The order is simple. First, separate what Brown claims. Then decide what would count as evidence, look at what the conversation itself supplies, weigh the strongest objection, and go check your own neighborhood. Groups get the most out of it when at least a few people do the field practice before the final discussion.
One new name, three different claims
Brown explains the change in vocabulary directly: “we don’t call it a food desert anymore. We call it food apartheid, because there were political factors. There are public policy and planning factors in play that created the dynamics that we have.” His objection to the old phrase is about cause. “There is nothing unnatural about a desert,” he says. Nobody is responsible for sand and heat. He puts it more bluntly when he mentions a sermon he plans to preach: “the desert didn’t do nothing to nobody.”
When Lisa Fields asks him to explain the policy factors, his answer contains three separate claims. They are not equally easy to prove, and the investigation depends on keeping them apart.
- Decisions determined where stores went. “somebody made the decision not to have grocery stores in certain communities. That didn’t just happen by coincidence or happenstance.” He names policy, planning, and corporate planning and development as the places those decisions were made.
- Bias ran through those decisions. He says there is bias and discrimination in legislation, public policy and local planning.
- So nothing in the neighborhood is accidental. Once you recognize that bias, Dr. Heber Brown says, “nothing that you see in your neighborhood should be considered a coincidence.”
The first claim is close to self-evident once stated. Grocery stores do not grow where rain falls. A company chooses a site, a city approves or blocks a use, a lender finances or declines. Even a store that leaves because it lost money left because someone decided to close it. The second claim is historical. It may well be true of a given place, but it requires records, because it says something about what decision-makers did and why. The third claim works more like a rule for reading a neighborhood than a finding about one. It tells you to assume design rather than accident. That rule can be a useful corrective, and it can also run ahead of the evidence in a particular case.
Brown also says why the name matters to the people who live there. A block crowded with corner stores, liquor stores and check-cashing places, with no bank, credit union or grocery store, can teach residents a false lesson about themselves. He insists the pattern should not be read as “some curse upon black people who just can’t organize themselves well.” This is the real stake in the vocabulary. The old word can leave blame floating, and floating blame often lands on the residents.
Scripture on hearing a matter out
Before weighing the evidence, read two proverbs. “He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and shame unto him” (Proverbs 18:13). “He that is first in his own cause seemeth just; but his neighbour cometh and searcheth him” (Proverbs 18:17).
These are proverbs, wise observations about how life usually goes, not laws of evidence. Still, they cut in two directions here. The person who assumes a neighborhood looks the way it does because of its residents has answered before hearing. So has the person who adopts a strong new term without asking what it rests on. The second proverb pictures a claim that sounds right until a neighbor examines it. The aim is not to distrust Brown. It is to let his claim be examined, which is how true claims become persuasive to people who were not already convinced.
Nehemiah 2:11-17 offers a narrative example worth reading slowly. Nehemiah arrives in Jerusalem, goes out at night with a few men, and inspects the broken walls and burned gates himself before he tells the leaders what he intends to do. The passage describes what one leader did. It does not command a method for every church. It does show a man who looked at the actual condition of a place before proposing a response to it.
Observation prompt: In Proverbs 18:17, who is the one “first in his own cause” in the food desert debate? Is there only one?
What would count as evidence
Suppose Brown’s second claim is true for a particular neighborhood. What would you expect to find? You would expect documents: zoning and planning decisions, records of where stores opened and closed, lending patterns, minutes of public meetings where development was approved or turned down. You would expect a comparison to show something, so that neighborhoods alike in income and density but different in who lived there received different treatment. You would expect people with firsthand knowledge to describe the same events without having heard the story from each other.
What would weaken the claim for that place? Records showing that stores left or never came for reasons that applied equally to similar neighborhoods regardless of their makeup. Accounts that turn out to trace back to a single retelling. Notice that even this kind of evidence would leave the first claim standing. Decisions would still have shaped the outcome. Only the question of bias would change.
What the conversation supplies, and what it does not
The interview gives you three kinds of material. It gives Brown’s testimony as a pastor who says he has worked in community activism for 15, going on 20 years. It gives a pattern he invites anyone to observe: which businesses are plentiful and which are missing. And it gives his reasoning, which moves from bias in public decisions to the conclusion that the pattern is not accidental.
It does not give named policies, maps, dates or company records. That is not a mark against him. A podcast interview is not a research report, and he was asked for a short explanation. It does mean that, from this source alone, the second claim is a well-informed argument waiting for local documentation, and the third is a strong generalization that a careful listener can hold as a working assumption rather than a proven fact.
