What the Candy Aisle Doesn’t Tell You: Sugar, Food Apartheid, and the Communities Paying the Price

“Food apartheid is not a metaphor. It is a policy outcome — and the candy aisle is one of its most visible monuments.”

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The Candy Aisle Is Not an Equal-Opportunity Problem

Research from the UNC School of Public Health found that Black and low-income families consume significantly higher amounts of added sugars from packaged and processed foods — not because of preference, but because of access. When whole foods are expensive, scarce, or simply not available in your neighborhood, processed food becomes the default. Candy, chips, sugary drinks — these are not choices made in a vacuum. They are choices made inside a system that has already made the healthier choice inaccessible.

The language of “food deserts” has given way to the more precise term food apartheid — a phrase coined by food justice activist Karen Washington — because “desert” implies a natural condition, something no one caused. (Elsewhere we unpack the difference between a food desert and a food swamp, and why neither label should let the system off the hook.) Food apartheid names what actually happened: deliberate disinvestment in Black and low-income communities through redlining, white flight, supermarket flight, and zoning decisions that concentrated fast food and corner stores in communities of color while routing full-service grocery stores to wealthier, whiter zip codes. The health consequences are not incidental. They are structural.

Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, and dental disease — all linked to chronic high sugar consumption — disproportionately affect Black, Indigenous, and Latino communities in the United States, often beginning years earlier as prediabetes that ancestral food wisdom can help reverse. The American Heart Association has documented the outsized burden of added sugar on communities already navigating healthcare inequity, housing stress, and generational poverty. The sugar is not simply bad food. It is one ingredient in a larger recipe for harm.

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What These Ingredients Do to the Body

Most commercial candy contains a combination of refined sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, artificial dyes, preservatives, and in some cases compounds with documented toxicity risks. Understanding what is inside these products matters — not to moralize individual consumption, but to understand what communities are being sold, at scale, with little regulation and aggressive marketing.

• ‣ Artificial dyes (Red 40, Yellow 5, Blue 1) — Derived from petroleum. Studies have linked them to behavioral disruption in children, and several are restricted or banned in the European Union. They remain widely permitted in US candy marketed heavily to children.
• ‣ Titanium dioxide (E171) — Used to make candy appear white and bright. Banned as a food additive in the European Union in 2022 over concerns about DNA damage and nano-particle accumulation in the body. Still permitted in the United States, including in common candy canes and chewing gum.
• ‣ Glycyrrhizin (black licorice) — A naturally occurring compound in licorice root that, in excess, lowers potassium levels, raises blood pressure, and can cause irregular heart rhythms. Particularly significant for communities already at elevated cardiovascular risk.
• ‣ Citric and malic acid (sour candies) — Erode tooth enamel on contact. Dental disease is the most immediate and visible consequence of high candy consumption — and communities without dental insurance, or without dental care infrastructure in their neighborhoods, bear the cost most heavily.
• ‣ High-fructose corn syrup — Linked to insulin resistance, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, and metabolic syndrome at higher rates than naturally occurring sugars. It is cheaper to produce than cane sugar and appears in a disproportionate share of the processed food sold in low-income communities.

This is not an argument that no one should ever eat candy. It is an argument that communities of color are being systematically sold the most harmful versions of processed food, with the least regulatory protection, and then blamed for the health outcomes that follow. That blame is compounded by broader confusion about sugar itself — confusion our piece debunking sugar myths and the truth about carbs in your diet works to untangle.

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How Processed Sugar Entered Our Communities

The saturation of processed sugar in Black and Indigenous communities is not ancient history — it is a post-World War II phenomenon, accelerated by urban renewal policies that cleared Black neighborhoods, displaced community markets and food traditions, and replaced them with fast food corridors and corner stores. The civil rights era brought legal desegregation but did not reverse the economic infrastructure of disinvestment. When supermarkets fled cities for white suburbs in the 1960s and 70s, they left behind food landscapes shaped by what was profitable to sell to people with limited alternatives.

The candy and processed food industry has compounded this through targeted marketing. Research from the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health at the University of Connecticut has documented that Black and Hispanic children are exposed to significantly more advertising for candy, sugary cereals, and fast food than their white peers — on television, social media, and in-store displays concentrated in communities of color. This is not coincidence. It is deliberate market segmentation, targeting communities where brand loyalty is cheap to build and regulatory scrutiny is low.

