NYT Highlights Food Desert Controversy
An April 17, 2012, New York Times article has drawn attention to two recent studies questioning the perception that poor urban neighborhoods are “food deserts” with little access to fresh produce, vegetables and other healthy options. According to Times science correspondent Gina Kolata, reports published in The American Journal of Preventive Medicine (February 2012) and Social Science and Medicine (March 2012) have concluded that such neighborhoods “not only have more fast food restaurants and convenience stores than more affluent ones, but more grocery stores, supermarkets and full-service restaurants, too.”
“Maybe we should call it a food swamp rather than a desert,” said RAND Corporation Senior Economist Roland Strum, whose study matched height, weight, diet, and residential data from participants in the California Health Interview Survey with information about nearby food outlets. Meanwhile, the second report funded by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) relied on a federal study of 8,000 children and data on all the businesses in the nation to determine that poor neighborhoods “had nearly twice as many fast food restaurants and convenience stores as wealthier ones,” but also “nearly twice as many supermarkets and large-scale grocers per square mile.”
In particular, PPIC Policy Fellow Helen Lee noted that previous studies
responsible for the notion of food deserts often failed to effectively combine
data about income, body weight and food outlet locations, or else focused on
areas that were too large to see “what happened in pockets of poverty within
those regions.” As she reportedly explained to Kolata, “Some researchers
counted only fast food restaurants and large supermarkets, missing small
grocers who sold produce. Some tallied food outlets per 1,000 residents,
which made densely populated urban areas appear to have fewer places
per person to buy food. A more meaningful measure… is the distance to the
nearest stores.”
