Monday, October 8, 2012

What is a Food Desert?


This article discusses the correlation between the locations of grocery stores with healthy food, compared to the locations of non-grocery stores that sell unhealthy food and how close they are to resident’s homes. Unhealthy eating habits have been at an increase since people started realizing how “fat” Americans were becoming and the up rise in childhood diabetes. When research was conducted on the small town of Lawrence, Kansas, it was found that there are many cities in the U.S where there are no grocery stores within a 5 mile radius of people’s homes. These places are considered to be a “food desert’s” [which] is the name established for specific locations with “poor access to affordable, healthful food” (1210). There are stores such as gas stations or food outlets in these areas, but the food offered is not of significant nutritional value.

  Other factors that were considered in this study were the modes of transportation used to get from the people’s homes to the food source location. Divided into four groups were people who walked, people who took public transportation, people who were driven and people who drove themselves. The conclusion the scientists came to when factoring in modes of transportation was that the “extent of the food desert is very different for people who travel on foot, by public transportation, and by private automobile as is the scale and time of their journey”(1215).  And depending on the type of transportation used there were limiting factors: if you were walking you can only carry so many bags of groceries, if you rode the bus you were also limited by the amount of groceries you could take, if you had a ride you were limited by the amount of time the person had available to take you to the store and what you were able to get, and if you had your own car you had to pay for gas meaning less money for food.

 
Specifically for this study “a cost model was created to calculate the cost variation between the distance from the stores, the mode of transportation, and income” (1212). Using the data calculated by this cost model, the researchers were able to conclude that there are many factors that limit how close healthful food is to a particular area. Factors such as income level, the amount of people that own vehicles, and location of the city all contribute to the lack of healthy food.



Works Cited

Lucious F. Hallett IV, D. M. (2010). Qantifying the Extent and Cost of Food Deserts in Lawrence, Kansas, USA. Applied Geography, 1210-1216.


3 comments:

  1. This is a very interesting article. I am doing my research on the socio-economic factors that play into consumer satisfaction at farmers' markets in both the rural and urban setting. This same type of anaylsis would be extremely helpful for my project.

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  2. Food deserts are a very interesting phenomena. My home town has a big problem with them, and over the past few years the city has been working with various grocery stores to try and fix it. This type of analysis is my favorite part of GIS, because it is so interesting and it spans so many fields of study. It would be interesting to look at the correlation between childhood obesity and food deserts, and see if their is an additional correlation between childhood obesity and the amount of fast food places in an area.

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  3. The location chosen for this study is very interesting to me. I had always thought of food deserts affecting people in larger cities, such as LA, but it seems that they would affect smaller cities with a lower concentrated population, thus less grocery stores. This visual depiction of this very serious social issue is incredibly effective and hopefully could lead the way to access of food to areas that truly need it. It would also be interesting to overlay the fast food restaurants in the area, to see was what the access to cheaper, less nutritious, and lower quality food is, comparatively.

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