Fresh Food

This piece originally appeared on Huffington Post.

In the face of the controversy that has quickly swelled around Walmart's plans to open its first ever stores in New York City, the Bentonville Behemoth has tried to sell New Yorkers on the promise that the company will solve the city's most pressing social ills in ways that New Yorkers themselves could never dream of doing.

Citing plans to open megastores selling cheap produce in some of the city's most underserved neighborhoods, the company would have us believe that it will eradicate poverty, unemployment, and solve the food desert problem to boot.  We are in a jam, the story goes, but just trust Walmart, and they'll swoop in and make all of our problems go away.

The very notion is as insulting as it is untrue.

With our city struggling with persistent unemployment and 3 million New Yorkers lacking access to fresh produce in their neighborhoods, the jobs problem and food desert problem are unquestionably real.  But asking Walmart to fix those problems is like asking a fox to fix a henhouse.