The term was popularized by Karen Washington, a Bronx farmer and food justice organizer, who argued that "desert" suggests an empty landscape that formed on its own. Apartheid names a system that was built and is maintained. It points to who decided where grocery stores, highways and fast-food outlets would go.
The framing connects food access to the rest of a community's history. Federal mortgage redlining from the 1930s, urban renewal and white flight drained capital from Black neighborhoods. Supermarket chains followed money to the suburbs. Today these same neighborhoods often have more liquor stores and dollar stores than produce markets, and higher rates of diet-related disease.
The framing shifts the answer from "bring in a store" to "change who controls the food system." That can mean community land trusts, Black-owned co-ops, urban farms and public investment that residents control.