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A new article by Associate Professor Nevin Cohen examines how digital platforms are reshaping urban food systems and creating new challenges for food justice.
Published in Politics and Governance, the article argues that established urban food policy frameworks have not kept pace with platforms that increasingly influence food access, prices, marketing, delivery work, and logistics. Cohen introduces “digital food justice” as a framework for understanding how these technologies can reproduce racial and economic inequities while making them more difficult for the public and regulators to detect.
Drawing on a qualitative case study of New York City and New York State from 2020 through early 2026, the article identifies four interconnected problems: the ability of platforms to change faster than government can regulate them; the movement of food provisioning into less visible spaces such as apps, dark stores, and delivery networks; the extraction and commercial use of consumers’ behavioral data; and the opacity of algorithms that determine prices, worker pay, delivery coverage, marketing, and access to platform work. The study examines policies affecting delivery-worker wages and deactivation, algorithmic pricing, last-mile warehouses, online food safety information, digital grocery programs, children’s data protections, and public food data systems.
The research finds that city and state governments can meaningfully regulate parts of platform-mediated food systems, but policies aimed at a single issue are often vulnerable to rapid platform adaptation. More effective governance requires enforceable standards, independent public data, strong enforcement capacity, and sustained participation by workers and affected communities. The article concludes that digital platforms should be treated as a central part of urban food policy, rather than as neutral technologies operating outside conventional systems of public accountability.
“Digital platforms are no longer simply tools people use to order food,” says Dr. Cohen. “They increasingly shape what food people can access, the prices they pay, the conditions under which delivery workers earn a living, and the burdens placed on neighborhoods. Governments need the authority and public data to make these systems visible and accountable, while giving workers and communities a lasting role in how they are governed.”
