There’s a PBS documentary called “Apple Pushers” specifically about the Green Street Cart effort.
You’d think about it walking home though. Try walking around the supermarket without a cart and see how quickly you’ve got more than you can carry. A mile and a half is a long way to walk with twenty pounds in each hand. Twenty-five to thirty minutes each way. Then there’s rain and cold and heat. The cereal boxes get wet and fall apart. The frozen foods melt. The cans keep stretching the bag until it fails. Try finding a seat on a city bus with four bags of groceries. They’re like airplanes without overhead bins, they don’t allot you any space by your feet.
Soldiers carry a lot of weight but it’s spread out across their body and not balled up in their fists. They’re also in a lot better shape than folks who can’t afford a decent pair of shoes and sport a few extra pounds because McDonald’s is closer than the Piggly-Wiggly.
1.5 miles is not much for a young, healthy, single person who works regular business hours to shop for herself- Whole Foods is my most common daily jogging destination. When I got shopping at the regular supermarket
But there are all kinds of common situations where that distance becomes a real problem- try dragging a couple of toddlers on a three mile walk. Try doing it when you are 75 years old or have a disability that impedes your motion. Try dragging enough food for a family of five on your back. Or imagine trying to arrange this when you work night shift and the area is not safe at night (which this area really isn’t.) And DC is not known for it’s great climate- extremely hot, extremely humid summers, snowy winters (and the sidewalks here can stay icy for months) and rainy springs.
Again, this is an urban area where people do not have cars. Apartments often do not come with parking, street parking is limited and expensive, and many people could not afford cars even if it were practical. There is decent public transportation, but for short distances you probably aren’t saving a ton of time over walking, considering the waiting time, walk to the right bus line, etc. There are pockets of high crime areas that the route to the grocery store passes through. More policing would be nice, but the DC police kind of have a lot on their hands.
There used to be more options in the area, but the mix of high land prices and low incomes created a perfect storm situation where it makes no sense to run a grocery store.
The whole field of studying food access is evolving really rapidly with increased data availability and new geographical analysis techniques. There are a lot of factors to take into consideration when you are trying to describe the ability of people in a certain area to get to store that have reasonably priced, healthy food. The ERS study linked above is a start, but it has some methodological weaknesses. First, it uses Census tracts and draws a line from the population-weighted center of the tract to the nearest grocery store. Sometimes the population-weighted center of the a Census tract isn’t a good approximation of where people actually live, and an “as the crow flies” measurement is often not a good approximation of the street network.
A newer approach starts with a grocery store and creates an oddly-shaped polygon on a map around the store that shows the areas for which that store would be accessible on the street network. I really like the work the Kirk Goldsberry and his co-authors have done on this. Their websiteis a lot of fun to play around with. This allows much better estimates of where people lack accessibility to stores, but, as you can imagine, it takes a lot of computing power.
There are also other factors that could be incorporated into a really thorough food access study. Is a given route suitable for pedestrians, or does it cross highway exit ramps? Is the neighborhood safe for walking? What public transit options are available? I’ve seen some research that incorporates all of these things into measures of food accessibility, but again, this would be very hard to do on a large scale.
Another data issue is trying to figure out what counts as a source of food. Generally, food desert studies begin with some sort of list of food retailers. There are commercially available lists from vendors like Nielsen, InfoUSA, and Dun & Bradstreet. These lists have some issues - not all stores will be included, some data will be out of date, etc. You also need to make some decisions about what to include based on the NAICS code. Standard practice is to include supermarkets and grocery stores, but to exclude small convenience stores and specialty food stores. As **doreen **points out, these other types of stores may be good sources of food. However, specialty food stores tend to be much more common in higher income neighborhoods.
Some food environment researchers do on-the-ground assessments of food offerings at the stores within a given area. (See the maps I liked to above, see also work by Sharkey and Horel.) Some of these studies look at the availability of certain types of healthy foods. Is there fresh produce? How much variety? What is the quality of the produce? Other studies also look at prices. For example, one research team calculated the cost of all of the items in the USDA’s Thrift Food Plan as a measure of the affordability of healthy foods. Obviously, though, it’s going to be very difficult to incorporate those sorts of measures into any sort of large scale study.
The ERS is planning a new release of the food desert locator, using 2010 Census data (the current one uses 2000) and smaller geographical areas, but still using the “as the crow flies” measurement technique. There is also some talk at the USDA about doing a food desert study specific to SNAP (food stamp) recipients that would examine the level of geographical disconnect between people who receive these benefits and the grocery stores that accept them. I don’t know if that’s going to happen, although I think it would be really interesting. There is also a growing body of literature on the relationship between food access and health outcomes. The study described in the LA Times article someone linked to above is a really awesome piece of data analysis, but I think there is a lot of work to be done before we really draw any conclusions.
I have noticed recently that a more-than-coincidence-number of New York City-sponsored redevelopment projects have a supermarket in the ground floor. I assume the developer gets some kind of significant break for encouraging this type of tenant.
