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Access to Affordable and Nutritious Food—Measuring and Understanding Food Deserts and Their Consequences: Report to Congress
Abstract and Figures
The Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008 directed the U.S. Department of Agriculture to conduct a 1-year study to assess the extent of areas with limited access to affordable and nutritious food, identify characteristics and causes of such areas, consider how limited access affects local populations, and outline recommendations to address the problem. This report presents the fi ndings of the study, which include results from two conferences of national and international authorities on food deserts and a set of commissioned research studies done in cooperation with the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan. It also includes reviews of existing literature, a national-level assessment of access to supermarkets and large grocery stores, analysis of the economic and public health effects of limited access, and a discussion of existing policy interventions. The study uses a variety of analytical methods and data to assess the extent of limited access to affordable and nutritious food and characteristics of areas with limited access. Overall, fi ndings show that a small percentage of consumers are constrained in their ability to access affordable nutritious food because they live far from a supermarket or large grocery store and do not have easy access to transportation. Urban core areas with limited food access are characterized by higher levels of racial segregation and greater income inequality. In small-town and rural areas with limited food access, the lack of transportation infrastructure is the most defi ning characteristic. Existing data and research are insuffi cient to conclusively determine whether areas with limited access have inadequate access.
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... Easily accessible by car and located on frequent routes for common commutes, they offer "one-stop" shopping. Supermarket chains are highly influential on our behavior and preferences, thanks to their leading role in creating the major antecedent sociocultural and economic trends (Dixon, 2007), furthermore, offering the same goods cheaper than smaller stores (Ver Ploeg et al., 2009). We are witnessing the popularization of a healthy diet in the western world, and although supermarkets are trying to follow that trend and increase the amount of nutritious food in their articles, it is confirmed by numerous studies mentioned below in this article that supermarkets continue to simultaneously strongly promote unhealthy 'discretionary' food. ...
... If consumer demand factors, such as inadequate knowledge of the nutritional benefits of specific foods, contribute to differences in access by reducing demand, then a public health campaign may be a preferred strategy." (Ver Ploeg et al., 2009) ...
... The second question was: "List the names of stores/online stores/drugstores where you buy healthy food." (17) 4. Bio&Bio (16) 5. Tommy (9) 6. Konzum (8) 7. Kaufland (6) The above listed stores appeared the most in the answers to this open-ended question. Most respondents answered that they buy healthy food in DM, the second most mentioned was Interspar, then Healthy food factory, Bio & Bio, Tommy, Konzum, and Kaufland. ...
... They are also ideal systems for exploring the mechanisms underlying trade-offs and synergies across biodiversity and ESs, given high local habitat heterogeneity (Lin et al., 2015) and direct connection to local food security (Alig et al., 2004;Lovell, 2010). Urban agriculture is a critical asset to food security where spatial inequities have created limited access to fresh produce by reduced proximity to markets, financial limitations and inadequate transportation (Thomas, 2010;Ver Ploeg et al., 2009;De Master & Daniels, 2019). While studies from rural agroecosystems have characterized food production as at odds with biodiversity (Foley et al., 2005;Glamann et al., 2015;Tilman et al., 2011;but see Hanspach et al., 2017), this relationship has never been rigorously explored in urban agroecosystems, despite the role of gardeners as both local habitat managers and direct beneficiaries of ESs (Lin et al., 2015). ...
Ecosystem services (ESs) are essential for human well‐being, especially in urban areas where 60% of the global population will live by 2030. While urban habitats have the potential to support biodiversity and ES, few studies have quantified the impact of local and landscape management across a diverse suite of services. We leverage 5 years of data (>5000 observations) across a network of urban community gardens to determine the drivers of biodiversity and ES trade‐offs and synergies. We found multiple synergies and few trade‐offs, contrasting previous assumptions that food production is at odds with biodiversity. Furthermore, we show that natural landscape cover interacts with local management to mediate services provided by mobile animals, specifically pest control and pollination. By quantifying the factors that support a diverse suite of ES, we highlight the critical role of garden management and urban planning for optimizing biodiversity and human benefit.
... This study used a cross-sectional design to assess the effect that the food environment surrounding the home relates to food consumption in low-income, urban, African American girls in early adolescence. Low-income neighborhoods have less access to supermarkets that sell healthy food but have more retailers that sell less healthy and energy-dense foods are labeled as 'food swamps' as the availability of healthy food is replaced by less healthy foods [14,15]. The hypothesis of this study was that living in a food desert is associated with decreased fruit and vegetable intake, and that living in a food swamp is associated with higher snack and dessert consumption. ...
