Right. If there were really a significant number of people coming home to their families and saying, “Well, I tried all five food places and none of them had fresh vegetables, so I guess it’s fried chicken again. Come and get fattened up!”, then I would expect entrepreneurs to catch on to that and come up with some sort of marketing plan. It wouldn’t even require new businesspeople - after all, Joe’s Pawn Shop, Bill’s Payday Loans, or Mark’s Discount Liquor and Rims could set up a small veggie counter in a disused area of the store. They wouldn’t have to make a lot of profit on the stuff, just enough to make the space marginally profitable.
It’s probably because the mapmakers used municipal boundaries, census tracts, or some other system of breaking down the map into “either/or” zones and were too stupid or naive to realize that people who live on the border of a census tract or whatever can, y’know, walk across the street to their technically “foreign” grocery store.
This is probably not the case, as others have mentioned. The green areas don’t actually represent food deserts per se - only areas that have a significant percentage of people who supposedly lack food access. This means that someone on the “edge” of a green zone might not actually be in a food desert. Therefore, the green color is due to the artifacting inherent in using zone-based statistics.
I’ve got to admit to some confusion as to why “ethnic groceries” disallow a food desert. They have a target market that does not consist of people shopping for everyday foods of American cuisine.
Convenience stores that carry food don’t count either. Unless you consider being able to buy a can of Beefaroni for $2.67 when regular grocery stores sell it for $1.00 as a reasonable alternative.
Omg, I live smack in the middle of a food desert. :eek:
What the hell is this supposed to say?
I checked all the boxes and all the over lays are on me.
In a 1/8 - 1 mile radius there are about 100 places selling food. From the veggie stands, supermarkets, walmarts, drug stores, mom pop stores, restaurant chains…
But, just one gas station.
It’s a **gas desert **if you ask me… almost like mad max over here. :dubious:
Because not every place is the same. In some places, the population is not predominantly people shopping for “everyday foods of American cuisine”. And you might be surprised at how much “everyday foods of American cuisine” ethnic stores carry - seems like every kind of ethnic butcher/supermarket carries certain cuts of meat (steaks, pork chops, chicken) but the sausages are different and the ethnic places carry meats you wouldn’t find in a American supermarket.
I myself cannot figure out why an area with butcher shops, fish markets ,grocery stores and fruit and vegetable stores might be a food desert simply because they are separate stores rather than departments of a single store. I get that it makes it easier to make the map to just use supermarkets, and to break it up by census tracts but at some point, you've made it useless for determining actual access to food. Even by the map's own definition there are problems-the only green spots I could find in NYC are in Staten Island but I know there are low-income parts of Brooklyn and Queens that aren't within a mile of a supermarket. I guess they must be on the edges of tracts where the majority of the land or population (can't tell which) are less than a mile from a supermarket.
Again, the map is showing low income area with low car access where more than 100 households are more than a mile (or the other distance options) from a supermarket. They are not looking at distances of the census track on the whole.
SNAP could be a reason. SNAP is what used to be known as “food stamps”, and I would expect that smaller stores would be less likely to go through all the government rigamarole to get set up to accept them. I remember reading about a local push to get the local farmers’ market to accept SNAP and how it wasn’t an easy thing to just set up, since ordinary people can’t just “accept food stamps”, even for food, without filling out dozens of pages of government forms.
One could raise the question that a food store isn’t “affordable” if it doesn’t take SNAP, even if the prices are arguably sufficiently low and the food sufficiently nutritious. Those veggies look pretty cheap, but Random Poor Person can’t use his food stamps, so they might as well be half a million each since all he brought are food stamps.
However, if that were the reason, the definition could simply refer to “stores accepting SNAP” rather than “stores accepting SNAP which have all common grocery departments (produce, dairy, meat, packaged foods, frozen foods, etc” - because while not all smaller stores accept SNAP, in some places many of them do.
The problem with your argument, as sources like Food, Inc. have noted, is that it doesn’t take into account the price differential between “fattening food” and “fresh fruits and vegetable”.
You’re insinuating that poor people are simply too stupid and/or greedy to make healthy nutritional choices, and they could easily get supplies of healthy food if they only showed interest in buying it.
The thing is, though, that poor people tend to have relatively little money to spend on food. If a whole meal of a burger and fries (already cooked) at a fast-food place costs about the same as a few fresh fruits and vegetables (that need to be stored and/or cooked) at a supermarket, you can see why the fast food is in many respects a better deal, despite its being less healthy and more fattening.
The question we perhaps ought to be asking ourselves is “why is a full prepared and cooked meal, including meat from livestock that have to be bred, reared, cared for, slaughtered and butchered in fairly labor-intensive and time-consuming procedures, cheaper and more readily accessible than small amounts of fresh produce?”
That may be what they intend, but it isn’t what they have.
As I’ve pointed out, the one by me has, in actuality, ZERO households of any income, as it is an airport. If they’d just used only the retirement community, and left out the airport, then maybe they’d have a point. Well, except for that Fry’s supermarket across the street.