Besides what has been mentioned above, now all urban areas in the U.S. have online grocery delivery.
So realistically it is only some rural areas which have a problem. For me it is 9 miles (10 minutes) to the nearest grocery store. But this store is in a town of 1500 so the prices are higher so I usually drive to a small city (10,000) 30 miles (35 minutes) away where there is a Walmart and a couple chain supermarkets. This is not a problem for me; I simply shop less often than people who live in urban areas.
I think there are lots of problems with food desert identification, so many that trying to identify them is almost pointless. For example, I get that it’s difficult to gather certain kinds of data. However, to consider a community where you can get every type of food a “food desert” because it’s to difficult to gather data when the foods are available in different stores strikes me as looking for your lost keys under the lamppost.
And that’s just one issue- there are others. For example, under some definitions, whether or not an area is a food desert depends on what percentage of residents have access to a car. If the supermarket/grocery store is more than .5 mile away and 39% of households have access to a car, it’s a food desert . If 41% have access to a car, it’s not a food desert. The definitions don’t seem to take how people actually shop into account- for example, although it’s difficult to carry a week’s worth of groceries for a mile, there are things called “shopping carts” that many people who walk to the supermarket use. Or they might not shop just once a week- when I took the train to work, I would often stop at the grocery store on my way home one day , the fruit store the next and so on. Or they might do what I’ve seen many people do - walk or take the bus to the supermarket and then take a car service back with the groceries. And while I totally understand that it can be difficult to cross a street with a small child or two, I’m not so sure we should be defining “food deserts” based on that sort of individual circumstance. The whole idea of “food desert” seem to be about describing a neighborhood/community/census tract rather than basing it on individual circumstances - if I don’t have a car,have to take a small child shopping with me and feel like crossing that 35 mph st is a major barrier , my difficulties will be the same whether 39% or 41% of my neighbors don’t have a car.
And the problem is that there are actual food deserts - there are large areas where you the only fresh fruits or vegetables you can buy are at the bodega which has a head or two of lettuce, a few tomatoes, perhaps an onion and possibly a few bananas*. Those places exist - but when newspaper article or report classifies a neighborhood where everyone can get fresh fruits and vegetables by walking a mile or less as a “food desert” because no one store sells groceries and vegetables, or an article sets the income criterion " median household income is less 185 percent of the federal poverty level for a family of four"*, I tend not to pay a whole lot of attention to that article or report.
And they only have those because they use the lettuce/tomato/onion in sandwich making and people will sometimes buy a single banana.
I tend to agree with this. Which is not to say that there aren’t real problems in healthy food availability for some people, but the extent of the perceived problem is going to be very sensitive to minor changes in how we’re measuring it.
One of the trends of industrialization has been consolidation of retail. 100 years ago, there were lots of little shops. There now tend to be fewer larger shops that require transportation to visit. So if you measure something like distance from a grocery store, over time that number is likely to go up.
But that’s not an accurate measurement of how hard or costly it is to get food. We have much better transportation infrastructure than we did in the past, and the cost of food has gone down because fewer larger retail centers are more efficient.
If you measured how difficult or costly it was to get a variety of healthy food, total cost including transportation and purchase, I expect that that number has continued to trend downward, even as measurements based on physical distance have gone up.
If it is true that the term still includes: (i) ethnic places that sell many vegetables and foods close to the going rate; (ii) places within sight which are accessible without a car, or within thirty minutes total by public transportation during the day with minimal planning; (iii) garden markets; (iv) neighbourhoods on a subway, well served by transit, where many decide they do not need a car…
Than the official definition of the term seems designed to elicit some shock value. However, surely some areas are genuinely bad served. Maybe they should use two terms: food island… and food peninsula? Food isthmus?
As a student, we would walk to the store and share a taxi back home. Not as easy to do if working two minimum wage jobs, though.
The concept is good as a concept and a sort of warning, but dividing the country into tracts and then calculating whether a tract is one or not, is going to get you examples like the two I posted.
In both cases, there’s no economic case to go to all that effort to plunk down a grocery store within whatever radius you use, because there are already multiple perfectly adequate grocery stores within a convenient distance for most shoppers. If there was, then someone would have already done it. Nobody’s going to pass a chance to make a buck like that.