One detail in the conversation is easy to miss. Brown says that the area where he pastors “would not be considered a food desert” at the outset. What moved him to act was something else: he kept visiting church members in the hospital for diet-related illness. That matters for this study. A church does not need to prove its neighborhood fits a label before it can respond to its own members’ health. The investigation governs what a church says publicly about causes. It does not have to delay care.
The strongest objection
A thoughtful skeptic might say that grocery chains go where they expect profit, and that this is economics, not apartheid. The objection deserves a real answer, and it is partly answered by Brown’s own wording. He includes corporate planning and development decisions among his causes, so a profit-driven choice is still a choice in his account. The real force of the objection lies elsewhere. “Apartheid” is a strong word. It names a system of enforced separation, and using it implies more than that decisions were made. It implies those decisions were bent against a people. Anyone who uses the word in public should expect to be asked for the evidence, and should be glad to have some.
Christians do not need to treat structural wrongdoing as an imported idea. Jude 3 teaches that biblical justice, defined by God’s character and Scripture, is the measuring stick, and that both individual sin and systemic, structural sin are real. So the question is not whether a society can build injustice into its institutions. It is whether it did so in this place, and how. That is a factual question, and it gets answered one neighborhood at a time.
The practice: a two-part neighborhood audit
Brown gives the starting instruction himself. He describes what you learn “when you walk around your community and look at who owns what and who’s selling what, and who’s in control of what”. This practice takes that literally and adds a records check.
Part one: the walk. Choose an area within about a mile of your church or home. Walk or drive it once, slowly. Write down every place that sells food and what kind: full grocery, corner store, dollar store, liquor store, restaurant, market. Note banks, credit unions and check-cashing places. Mark how far the nearest full grocery store is, and how someone without a car would get there.
Part two: one fact, traced. Pick a single question your walk raised. When did the nearest grocery store open or close? Why is that large lot empty? Then try to find one document that addresses it: a local news archive, city council or planning commission minutes, a library’s local-history collection, a property record. Talk to one longtime resident, and note whether that person saw the events or heard about them from someone else.
Sort everything into three columns: what I saw, what a document says, what someone told me. Then ask which of Brown’s three claims your findings bear on. Most people will find strong support for the first, some evidence for or against the second, and open questions about the third. That is an honest result.
Then count what you have. Brown’s advice to pastors is to “start with asset mapping” rather than a list of needs. He describes how communities are trained to lead with their deficits, partly because grant applications ask for them, and says, “We flipped the script on that.” Add a fourth column to your notes: land, kitchens, vans, meeting rooms and people your church already has, plus anyone nearby already doing food work who lacks a building or a kitchen. Brown is clear that a busy congregation does not have to lead every effort. It can place what it owns behind someone already doing the work.
For group leaders: divide the records search so that different people chase different questions, and give the group a week before comparing notes. Ask people to report what they found and where, not what they suspect. Avoid naming motives for specific businesses or officials unless a document shows them. Members who have lived in the area for decades are valuable witnesses. Invite their memories, and let them decline if the history is painful.
Questions for discussion
- Before this study, which word did you use, desert or apartheid? What did that word assume about who was responsible?
- Of Brown’s three claims, which did your audit support most clearly? Which remains unsettled, and what record would settle it?
- Where did testimony and documents agree in your findings, and where did they pull apart? How did you decide which to trust more?
- Brown warns against reading a neighborhood’s condition as a curse on its people. Where have you heard that reading, spoken or unspoken, and what evidence would answer it?
- Read Proverbs 18:17 again. Who, in your community’s conversation about food, has been “first in his own cause”? Who has done the searching?
- Lisa Fields observes that “people discount the power that we have.” What did your asset column show that your group had not counted before?
- If the cause of your neighborhood’s food conditions stays partly uncertain, what can your church responsibly do now, and what should it wait to say?
What you can say, and what you cannot yet
After this work, most people can say several things with confidence. Food access in a neighborhood is the product of human decisions, not climate. The common pattern of plentiful liquor stores and missing grocery stores says nothing about the worth or capacity of the people who live there. And a congregation holds land and buildings it can put to use, whatever the full history turns out to be.
Whether bias drove the decisions on your particular blocks is something you can say only as far as your records reach. If you found the documents, say so and point to them. If you did not, say that Brown makes a serious argument, that you have seen the pattern he describes, and that you are still tracing its causes. That answer will not satisfy someone looking for a slogan. It will hold up when a neighbor comes and searches it, and the church will still have its kitchen, its vans and its patch of ground ready to use while the search goes on.