SNAP benefits — the primary food assistance program for low-income families — can be used to purchase candy and sugary beverages, a policy decision that has been contested by public health advocates for decades. The food industry has lobbied successfully to preserve this, ensuring that billions in federal food assistance flow directly into the processed food supply chain. Communities are navigating these conditions while being told that health is a personal responsibility.

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What Our Ancestors Ate Instead

Before the industrial food system, African and African diasporic communities had rich traditions of sweetness rooted in whole foods: dates, honey, tamarind, baobab, dried mango, hibiscus, sugarcane chewed fresh from the stalk, and fruit fermented for ceremony and celebration. These were not nutritional supplements — they were cultural foods, seasonal, communal, and embedded in relationships with land. The sweetness was real. The extraction was not.

Indigenous communities across the Americas held similar traditions: maple sugar, mesquite, agave, dried berries. These foods provided sweetness within a matrix of fiber, micronutrients, and cultural practice that softened their metabolic impact and rooted them in relationship with specific ecosystems. The loss of these food traditions — through colonization, forced relocation, and the deliberate undermining of Indigenous agriculture — was not simply a culinary loss. It was a public health catastrophe whose consequences are still accumulating.

Reclaiming ancestral food traditions is not nostalgia. It is a form of health sovereignty — the recognition that our communities had answers before the problem was manufactured for us, and that those answers are still available. Ubuntu Village’s food sovereignty work in East Harlem and across our programs in Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria is rooted in this understanding: that the community garden, the shared meal, the seed saved for next season, are not alternatives to the medical system. They are the foundation that makes community health possible.

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Community Power Is the Intervention

The answer to food apartheid is not individual willpower. It is collective power. Community land trusts that keep urban agriculture accessible. Food co-ops that bring full-service grocery options to underserved neighborhoods. Policy advocacy that challenges predatory marketing aimed at children of color. SNAP reform that supports whole food purchases. School food programs that introduce children to culturally rooted, nutritionally dense foods before brand loyalty to processed food is established. These are structural interventions to structural problems.

For families navigating food deserts today, small pivots matter: fresh or dried fruit instead of candy as a sweet, whole food versions of culturally familiar flavors — tamarind candies made with real tamarind, hibiscus agua fresca instead of dyed punch, echoing the zobo our grandmothers brewed long before bottled soda arrived, dates rolled in coconut as a dessert. These are not deprivations. They are reclamations — a return to what we knew before the system convinced us that petroleum dye and corn syrup was a treat.

Ubuntu Village invites you to explore our companion posts on what industrial agriculture has done to our bodies and food deserts as spiritual violence and the path to reclaiming nourishment for more on the history and the pathway forward. The conversation about what we eat cannot be separated from the conversation about who controls what we can access. The children growing up inside these conditions — in East Harlem and communities like it — deserve a fuller accounting of the systems shaping their lives: see our examination of what Ubuntu demands for the urban children of color the systems are failing. And the question of who profits when these conditions persist is one our piece on the business of poverty refuses to leave unanswered.

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What foods from your ancestral tradition have you reclaimed — or are you trying to reclaim? Share in the comments below.

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References

• ‣ Powell, L. M., et al. (2013). Disparities in Exposure to Food Advertising by Race/Ethnicity and Socioeconomic Status. Health Affairs, 32(9), 1648–1655.
• ‣ UNC School of Public Health. Added Sugars in Packaged Beverages: Disparate Impact on Black and Low-Income Families.
• ‣ American Heart Association. Added Sugars: How Much Is Too Much?
• ‣ European Food Safety Authority (2021). Titanium Dioxide (E171) No Longer Considered Safe When Used as a Food Additive.
• ‣ Washington, K. (2012). On Food Justice and Food Apartheid. US Food Policy interview.
• ‣ Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Added Sugar in the Diet. The Nutrition Source.

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Related Reading

• ‣ What Industrial Agriculture Has Done to Our Bodies — And What Our Ancestors Already Knew
• ‣ Food Deserts Are Spiritual Violence: Reclaiming Nourishment as a Sacred Act
• ‣ Undetected Mouth Cancer Is a Health Equity Crisis — Not a Personal Failure
• ‣ What Your Teeth Know: Oral Health, Ancestral Dental Care, and the Racialized Cost of Missing Access

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