I had started to list them and it got too long. Roughly speaking, I’d define a food desert as: it takes 2 buses or 45+ minutes each way to buy a quart of milk. Or, it’s walkable but only if you cross a freeway or mountains of illegally dumped trash.
So degree of difficulty, danger, time, or physical hardship required. Usually a “desert” refers to fresh produce as well, as opposed to highly processed foods that are shelf-stable but not very nutritious. So, how hard is it to buy a tomato or a container of yogurt?
I live in a big city and it’s never been a problem for me. I can easily walk to my favorite grocery store and there are grocery stores in two small malls nearby, plus one off by itself. I assume food deserts don’t include restaurants?
There was a problem where my favorite grocery store (the cheapest) was shut down for almost a year. Several other stores in the same chain had shut down permanently, but this one didn’t. A family member worked there, and was transferred to another store for that period. Even she wasn’t sure if it would reopen. It did with a new manager/franchisee. It wasn’t a food desert, but either I would have to use transit to go shopping for the same price (and I don’t want to take a cart onto a bus) or I would have to go to a more expensive store.
There could probably be restaurants in a food desert. I think the point of the term was to describe people of limited income without access to the cheaper vegetables and nutritious foods available at a larger grocery store. The “definition”, which I guess exists, seems to include markets and may include areas that are inconvenient to access. How long a bus ride is is much more subjective.
There definitely are - especially fast food places. One of the negative outcomes of a food desert is that the opportunity cost of grocery shopping rather than feeding everyone cheap junk is much higher than it might otherwise be.
Like somebody said above, food deserts are important as a concept rather than trying to map out and quantify exactly what parts of a city are or aren’t a food desert.
The lower you are on the socioeconomic ladder, the more likely you are to find yourself in a food desert because you don’t have the same tools at your disposal as other people. Some of those tools are:
Transportation. Outside of walking, transportation is not free. If you’re poor, the idea of hopping on a few different mass transit lines might not be feasible. If you have a car, gas and maintenance are always serious concerns. If you’re using public transport, you’re going to have to cart your groceries from store to store (if they’ll even let you bring food from somewhere else in) or go home between trips. That’s more money and more time. Speaking of which…
Time. If you’re part of the working poor, you may be holding down two or more jobs and working way more than 40 hours a week between them all. You’re already spending a significant amount of time not only being at work, but moving between your different jobs. You may simply not have the time to go to the other side of town or, on your side of town, to bounce between several different stores to ensure that you get everything you need.
Money. Somebody above mentioned that many stores have online delivery. That costs extra money that you simply might not have. Small stores tend to have higher prices than big ones, too. There’s a reason why Wal-Mart is so popular and it’s not quality.
So what’s a food desert? That’s not the right question. Better to consider who lives in a food desert. The answer is anybody who lacks easy, affordable access to fresh food. Johnny in 5A might not be in a food desert because he’s comfortably middle class and has time, money, and transportation. But Mary in 5B, who is a single mom holding down three jobs and has no car might very well be in a different boat.
And so what does Mary do? She feeds her kids McDonald’s three days a week because it’s either that or nothing. And she can get a lot of food at McDonald’s for not much money if she sticks to the bargain menu. This leads to health issues for her kids, which leads to medical bills which she can’t pay because she has no insurance or crappy insurance, which means she has less money to spend on food, which means…
It’s all interconnected. Just one piece in a very sad mosaic.
Fast food is hardly ever as nutritious as other options. But many millions of people eat it every single day. Some have limited options. Others do it because fast food is engineered to be delicious (or at least appeal to dozens of measurable preferences) and can be cheaper than cooking fresh food. I think people who want to eat fresh food should generally have this option. People who live in Northern Canada can sometimes pay five or ten times the cost of food close to the US border.
If your issue is cheap/free mass transit, then I think you should talk about that as the issue instead of labeling an area as a ‘food desert’ if it doesn’t have enough mass transit. I think labeling huge tracts of land (some of which are directly across the street from supermarkets) as ‘food deserts’ because they don’t have mass transit to an arbitrary standard does a disservice to everyone involved. If the problem is really that five houses at the center of an arbitrary tract on the map are slightly too far from a supermarket, maybe the solution is to set up a free or low cost van service to those few houses instead of labeling the whole area a ‘food desert’ and trying to bring in an uneeded supermarket.
The ‘food desert’ areas near me all have grocery stores closer than the nearest McDonalds, FYI.
