Food Deserts and Inequality in Access to Nutrition.

[Ibby]

(Maps courtesy of USDA.)

Food Deserts Across America

A food desert is a low-income area that lacks access to fresh fruits and vegetables, and other foods that make up a heathy diet (limited or no access to supermarkets and grocery stores, sometimes coupled with limited to no transportation); instead, these areas are riddled with convenience stores and fast food restaurants.

The Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008 required the USDA to study food deserts for one year. In the study’s findings, some key points were:

• About 2.3 million households (~2.2% of the population) live more than a mile from a supermarket and have no access to a vehicle. Another 3.4 million households live between 1/2-1 mile from a supermarket and have no access to a vehicle.

• Roughly 23.5 million people live in low-income areas that are more than 1 mile from a supermarket. However, only 11.5 million (4.1% of the population) of these people are low-income.

• Urban areas are more likely to suffer from limited food access due to racial segregation and income inequality. In rural areas, it’s because of a lack of transportation infrastructure.
• Shopping at small stores and convenience stores more likely to be found in food deserts is significantly more expensive than shopping at a large grocery store or supermarket.

• While some researchers and their studies point towards lack of availability to nutritious foods as the reason for a lack of intake (and instead relying on the convenience stores and fast food restaurants), other researchers/studies prove otherwise. Either way, more research is needed in this area.

Dr. Eduardo Sanchez, vice President and chief medical officer of Blue Cross Shield Texas (not to mention former Texas commissioner of health and a national leader on childhood obesity) said:

Access to healthy, affordable food is a major public health problem and should be considered as important as affordable healthcare.
While Alan Hunt, senior policy associate at the Wallace Center at Winrock International had this to say:

Why America has a nutrition/obesity problem, especially among the poor and among communities of color. this stuff is important!

[Ibby]

i note that the first map especially is really closely correlated with the election results...

[Flint]

Originally Posted by Ibby

i note that the first map especially is really closely correlated with the election results...

Wow, those are some insanely highly detailed maps, without a lot of concrete reference points to correlate. Do you have photographic memory of spacial orientation details, or did you overlay semi-transparent layers of the maps in a graphics editing program?

How did you determine the correlations between the maps? Even that they were "really closely correlated" --by what percentage would you estimate?

[Undertoad]

The pawn shop is two doors down from a ghetto supermarket. I will have to take pics sometime to show their goods. There are freezers full of racks of ribs, with spices above them, in the same place where the produce section would be found.

This is an education problem. The ribs are not utterly cheap, but this is the food they demand, and are provided.

Also available are snack foods 3-4 weeks past their sell-by date. I made the mistake once of buying a bag. The potato chips were chewy.

[footfootfoot]

hence the demand for leaded paint chips which retain their crunch. Please follow along, Mr. Tode.

[Ibby]

Originally Posted by Flint

Wow, those are some insanely highly detailed maps, without a lot of concrete reference points to correlate. Do you have photographic memory of spacial orientation details, or did you overlay semi-transparent layers of the maps in a graphics editing program?

How did you determine the correlations between the maps? Even that they were "really closely correlated" --by what percentage would you estimate?

It's more that I'm familiar with the elections map - note the rings of white flight republicans surrounding southern democratic cities - along with remembering an article I can't find about how the blue curve that runs along the fertile strip of the south - from Mississippi (rich Delta soil) across Alabama and Georgia up into the Carolinas - makes millions-of-years-old dead plankton relevant in American politics (by making that stretch of formerly-submerged land particularly fertile, meaning they became predominantly black in the age of slavery and retain large african-american populations today), and I notice the same trend of predominantly african-american areas having more food deserts than whiter areas.
edit to add: so obviously I'm speaking in a political science mindset, not mathematical correlation. Just "eyeballing" it as it were.

[Ibby]

you can seriously pick out the poor parts of cities - and the least white parts of them - going off just these maps alone. 'Course, in the west, a lot of that food desert is also actual desert.

but there's some important stuff going on in the west, too, if you look for it.



reservations are MUCH more likely to be food deserts than other land.

[orthodoc]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

This is an education problem. The ribs are not utterly cheap, but this is the food they demand, and are provided.

Education, and cultural expectations, are definitely part of the issue. When I worked in Moosonee (sub-arctic, south end of James Bay) in the 1980s, the train brought in groceries once a week for the local grocery store. The next day, every frozen dinner, all the frozen fish, wings, and fried whatever would have been stripped from the store; all the baked goods would be gone; the produce was always untouched. (People there weren't living on the land, with a few exceptions, and weren't adhering to an Inuit diet or anything similar.)

That said, I'm all for local sourcing - fresh, local food through coops, farmer's markets, etc. The more direct farm-to-table, the better.

Walking, or the refusal to do it, is another cultural thing. Americans don't generally like to walk. American cities and neighborhoods aren't laid out to encourage walking (to walk to my local grocery is to take your life in your hands). If it isn't dangerous, though, 1/2 to 1 mile is NOT a long distance. My ex-mother in law walked a mile each way to her local grocery well into her eighties. She pulled a little wire grocery cart and bought what she needed that day. She came from a European tradition of daily marketing and never kept food in her fridge more than a day. I have relatives who walk five miles or more daily, in their seventies. When they go sightseeing (in Canada), people think they're nuts to walk 2 miles to see a local attraction.