I see that in my enthusiasm for the intricacies of the data analysis associated with studying food accessibility, I never really got around to directly addressing the OP’s questions. Basically, it’s really hard to answer the first. It’s complicated enough to describe food accessibility in a given area; creating summary statistics is a daunting task. As for the cause, I’m pretty sure it’s simply that grocery chains aren’t all that keen to open stores in areas where people don’t have a lot of money to spend on food.
OK, one more. (Sorry.) ERS’s 2009 Report to Congress (pdf) on food deserts is a good start for anyone who wants to read more about them.
That’s what I was thinking.
I do live rural, but my closest grocery store is 15 miles. What most people would call a Super Market is 25 miles.
Lots of these in Nevada. Last month we were in a town with a tiny grocery store - no fresh veggies, and the nearest “real” supermarket was more than 100 miles away. I grew up in a town (population 7,000) with only one small grocery store (about 8 aisles) and the nearest supermarket was 35 miles away.
For rural areas, a typical strategy would be to consider anything under 10 miles high access and anything over 20 miles low access. Rural food environment studies usually assume that everyone has access to a car.
I agree the phenomena exists but I have to question the accuracy of that map. The “food desert” they list that’s closest to me (Albion, NY) doesn’t seem to qualify. There’s a WalMart supercenter, a full-sized Tops supermarket, and a discount Sav-a-Lot grocery store in Albion - so the people living there seem to have adequate access to groceries.
I think it may be due to their divide over urban and rural. Urban people are listed as being in a food desert if there’s no grocery store within a mile; rural people are listed as being in a food desert if there’s no grocery store within ten miles. I can see it’s a valid point - I grew up in a rural area and there certainly wasn’t a grocery store every mile down the road. But we didn’t considered ourselves deprived for having to drive into the nearest town for groceries. But somebody living in Manhattan and not owning their own car would justifiably see a grocery store five miles away as being inaccessible.
But when you get to a location like Albion, this divide can create artificial food deserts. A supermarket is located in town. Some people in the town might be 1.1 miles away from the store and are therefore considered outside the store’s urban range. But people who live 1.5 miles away from the store and are outside the town limits are considered to be inside the store’s rural range.
Other than Mountain Dew, most of the time my purchases can fit in a hand cart and I only shop a couple times a week. Even with slightly larger purchases, walking home with them would be no problem especially if they were in paper and/or I had a backpack (rain though I’ll grant you.)
Most new developments in Dubai have provisions for grocery stores. I used to live in a building with a great supermarket downstairs and we’d roll the cart into the elevator to take home, then return the cart.
In college, I used to bicycle over 3 miles for groceries and they were still frozen when I got back. Perhaps there should be an intermediate level between urban and rural areas for where bicycling is fast, safe, and efficient.
Um, lets just say, those maps are either incorrect or incredibly “liberal” - I looked up the one for my city and the largest “food desert” colored in actually incorporates the two largest standalone supermarkets in the (~30,000 pop) city.
I think if you read the whole thread you’ll find that
a) there are different ways of measuring access and the methodology used in that particular map can be in reasonable dispute.
b) the population data for that particular map is from 2000 (Since its so hard for you to read, perhaps you also can’t add: the data is 12 years old).
c) the data about what stores are open and what they sell can be mixed in its accuracy.
–none of the above means the problem does not exist.
Just because a supermarket is in an area designated low-access does not mean that all the population can get to it. As already described above, it may be impossible for some fairly large groups of people – the elderly, people shopping for large households, disabled individuals, people working multiple jobs or long hours – to access it without a car. Pedestrians may be functionally cut off by dangerous neighborhoods, highways, or lack of sidewalks.
Interesting thread-these “food deserts” are real. Take inner city Los Angeles. When the LA riots took place, many of the Indian and Korean owned small markets were burned out. Small grocers cannot get adequate insurance, so many chose not to rebuild. Large chains did not want to enter the area, because of concerns over crime. So what is left? Mainly USDA surplus food distribution centers-featuring that famous rubber-like “cheese”, canned meat, peanut butter, etc.lots of high calorie, sugary dreck, and no fresh vegetables. And the government wonders why the people served are obese.
The government is now launching a very expensive campaign to fight diabetes-while the USDA is promoting it.:smack:
Crap! You just back some vivid memories; I used to drive produce trucks to Hunt’s Point! What a terrifying shit hole! And, um yeah LOTS of produce goes through there and a fair amount even gets delivered without “falling off the back of the truck” 
Back to the topic, while the income in my area is to high to qualify for us to qualify as a food desert, fresh produce is difficult to come by – aside from potatoes, onions, carrots and other stable produce. It’s an hour minimum by bus to a grocery store. There are two buses in the morning and two in the evening so you’d better keep an eye on the clock!
Nitpick: It’s this measurement and it has to be a low-income census tract.
That makes sense; if it’s not low-income then even in the urban areas most people would have access to transportation that could take them more than a mile.