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In June of 2022, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced a new framework to address and transform the food system, including a commitment to increase funding to the Healthy Food Financing Initiative (HFFI) to the tune of $155 million to address “food deserts.” This investment is perplexing given the decade of scholarship and activism critiquing the food desert concept and its tendency to invite supply-side, corporate food retail development, of which the HFFI is emblematic. Bringing legal geographies to critical food studies, this article argues that the food desert concept, as invoked, spatialized, and abstracted by the USDA, is better understood as a socio-spatial-legal instrument imbricated in the production of space. First, this article attends to the USDA's use of the food desert as a guiding metaphor in the production of abstract space, highlighting the dominant characterizations of abstract space—fragmentation, homogenization, and hierarchy. Second, this article traces how this abstraction is materialized through US legislation and policy aimed at “fixing food deserts,” most readily through the HFFI. In the context of extensive scholarship that has criticized the prioritization of capital development and food retail, this analysis engages radical food geography praxis to outline a new terrain for struggle, namely where the discursive comingles with and co-constitutes the legal and spatial. From this analytical vantage point, this article demonstrates how the food desert concept, through US law and policy, is made material and spatial in ways that reproduce inequitable food landscapes and foreclose more radical approaches to food equity. Beyond the context of the food desert concept, this analysis offers an account of how discourse is rendered material, and the consequences therein.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to estimate the interrater reliability of the Modified Ashworth Scale (MAS) using consistent movement speeds guided by a metronome when measuring wrist flexor and ankle plantar flexor spasticity in patients with an upper motor neuron (UMN) lesion. The MAS has been found to have inconsistent interrater reliability for scoring the degree of spasticity. Method: This quantitative cross-sectional pilot study occurred in the outpatient spasticity clinic of a community rehabilitation hospital. Participants were a convenience sample of 20 patients with UMN lesions receiving botulinum toxin type A injections for focal spasticity. For each of the muscle groups tested, different pairs of evaluators scored spasticity on the MAS at a velocity of 130° per second. Evaluators were physical therapy students trained by an experienced physical therapist in MAS assessment. Weighted κ values were calculated to measure interrater reliability for each muscle group. Results: The weighted κ values for the wrist flexors and ankle plantar flexors were, respectively, moderate (κw = 0.54; 95% CI: 0.21, 0.87) and slight (κw = 0.08; 95% CI: −0.34, 0.50). Conclusion: Using consistent movement velocity, novice evaluators were able to score spasticity with reasonable interrater reliability when assessing the wrist flexors but not the ankle plantar flexors.