Governments are experimenting with assorted ways to help keep the people who elected them fed.

In many cases, that means financial assistance for food. This kind of help is vital, borne out by the historically high cost of food.

But it doesn’t address a key element of the matter: that is, access to food. Assistance programs are ineffective if recipients – and everyone else, for that matter – no longer have a local grocery store where they can buy food.

Over the past few decades, thanks to tightly controlled consolidation and profit-driven mega-corporatism in the grocery retail business, along with the allure of bargain prices elsewhere, independent grocers have struggled or disappeared.

That’s led to what are called food deserts, neighbourhoods where the only place you can buy anything resembling food is at a convenience store or gas station.

Politicians are frustrated with shallow, half-hearted efforts from the food sector to provide help.

In Illinois, in his budget address last week, Governor BJ Pritzker laid it on the line. He said state and local governments have tried hard to attract big retail food chains to neighborhoods that need them with tax incentives and with what he calls “flashy ribbon cutting ceremonies.”

“But,” he says, “after the cameras leave, often so do the commercial chains — leaving poorer rural and urban communities high and dry.”

So he’s proposing a new approach. As part of the budget, he’s proposing a back-to-basics model called the Illinois Grocery Initiative. And he’s dedicating $20 million to make it work.

According to his plan, support will be offered to help municipalities and independent grocers open or expand grocery stores in underserved rural towns and urban neighborhoods.

Further, he’s providing an additional $2 million to help grocers offer local food.

“It’s time we return to a tried-and-true model,” he says, “one where those communities are served by independent, local grocery stores that sell food grown by Illinois farmers.”

He’s not talking about storefronts. Examples exist where established chains have sensed the tide turning, and made more of an effort to respond to rural people’s needs with farm-like facades. But opening this kind of a store is easier to do in a city of 150,000 or so than in a fairly isolated rural community.

Pritzker’s program depends on community support. And that means making sure shoppers can physically access the store… which sounds simple, but it’s not.

Rural areas and small towns are mostly underserved by public transit. If you can’t afford a vehicle, how will you get to and from your local independent grocer? Home delivery is one option if other alternatives are unavailable, but it doesn’t address the underlying public transit issue.

Food is cultural, and grocery stores are an integral part of a community’s cultural heartbeat. With even a little imagination, the kind of local grocery stores that politicians like Pritzker envision could establish themselves as more than food outlets. They could endear themselves to their communities in ways than chains never could.

What a timely post-pandemic idea as people re-examine their priorities.