Food desert

A food desert exists when particularly nutritious food is difficult to obtain due to availability, affordability, distance, or number of procurement points – typically operationalized as supermarkets – in a given area, urban or rural. This has health and diet implications in individuals living in these areas where nutritious food is not readily available, though some of these claims such as linking food deserts with obesity in children are disputed.

Food deserts are associated with poor food access as racially and socioeconomically discriminatory policies and patterns of development such as redlining have resulted in uneven distribution of resources including supermarkets. Researchers are interested in understanding the relationship between these affected areas and policies, but in varying capacities. They have employed a variety of methods to assess food access including: directories and census data, focus groups, food store assessments, food use inventories, GIS technology, interviews, questionnaires and surveys measuring consumers food access perceptions. For example, the U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Access Research Atlas provides an interactive map that identifies areas of low food access in low income urban and rural areas.

While there are a myriad of definitions for the term food desert, none of them are necessarily mutually exclusive from one another as each recognizes that food deserts exist when people have limited access to particularly nutritious foods. However, because different parameters and measures may be used depending on the group, variations in definitions exist according to the:

The multitude of definitions which vary by country have fueled controversy over the existence of food deserts.

Distance-based measurements are commonly used to measure food accessibility and to distinguish whether or not a community is a food desert. There is no one set method on how to determine the distance, but it is commonly measured with the center of an area to the nearest grocery store.

The United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service (USDA ERS) measures distance by dividing the country into multiple 0.5 km square grids. The distance from the geographical center of each grid to the nearest grocery store is measured to determine food accessibility for the people living in that grid.Health Canada divides areas into buffer zones, which is formed by using people’s homes, schools or workplaces as the center. The Euclidean distance or the shortest route distance between the two points of interest is then measured for gaining food access data.

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Wikipedia