Food Deserts?

Wired features a map from Nathan Yau showing the distance to the nearest grocery store (click to view):

Last time I looked at where major grocery stores are across the United States. Where you shop for groceries changes depending on what region you live in, but hunger and nutrition carries less variance. It's important that everyone has access to healthy food options, so I looked at the data, this time from Google and from a different angle. Instead of where stores are, I looked at how far away the nearest grocery store is.

The map above shows a sample of locations across the country, and line length represents distance to the nearest store. For example, in areas with a lot of lines headed to one spot is an area with fewer grocery stores. In contrast, mostly small line segments mean more grocery stores, and therefore less distance to travel to buy groceries.
Places where residents have limited access to grocery stores are called food deserts. However, there's no exact definition of what limited access means or what a long distance is. Some set a 10-mile marker whereas others say a store should be less than a mile away where there is a lot of pedestrian traffic.

I'm sorry, those areas aren't "food deserts,"  they're God damned deserts! That's why people don't live there, and that's why they don't have groceries.   Let's take a look at a map of federal lands in the west:

You know why the federal government still owns that land?  Because it is the God damned desert, that's why.  The federal ownership also keeps people from living there, but not like the lack of rain does.