Childhood obesity is an epidemic connected with poor eating. According to the United States Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service (USDA-ERS), food deserts are geographical locations in which residents have restricted or nonexistent access to healthful and quality food. Restricted access to healthy food is commonly associated with poor nutrition-related health outcomes, including obesity. This review aims to highlight the relationship between residing in a food desert or a similar environment on body mass index (BMI) in school-aged children in North America, predominantly in the Midwest region of the United States and Mexico. In this study, 17 articles were included from PubMed/Medline, Google Scholar, and Crossref. Most of these studies showed no association between the food environment and increased BMI. This discrepancy emphasizes the need for further research; the lack of access to healthful foods in food deserts is an issue that deserves additional attention.
... Using ZIP code centroids and healthy food sources (supermarkets and farmer's markets) extracted from business data provided by InfoUSA (now DataAxle), the Near calculation was used to calculate the Euclidean distance between the ZIP code and nearest healthy food source for the variable DIST_SUPER. Other absolute measures do exist such as network distance (Pearson et al., 2005;Morland and Evenson, 2009) and travel time (Ver Ploeg et al., 2009;Jiao et al., 2012) between individual addresses and food locations, but require more data preparation and processing, thus taking from the goal of this paper. ...
Contemporary research has measured differences between rural and its urban/suburban counterparts on the backdrop of social, economic, political and health phenomena. However, given the ambiguity of its definition, varying meanings and applications of the word ‘rural’ exist. In this paper we explored three different popular uses of the term rural on the backdrop of quantitative data with findings highlighting 1) there do exist statistical differences in data depending upon how rural is defined and 2) the definition of rural provided through the USDA’s Rural-Urban Commuting Areas (RUCA) best aligned with other definitions of rural.
Background:
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted access to school meal programs, putting children and adolescents at greater risk for food and nutrition insecurity. In response, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) waived restrictions on where free meal sites (FMS) operating through its summer meal programs could locate. This study assesses whether and how the distribution of FMS across communities and access to them changed after the waiver.
Methods:
This study used administrative and survey data on all FMS and census tracts in Texas for July 2019, before the waiver, and July 2020, after the waiver. Changes in the characteristics of tracts hosting an FMS and the share within accessible range of a site were evaluated using t-tests. These were supplemented with multilevel conditional logit models linking tract characteristics to the likelihood of hosting an FMS and estimates for the number of children and adolescents with access to an FMS.
Findings:
More FMS were operating after the waiver, and these were spread across a wider range of census tracts. An estimated 213,158 additional children and adolescents gained access to an FMS, including those at highest risk for food and nutrition insecurity.
Implications for school health policy:
Relaxing restrictions on the location of FMS can expand children and adolescent's access to meals during expected and unexpected disruptions to school meal programs.
Food beliefs and taboos about certain foods influence the use and consumption of food in the household. Today, especially in rural areas, some people believe certain foods affect health. This practice has resulted in the non-optimized intake of some food categories. As a result, it is not easy to diversify the types of food for daily diet. This study aims to investigate the beliefs and convictions of rural communities in Kedah regarding certain foods that may influence health. This study also identified the pattern of food intake among residents in rural areas of Kedah State following the belief that some foods can affect health. This study focuses on the rural areas of Kedah State, which include Kubang Pasu, Baling, Pendang, Alor Setar, and Kuala Muda districts. A total of 225 farmers in the rural areas of the selected districts were selected using stratified random sampling. The data were analyzed using SPSS 25 and food intake results. The results of the study show that low-income residents in rural areas of Kedah believe that some foods have an impact on health. A total of 37.11% believe that coffee, carbonated drinks, fresh milk, and low-fat milk cause headaches, stomach aches, heartburn, and nausea, followed by 18.66% who admit that spicy foods such as mutton, beef, and durian cause headaches, high blood pressure and skin problems. The impact of the food taboo has resulted in an overall food consumption rate below 29.9 in households of low-income residents in rural areas in Kedah State. The study's findings suggest that the Malaysian Ministry of Health should develop nutrition and health awareness programs and activities for the rural population. At the same time, there is a need for a comprehensive restructuring of the curriculum and syllabus by addressing the need for healthy eating as early as primary school so that nutrition and health awareness can be embedded in early childhood education.
The objective of this paper is to provide insights into the impact of missing price data in food security assessments. We find that the treatment of missing data plays an important role in our understanding of the uncertainty inherent in food cost calculations. We show that imputation techniques tend to bias upwards the estimated cost of a Thrifty Food Plan basket. We find that the standard infill technique commonly employed in food security research (based on taking the average price of individual items) tends to be more biased than the experimental, multiple imputation approach we are suggesting.
