{"id":927,"date":"2013-07-24T22:23:00","date_gmt":"2013-07-24T22:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2013\/07\/lets-talk-about-food-deserts-2.html"},"modified":"2015-02-24T18:55:27","modified_gmt":"2015-02-25T00:55:27","slug":"lets-talk-about-food-deserts-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2013\/07\/lets-talk-about-food-deserts-2.html","title":{"rendered":"Let’s talk about food deserts!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Have you ever looked at the definition of a food desert?\u00a0 The USDA tool<\/a>\u00a0has changed since I looked at it last, and it\u2019s now multilayered, allowing the user to look at multiple definitions of a \u201cfood desert\u201d but the classic definition remains:
1) being \u201clow income\u201d \u2014 more than 20% of the population in a census tract being in poverty, or the median census tract income being less than 80% of the median income for the state or metro area (which is really more like the definition of \u201cmoderate income\u201d), and
2) being more than 1 mile from a supermarket or large grocery store (city) or 10 miles (rural areas), where a grocery store is defined as\u00a0having \u201cat least $2 million in annual sales and contain[ing] all the major food departments found in a traditional supermarket, including fresh produce, fresh meat and poultry, dairy, dry and packaged foods, and frozen foods. \u201d\u00a0 \u2014 see the \u201cdocumentation\u201d section of the site.<\/p>\n

And here are my three major irriatations with this definition:
1)\u00a0 there is no reason why an area has to have a large<\/em> grocery store in order to provide food access, or even have all the listed items (what about a small ethnic grocery?\u00a0 Or a place with only frozen meat\/poultry, not fresh?).
2)\u00a0 the 1 mile vs. 10 miles differentiation between urban and rural areas is quite arbitrary and designed to highlight the issue for urban areas.\u00a0 A meaningful differentiation would be between those areas with mass transit access and those without, but that would produce the opposite result of more food deserts in suburbs\/rural areas than in cities. Likewise, the \u201clow income\u201d requirement doesn\u2019t have any direct connection, except presumably that poor people are less likely to have cars.
3)\u00a0 ultimately, the issue is not a lack of a convenient grocery store, but the lack of transportation among low income people.\u00a0 In fact, one of the alternate measures incorporates the percent of population with\/without \u201cvehicular access\u201d \u2014 but the issue is not one of access to cars at all!\u00a0 <\/p>\n

I would expect that in Germany, such a map would show vast areas of food deserts \u2014 small towns and larger cities alike, where large supermarkets are much less common than small stores, often with a small grocery paired with a fruit-and-vegetables shop, a bakery, and a butcher shop.\u00a0 But you know what?\u00a0 Germans aren\u2019t set on a car as a necessary component of grocery shopping:\u00a0 Germans use bikes (potentially with a bike trailer or saddlebags), and Germans use something similar to this shopping\/utility cart<\/a>, which would commonly be taken on streetcars and busses.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

In the American inner city, neither of these appear to exist \u2014 one news video on the tragedy of food deserts featured a woman with her groceries in a handful of plastic grocery bags which she struggled to carry along with her on the bus, as a pathetic sight.\u00a0 And \u2014 for reasons that aren\u2019t entirely clear to me but I imagine are a matter of culture and fear of theft \u2014 bikes simply don\u2019t seem to exist among the urban poor in America, let alone bike trailers.<\/p>\n

But instead of fixing the fundamental problem of lack of transportation, politicians are busy instead compelling major retailers to open up supermarkets in poor areas, which I suspect are money-losing ventures dependent on tax subsidies or the need for political favor.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

But you know what the truly remarkable thing is?\u00a0 Looking at this map, there are really very few such \u201cfood deserts,\u201d certainly very few in relation to the amount of ink (or pixels) devoted to the topic.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Have you ever looked at the definition of a food desert?\u00a0 The USDA tool\u00a0has changed since I looked at it last, and it\u2019s now multilayered, allowing the user to look at multiple definitions of a \u201cfood desert\u201d but the classic definition remains:1) being \u201clow income\u201d \u2014 more than 20% of the population in a census […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-927","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nLet's talk about food deserts!<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Have you ever looked at the definition of a food desert?  The USDA tool has changed since I looked at it last, and it's now multilayered,\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, 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