Living in a Food Desert

[salvorhardin]

Living in a Food Desert
Low-income neighborhoods have higher rates of chronic diseases for a reason—they don’t have access to supermarkets that sell fresh fruits and vegetables. ...

But even though information on healthy foods may be more readily available than before the obesity epidemic, it has not resulted in across-the-board changes for people in all socio-economic classes. A closer look at the situation reveals that healthy food is a privilege. The wealthier you are, the more ability you have to choose a favorable environment where a healthier quality of life, including healthier food, is readily available.

The problem for poor people isn’t just a lack of disposable income to purchase healthier food. For the most part, people in low-income neighborhoods cannot access healthy foods like fresh fruits and vegetables because it is inconvenient or nearly impossible to get to a place that sells them. Areas with limited or no access to local supermarkets are known as a "food deserts." Such places are often littered with convenience stores or fast food restaurants, leaving people with cheap but unhealthy options. Unlike their richer counterparts, poor neighborhoods have 30 percent fewer supermarkets.

Food deserts initially coincided with the "white flight" in the 1960s and ’70s. Supermarkets followed affluent whites into suburban areas, leaving people in low-income areas without access to healthy foods. As a result, establishments that sell unhealthy, over-processed food, like convenience stores and fast-food restaurants, experienced abundant growth in poor areas, leading to higher incidences of chronic diseases like diabetes, obesity, and heart disease.

Stewart Auyash, an associate professor of health promotion and physical education at Ithaca College, noted many investors don’t see it as economically viable to open supermarkets in poor areas. As a result, Auyash says, "the competition isn’t as much between supermarkets and the costs of food increase. It may be hard to believe, but food costs are higher in poorer areas of our country, rural and urban, than in suburban areas, where there are … wealthier people." This is something that DeNeen Brown explored in a recent Washington Post article.
http://www.campusprogress.org/fieldreport/4092/living-in-a-food-desert

Referenced in the above...

Poor? Pay Up.
Having Little Money Often Means No Car, No Washing Machine, No Checking Account And No Break From Fees and High Prices

By DeNeen L. Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 18, 2009

You have to be rich to be poor.

That's what some people who have never lived below the poverty line don't understand.

Put it another way: The poorer you are, the more things cost. More in money, time, hassle, exhaustion, menace. This is a fact of life that reality television and magazines don't often explain.

So we'll explain it here. Consider this a primer on the economics of poverty.

"The poor pay more for a gallon of milk; they pay more on a capital basis for inferior housing," says Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.). "The poor and 100 million who are struggling for the middle class actually end up paying more for transportation, for housing, for health care, for mortgages. They get steered to subprime lending. . . . The poor pay more for things middle-class America takes for granted."

Poverty 101: We'll start with the basics.

Like food: You don't have a car to get to a supermarket, much less to Costco or Trader Joe's, where the middle class goes to save money. You don't have three hours to take the bus. So you buy groceries at the corner store, where a gallon of milk costs an extra dollar.

A loaf of bread there costs you $2.99 for white. For wheat, it's $3.79. The clerk behind the counter tells you the gallon of leaking milk in the bottom of the back cooler is $4.99. She holds up four fingers to clarify. The milk is beneath the shelf that holds beef bologna for $3.79. A pound of butter sells for $4.49. In the back of the store are fruits and vegetables. The green peppers are shriveled, the bananas are more brown than yellow, the oranges are picked over.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/17/AR2009051702053_pf.html