There’s been little improvement in the country’s food accessibility in recent years, and that’s bad news for millions of Americans.
America’s top 75 food retailers — led by Wal-Mart, Kroger, Costco, Target and Safeway — opened more than 10,000 new locations between 2011 and the first quarter of 2015, according to an analysis published Monday by The Associated Press. But when the AP stripped away convenience stores and dollar stores that don’t usually provide fresh meal options, it found that only a little over 250 new supermarkets cropped up in the country’s expansive food deserts, which held more than 18 million U.S. citizens as of 2010, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Federal agencies define a food desert as a community that doesn’t have sufficient access to fresh, healthy and affordable food — typically provided by a supermarket or grocery store. At least 500 people or 33 percent of a region’s population must live more than a mile from the nearest supermarket or grocery store for census tracts to be considered food deserts. For non-metro regions, that distance benchmark is extended to 10 miles.
Such communities are also generally low-income, with poverty rates of at least 20 percent of the overall population or “a median family income at or below 80 percent of the area median family income,” according to the USDA. Though food deserts are prevalent in the Mid-Atlantic and the South, the USDA projects that large swathes of the Midwest and West Coast also struggle to meet Americans’ food accessibility needs.
“Efforts to encourage Americans to improve their diets and to eat more nutritious foods presume that a wide variety of these foods are accessible to everyone. But, for some Americans and in some communities, access to healthy foods may be limited,” said a 2012 USDA report, which found that nearly 10 percent of the U.S. population lived in a low-income area more than a mile from a supermarket, based on 2006-2010 census data. About 2 percent of the population lived more than a mile from the nearest grocer and didn’t have a car or other vehicle on hand, the report said.
That only 250 new options have popped up across the country’s food deserts over the last several years is disconcerting, and comes on top of the fact that a group of grocers and retailers back in 2011 vowed to open or expand more than 1,500 stores to “serve communities throughout the country that currently do not have access to fresh produce and other healthy foods,” according to the White House.
That initiative, which is known as the Partnership for a Healthier America and is spearheaded by first lady Michelle Obama, was largely expected to meet its goals by mid-2016. But Wal-Mart is one of the only partners to have completed its stated mission from more than four years ago. Walgreens, The Fresh Grocer, SuperValu and Calhoun Foods are among other partners who haven’t yet hit their benchmarks, according to the AP’s analysis.
Research into the precise economic costs associated with America’s food deserts is limited, in part because store locations are impacted primarily by supply and demand dynamics. Stores will set up shop in regions where they’ll turn a profit, so it’s hard to justify setting up a major grocery chain in a small town with an existing competitor only a mile or two away. It’s also a tricky business to quantify, considering store counts are constantly in flux. Each time a grocer opens up for the first time or shuts down for good, a given region’s status shifts.
But those who lose out are ultimately the millions of Americans whose shopping is restricted by distance and time. A study published in the Agricultural and Resource Economics Review suggested “lower-income shoppers must travel further and/or have fewer shopping options than do higher-income shoppers.” That means more gas costs and more vehicular mileage for desert-dwellers, and fewer shopping options generally equates to less intense pricing competition for local stores, which could allow grocers to boost prices or offer products of poorer quality.
“If a number of food stores are relatively close by, competition on price, quality and other store attributes is likely to be greater, and consumers are likely to benefit,” the 2012 USDA report said. “If a store is the only one nearby, there is likely to be less competition on these attributes.”
Other research suggests healthier food options are typically limited in low-income regions, as a team of Yale University professors concluded after a regional supermarket analysis that “lower-income neighborhoods (compared to those in higher-income neighborhoods) stock fewer healthier varieties of foods and have fresh produce of much lower quality.”
Food desert residents thus face both geographic and selection limitations, which could push consumers toward less healthy fare. The first lady’s initiative is aiming to improve the accessibility of nutritious and affordable meals, but as 2016 approaches, there’s still a lot of work to do.
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Millions of Food Desert Dwellers Struggle to Get Fresh Groceries originally appeared on usnews.com
