Federal Report Examines Consequences of “Food Deserts”
USDA’s Economic Research Service has issued a report to Congress that assesses the effects of “food deserts,” low-income rural or urban neighborhoods that frequently lack access to affordable, healthy food venues like supermarkets but instead offer convenience and small neighborhood stores that offer few, if any, healthy foods. Public health literature links such access issues to obesity and diet-related diseases.
Titled “Access to Affordable and Nutritious Food: Measuring and Understanding Food Deserts and Their Consequences,” the report asserts 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.” USDA notes that the causes of limited food access varied between urban core areas, which were “characterized by higher levels of racial segregation and greater income inequality,” and small-town and rural areas, where “lack of transportation infrastructure is the most defining characteristic.”
According to the report, “a large-scale, national level program may have difficulty addressing what are likely to be quite localized pockets of limited access,” while “interventions that may be effective in areas with concentrated poverty are probably different than the type of interventions that may be effective if the population with limited access is more geographically dispersed.” See USDA Press Release, June 25, 2009.
