Week 7: Food Deserts

Last year, I attended a Sustainability Summit put together by Leon County as a way of joining people together on the issue of food. It was a great event with guest speakers from the community and beyond. A hot topic at the event was "food deserts" and how we need to close the gap in our communities in  Tallahassee to make healthy food more accessible. However, one of the speakers, Karen Washington brought up that what's even more important than addressing frequency of food stores is focusing on the nutritional quality of the foods available. She noted that for a lot of families in low socioeconomic communities, just having vegetables and fruit is a huge step rather than fixating on immediately bringing in organic, local food that may not even be an economically possibility.

I thought about this as I read this week's articles and was impressed by the awareness of the authors as to the needs of the communities in question. For example, in the article "Beyond Food Deserts- Measuring and Mapping Racial Disparities in Neighborhood Food Environments" the authors pointed out that although major media likes to portray food deserts as completely devoid of any food options whatsoever, the communities of Erie County, New York actually did have food options. They may not have major super markets, but they have a network of smaller locally owned markets. Although they didn't have major brand-name supermarkets, they had culturally appropriate stores run by their community members, The authors honed in on four major ways of identifying a food desert: quality, scale, urban form, and diversity.

In the articles "Mobility Strategies and Food Shopping for Low Income Families" and "Food Deserts, Oases, or Mirages?" the authors defined the relationships between mobility constraints and assessments on how food retailers contribute to urban food security. The final article, "African Americans’ Access to Healthy Food Options in South Los Angeles Restaurants," gave a thorough description of the opportunities for African Americans to eat healthy, safely, and happily at restaurants in South Los Angeles. The results for this showed that the more African Americans living in an area, the less healthy options there were for people looking to eat away from home. A lot of these issues seem to derive from their environment, but the result is that disease associated with poor diet is going to more greatly affect people of color in less affluent areas.