It’s all interconnected. You can’t break systemic poverty into neat, solvable little chunks any more than you can fight a fire one neat little acre at a time.
You seem a bit stuck on the idea that a food desert is or should be solely defined by geographic proximity to supermarkets. That’s not the case.
Here’s a good breakdown from the USDA about the concept. Note that, like I laid out in my previous post, it’s not strictly an issue of geography. It’s about access.
I live in a wealthier suburban city - Burlington, ON, population 200,000. There are no food deserts here, and indeed in most of the city you are within walking distance of groceries.
The USDA website seems to be saying that food deserts are defined either by not being near fresh food - which is an issue of geographic proximity - or by people not having the resources to buy the food.
The folks at USDA do good work but that’s really dumb. They’re conflating two different problems. A food desert certainly started out as meaning that people could not physically get to fresh food. Lacking the wealth necessary to get to the fresh food is a significant problem but it’s a different problem - it’s the problem of POVERTY.
I would agree with this. I first heard the term as a reference to people who lived in dense metropolitan areas where the only close food access was stores that sold mostly shelf stable food.
So that was the starting point, but it’s the next logical question is to ask “who else does not have access to fresh food?”
Of course it is - that’s the whole point. You can put a wealthy person into the middle of the most deserty food desert that ever deserted and, FOR THEM, it would not be a food desert. You can put a poor person into the middle of a wealthy area and they might not be able to afford the prices at FancyMart, making proximity meaningless.
I agree with the notion that you can’t fix this problem by plopping supermarkets into food deserts - they would already be there if it were economically viable. You fix the problem by making it economically viable. By addressing systemic poverty.
Quibbling about the geographic designations of what exactly is or is not a food desert is ultimately just a way to minimize the problem. At best. At worst (and I’m not accusing anybody in this thread) it’s an active strawman.
That’s just a cop-out. If the area has plenty of accessible food but lacks mass transit at the geographical center of a large, arbitrary tract, claiming that the area is a ‘food desert’ is nonsensical. If your goal is to fight systemic poverty, trying to get people to swallow absolutely absurd (and often racist, like ‘ethnic grocery stores don’t count’) terminology is counterproductive to that goal.
I’m ‘stuck’ on the idea that calling a ‘food desert’ things like a house literally across the street from a supermarket, or a tract that has a supermarket smack in the middle but it’s ‘ethnic’ so doesn’t count is simply absurd. That is the case with the first two food deserts near me, and seems to be the case for other people. Whatever you’re trying to convince people to fix by calling areas ‘food deserts’, people aren’t going to take the concept seriously when ‘there’s a supermarket right across the street from your house’ isn’t enough to be out of one.
Making nonsensical geographic designations of an alleged ‘problem’ that doesn’t seem to actually exist, then accusing people who point out the problems with the geographic designation as ‘minimizing the problem’ does not do anyone any good at all. When people hear about food deserts, and that there is one near them, they might think ‘oh, that’s something we should try to fix!’. When they see that there is a food desert with a supermarket that ‘doesn’t count’ right in the middle of it, or a food desert literally across the street from a supermarket, then they think that the problem is being overblown.
The case could be made for the wealthy these days with the high availability of food delivery services, but unless you were quite wealthy - enough to easily employ a plethora of servants if you so chose - before around 2010 it was difficult to find ways to get fresh food delivered reliably in the middle of a food desert.
For the specific case of the poor person with close but expensive food options, I’m not sure how often that exists either. I guess if you inherited a home in an expensive neighborhood that could be the case. More often the problem is a lack of easy access to fresh food period. Although again with food delivery services this line is also becoming blurred, because food delivery isn’t free.
Or is it? I seem to recall some locations helping people under quarantine get their food delivered. Are there programs to subsidize food delivery for the poor and disabled in food deserts?
I agree that the definition you are working from, which only considers geography, is not useful. However, I have shown you that this is not the working definition used by the USDA and other organizations when considering what a food desert is.
So we are using different definitions, yes? Is there any reason to insist that a food desert can only be defined by geography and is therefore an ‘alleged problem that doesn’t seem to actually exist,’ or can we agree to use the same metrics and considerations as the organizations who make this sort of thing their business?
This is what happens when neighborhoods gentrify, though it of course has to do with more than just food options.