The characterization of local food environments is of great importance due to its connection with the health of citizens. Nevertheless, little is known about the in-store availability, quality, and price of healthy items in convenience stores, a food store quickly spreading in urban settings around the globe. To fill this gap, this study explores their contribution to healthy food environments in Barcelona (Spain). We compiled a representative food basket with healthy options and compared it with 170 observations in convenience stores to collect data on the in-store availability, quality, and price. About 66 % sold fruit and vegetables. The quality of fruit and vegetables sold was good-medium. Compared to regular supermarkets, the basket at a convenience store was 18 % more expensive. There were not differences in the availability and quality of products between neighbourhoods of different income levels. We conclude that convenience stores contribute equally as supermarkets in terms of availability and quality to the healthy local food environments. More research is needed to effectively evaluate the implications of affordability in low-income neighbourhoods. We highlight the importance of considering convenience stores in the healthy food access mapping in urban settings worldwide, and on the global debate on sustainable food environments.
In light of claims that many low-income urban neighborhoods are “food deserts,” this article reports on pilot research to assess whether and how small, full-service food retailers contribute to urban food security. It demonstrates that such stores meet many of the criteria for community food security by providing a wide variety of relatively low-cost foods. At the same time, their geographic unevenness, tendency to target particular ethnic clienteles, and inability to address affordability in an absolute sense place some caveats on the conclusions and suggest the need for more fine-grained research regarding how the unique economic development histories and cultural politics of neighborhoods affect food availability.
Objective: We assessed 357 supermarket service areas in a 14 county area in central NC as part of the Pregnancy, Infection and Nutrition prospective cohort study. Methods: Supermarket location was obtained using ReferenceUSA Business database and mapped using ArcGIS software. Distance to closet and density of supermarkets were derived for each of 1781 PIN participants. We assessed service areas by creating 0.25 to 4 miles buffers around each supermarket. Results: Distance to the closest supermarket ranged from less than 1 to 12 miles, on average women lived within 2 miles of a supermarket. 12% of women did not have a supermarket within 4 miles, a cutpoint that we previously found associated with poor dietary intake. Households at <185% of poverty had 1 fewer supermarket within the 4 mile buffer and were 0.4 miles further to the closest supermarket, compared to households >185% poverty. Women who lived greater than 4 miles had significantly higher BMI. Distance of > 4 miles was associated with a higher BMI after controlling for income, education, age, race, marital status, number of children, smoking, and accounting for clustering of observations. Living > 4 miles was also associated with higher % of carbohydrate and lower % of protein, but not fat, in the diet. After controlling for confounders and accounting for clustering of data, the relationship between living > 4 miles and carbohydrate was attenuated (significant at p <0.06) but the relationship remained significant for lower protein intake. Conclusion: Distance to supermarkets may influence diet and weight.
Americans’ diets, particularly those of low-income households, fall short of Government recommendations in the quantity of fruits and vegetables consumed. Some proposals suggest that a price subsidy for those products would encourage low-income Americans to consume more of them. This study estimated that a 10-percent subsidy would encourage low-income Americans to increase their consumption of fruits by 2.1-5.2 percent and vegetables by 2.1-4.9 percent. The annual cost of such a subsidy for low-income Americans would be about $310 million for fruits and $270 million for vegetables. And most would still not meet Federal dietary recommendations.
Nutrition educators research, teach, and conduct outreach within the field of community food security (CFS), yet no clear consensus exists concerning what the field encompasses. Nutrition education needs to be integrated into the CFS movement for the fundamental reason that optimal health, well-being, and sustainability are at the core of both nutrition education and CFS. Establishing commonalities at the intersection of academic research, public policy development, and distinctive nongovernmental organizations expands opportunities for professional participation. Entry points for nutrition educators' participation are provided, including efforts dedicated to education, research, policy, programs and projects, and human rights.
The two aspects of discriminant analysis are briefly reviewed: predictive discriminant analysis (PDA) and descriptive discriminant analysis (DDA). Use of three popular statistical packages (BMDP, SAS, and SPSS) to obtain computational results for a PDA and for a DDA is generally reviewed. Results yielded by two BMDP procedures (7M and SM) are discussed, as are four SAS procedures (DISCRIM, STEPDISC, CANDISC, and GLM), and two SPSS procedures (DISCRIMINANT and MANOVA). It is pointed out which procedures are used to obtain PDAresults and which are used for PDAresults. Examples of printout information are given. Some of these examples pertain to misleading information-one to incorrect information, and some, of course, to very useful information. The need for nonpackage analyses to generate specific PDA and DDA information is also mentioned.
“Food deserts” in British cities are partly the result of the expansion of multiple food retailing. New large stores force smaller stores to close down, thus depriving local residents of food shopping opportunities. Examines this proposition through an analysis of changes in consumer access to food shopping in Cardiff over the last 20 years. Shows that although accessibility scores have increased in Cardiff since 1980 they have increased at a faster rate in higher income areas. In a pocket of deprived areas accessibility has declined over the decade. Thus, there has been a polarisation effect with a widening gap in accessibility scores across the city.