It will take major public health programs to address behaviors like these - encouraging people to choose walking, to choose local, healthy foods to eat, and so on. I think the funding needs to be provided; otherwise we're facing a public health disaster over the next ten to fifteen years. But it'll take time, because people have to internalize new attitudes and choices.

[ZenGum]

Originally Posted by Ibby

Either way, more research is needed in this area.

Ahh, the universal finding, proved in every darn paper there is.

Just once, I'd like to see a study that ends "Yeah we've figured this out, we're done here, let's move on to something else."

Seriously, this stuff is important. Before even long-term health, how can kids do well in school if breakfast was mostly a cupful of sugar and artificial chemicals?

Originally Posted by Undertoad

This is an education problem. The ribs are not utterly cheap, but this is the food they demand, and are provided.

I think you're close but not quite right. It is demand, but I'm not sure the problem is education.
The stores sell this because this is what sells.
If it was profitable to be selling veggies in the ghetto, shops would. People just don't buy them.

Why not? I cannot believe that poor people are completely ignorant of nutrition. Fine details maybe, but a general veggies-good-coke-bad idea must be around, surely? I guess (having spent many years researching US urban ghettoes ) it is more to do with the primacy of immediate survival:
I can get this Burger, fries and coke, now, that will keep me going for another eight hours, within my limited budget; rinse and repeat.
Or maybe just not valuing long-term health over a short term sugar-fat-salt fix.

As for country areas of food deserts, does this account for the fact that many people there have grow-your-own options?

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by ZenGum

Why not? I cannot believe that poor people are completely ignorant of nutrition. Fine details maybe, but a general veggies-good-coke-bad idea must be around, surely? I guess (having spent many years researching US urban ghettoes ) it is more to do with the primacy of immediate survival:
I can get this Burger, fries and coke, now, that will keep me going for another eight hours, within my limited budget; rinse and repeat.
Or maybe just not valuing long-term health over a short term sugar-fat-salt fix.

Some other potential factors.
1) Cooking time. If it's a one-parent household, or both parents work, possibly multiple jobs, it is extremely tempting to have a ready-to-eat meal, whether it's a frozen dinner or fast food.
2) Cost. Processed food is extremely high-energy for low cost. It's unhealthy energy, but it gets you more full for less money than many healthier alternatives.
3) Culture. Even in situations where the previous are not as true anymore as they were, you may have grown up raised by parents for which it was true. Your comfort food is often what you had when you were a kid.

[Clodfobble]

Originally Posted by ZenGum

I cannot believe that poor people are completely ignorant of nutrition. Fine details maybe, but a general veggies-good-coke-bad idea must be around, surely?

You'd be surprised. Stunned, even. I end up in a lot of conversations in the store checkout line, because my groceries are so unusual (20 pounds of zucchini every week, for example.) One woman, on seeing my bag of fresh green beans, asked me, "You know, I've always wondered... Do you, like, keep the cans at home to put them in, or what?" She honestly didn't even know you could eat a green bean without giving it a proper aluminum soak first. Another, while nominally approving of my selection, asked if I knew about this great new Vitamin Water thing. "I just let it take care of all that for me."

Picture the people who come into UT's pawn shop every day. It's like them, only more widespread.

[ZenGum]

Mmmmyeaahhh ... maybe I am kind of insulated ...


[thinks about some of the morons I knew who had gotten into university. Hmmm.]

[Flint]

Originally Posted by Ibby

It's more that I'm familiar with the elections map - note the rings of white flight republicans surrounding southern democratic cities - along with remembering an article I can't find about how the blue curve that runs along the fertile strip of the south - from Mississippi (rich Delta soil) across Alabama and Georgia up into the Carolinas - makes millions-of-years-old dead plankton relevant in American politics (by making that stretch of formerly-submerged land particularly fertile, meaning they became predominantly black in the age of slavery and retain large african-american populations today), and I notice the same trend of predominantly african-american areas having more food deserts than whiter areas.
edit to add: so obviously I'm speaking in a political science mindset, not mathematical correlation. Just "eyeballing" it as it were.

So which maps are you eyeballing? The food desert maps I see here look like random splotches, whereas the last map (I assume the election map) has the type of clear features you are describing.

For instance, which food maps show the "rings of white flight republicans surrounding southern democratic cities" or the "predominantly african-american areas"? I'm having trouble seeing this. By looking at the zoomed-in cities, it appears that the food deserts are in rural, or outlying areas. I can understand that, because where I live it takes 30 minutes to drive to a grocery store.

[Ibby]

Here's what I'm seeing, flint. This is admittedly just a quick look, not a rigorous mathematical analysis, so you might not see the same trends I do - but to me the blue shades look to be a lot more desert-y.

[piercehawkeye45]

Since when did Appalachia have a good diet? I thought Tennessee and Kentucky would just be one big food desert...

Or maybe I shouldn't buy into that stereotype as much?