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Hungry for Change: A Food Desert Study

Food deserts are called places where people lack access to low-priced, healthy food.

Typical features of food deserts include people with low incomes, high ethnic minority

populations, difficult access to grocery stores with a product section, and high proximity to

restaurants and convenience stores for fast food. Food deserts are limited areas where people

have minimal physical access to fresh fruit, vegetables and other safe and inexpensive

nutrition sources that lead to a balanced diet. It has been estimated that within such regions,

46% of the planet is limited. Their history can be traced back to the gradual collapse of urban

squares in urban areas, where small grocery stores supplied the local population with

homegrown, new domestic goods(Bitler and Haider). As agriculture shifted further away

from towns into large rural areas, it became increasingly difficult to procure locally sourced

produce, especially in these densely populated urban centres.

Large supermarket franchises that were then charged with compensating for this

supply shortage shifted to more profitable suburban areas or districts that were more

gentrified. This, combined with the downward economic trend in these neighbourhoods,

meant that any desire to correct this by internal means became impossible, there was simply

not the requisite funding. Therefore, poverty is the common factor uniting these deserts

across American cities, where there is little financial incentive for grocery chains and private

companies to offer healthier alternatives to demographic residents who are forced to switch to

accessible, most frequently readily available and cheaply available, nutritious foods. Among

the black communities in America concentrated in these inner-city areas, this effect is felt

most intensely. As a consequence, in such populations, negative health is often most

frequently associated with these circumstances.

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The problem is compounded by cultural attitudes that serve to stigmatise nutritional

foods, boutique retailers and smaller grocery stores that supply fresh food do not market to

urban communities, as a consequence of the brand loyalty built up to fast food outlets and

snack food products sold at "corner stores(Dutko et al.). Because of shifts in social conditions

or other causes, neighbourhood blight is the gradual deterioration in community areas. It

leads to deteriorating and falling into disuse of buildings and public fixtures.

Housing in low-income areas where tenants cannot afford to maintain their homes

properly can also be affected, leading to these being slum areas. Neighbourhood blight does

not occur in isolation that affects only one property in an area, as property values are

decreased, the effects of a blighted building are felt throughout the neighbourhood. Very

cheap or abandoned housing, such as vagrants and drug users who cannot find alternative

homes, can also attract a criminal element to a neighbourhood (Jeong and Liu). In addition,

areas subject to blight are likely to be subject to many safety problems, such as a higher risk

of fire spreading or the collapse of decayed buildings. There is no single cause that can be

attributed to this decay, but depending on the region, a number of social and economic factors

may be present.

Accordingly, solving these problems requires unravelling a multitude of factors that

have been entrenched for several years. Initiatives such as the Edible Schoolyard Project and

the Safe Harvests Initiative educate children at a young age about the value of good nutrition

through small organic gardens where they can learn to grow their own fruits and vegetables

are one of the instruments used to combat this. The "Let's Move" initiative of Michelle

Obama also works through school initiatives to enhance nutrition in urban centres, with

trained chefs working to improve menus in public schools while educating children about the

benefits of healthy eating.

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Regulation has also been a tool used by government agencies like the USDA through

the introduction of policies aimed at incentivizing grocery stores and healthy eating

establishments in urban areas. This is accomplished either by offering grants to large existing

retail chains or to developers who are looking to set up shops in urban centres. Similarly,

community food programmes are government-funded projects that empower local

communities to engage in identifying alternatives to the shortage of nutritious food choices

and seek to establish viable long-term ways of supplying the community with those services.

Food policy councils are a more coordinated way of pursuing these same solutions, bringing

food retailers, farmers and politicians into the conversation to create state-wide approaches to

food desert management.

Work Cited

Bitler, Marianne, and Steven J. Haider. “An Economic View of Food Deserts in the United

States.” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, edited by Douglas J. Besharov,

vol. 30, no. 1, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Dec. 2011, pp. 153–76, doi:10.1002/pam.20550.

Dutko, Paula, et al. Characteristics and Influential Factors of Food Deserts. 1 Aug. 2012,

doi:10.22004/AG.ECON.262229.

Jeong, Joowon, and Cathy Yang Liu. “Neighborhood Diversity and Food Access in a

Changing Urban Spatial Structure.” City and Community, Blackwell Publishing Ltd,

2019, doi:10.1111/cico.12426.