Food Deserts Case Study

It has been argued that organic are worthwhile because of nutrition. In paragraph 21, David Lazarus, stated, “What you’re paying for, presumably, is a more healthful diet. That means produce that hasn’t been drenched in pesticides, chicken and beef that hasn’t been pumped full of antibiotics, milk with even more nutritional value.” However, organic food is not worthwhile because of nutrition. “A 2012 study found no real difference between organic and conventional food in terms of nutrition. Its findings appeared in the Annals of Internal Medicine”(Cernansky 6). This quote shows that there is no difference between organic and conventional food. If there is no difference between the food then why change the

Economically, regular food is a better option than organic food. Regular food costs significantly less money per pound to purchase than the organic options. A 2015 consumer report shows that the price per pound for regular zucchini was 0.99 cents, while the price for the organic zucchini was $3.99. Both food items are zucchini, but because the second was grown organically it costs a lot more per pound than the one grown regularly. It isn’t practical to pay that much more for organic food, especially since not everyone can afford to pay that much for food, meaning organic is not the best option for everyone. Some people may say that the price for organic food is worth the health benefits, but only the rich can afford to have an organic lifestyle and the upper class can afford to have gym memberships and buy expensive health foods. They can afford to have an overall healthy lifestyle, but for the middle and lower classes, buying organic is not an affordable option. Organic food also costs the United States “at least $100 billion annually” (Lomborg), a lofty amount of money for food whose sales totaled only

Food deserts are one of the main causes of obesity in lower income areas, and while initiatives are being created to solve this problem, more than just a few initiatives are needed to change the obesity issue.

In Eric Holt-Gimenez’s article, “The Fight over Food Deserts: Corporate America Smacks Its Way Down”, the author provides answers the food desert epidemic facing the United States today. A food desert is an area in which fresh and nutritious food is not readily available to the masses. Whether it be because of economic or geographic reasons, the fresh ingredients are often scarce and expensive. Gimenez first addresses the corporate aspect of food desert problem and how the big box companies are looking to take advantage of impoverished neighborhoods (Holt-Gimenez 525). Next, Gimenez states a solution to the problem; improving wages for the working class, not providing big business with more money to move into local areas(Holt-Gimenez 526-527). While I agree with Gimenez that having the government fund the big chain stores is not the solution; I do not think that raising the minimum wage is the answer. To solve the food desert problem, the farmers and local grocers need to be funded by the government.

In terms of governmental involvement in the management of food deserts, we argue that very little has been done legislatively by the Metro Nashville and Davidson county government. Despite the fact that several areas in the Davidson County have been identified as food deserts by the USDA, little to no legislation has been created to combat the problem and its effects on the health of its citizens. Edgehill has been put on the USDA map of food deserts, because it qualifies “as a “low-access community,” [where] at least 500 people and/or at least 33 percent of the census tract's population must reside more than one mile from a supermarket or large grocery store (for rural census tracts, the distance is more than 10 miles)” (USDA). However, the

Diverse groups in American society are often the most marginalized and therefore the most vulnerable to issues that undermine the fair and uncomplicated pursuit of health and wellbeing. One of those issues is the lack of access to affordable healthy food and, in many cases, the inaccessibility to food in general. Areas where affordable and healthy foods are largely unavailable are called food deserts and the members of the diverse groups that live in such areas or that have access to very little food at all often develop a sense of food insecurity. One of the groups that is increasingly impacted by food deserts and food insecurity is the nation’s elderly population which is, by most standards, defined as those individuals aged 65 and older. The following paper investigates this phenomenon by addressing the elderly population of Ada County, Idaho as representative of this diverse and often disenfranchised population. The paper investigates the issue of food deserts and food insecurity that threaten the health and wellbeing of the elderly in the context of the various elements of social determinants of health that contribute to their development and persistence. The paper also includes proposals for individual and population-based strategies to improve access to healthy and affordable food by this population as well as improve the health and wellbeing of its members.

Traits of organic food can also be misconstrued in the sense of the ingredients and how it is different from the way processed food is produced. “In reality, certified organics have lower levels of chemical residue, Roethal argues, which is positive for consumers, farm workers and the land itself, but organic growing practices have no impact on how many nutrients, calories or grams of fat are in anyone's favorite foods”(SFGate). As mentioned previously in the quote, often times organic food can benefits one’s health because of the little amount in which chemicals and calories are in the substance. The concern about organic food is that it is substantially more expensive than non-organic food. However,“Organic food sales are increasing by double digits annually, and more than 80 percent of parents reported buying organic food for their families last year”, according to Batch. With the high-price of organic food, this could also be a reason on why people tend to lean more towards the less healthier items, all because of the low cost. Even though there are different and confusing standards on what organic really is, the ideal description would typically be foods that do not have the same producing process as non-organic food.

The existence of food deserts is an issue of both public health and social justice (Schafft, Jensen and Hinrichs 153). Schafft et al. made this point with reference to the state of Pennsylvania. Utilizing data from Pennsylvania, Schafft et al. studied the relationship between residences in a food desert (whose definition was established through a proximity-based model utilizing distance from large grocery stores as a criterion) and found that schoolchildren living in food deserts were more likely to be both poor and obese. Schafft et al. utilized these findings to reach the conclusion that the

Food deserts are one of the biggest problems in society, as the authors of Food Justice bring up (Gottlieb & Joshi, 2010). In fact, Indianapolis is ranked worst in the nation for food deserts. So what is a food desert? A food desert is when places are left with the lack of availability of nutritious foods and high rates of poverty. Often times, these are known as grocery gaps because grocery stores move out of the area, normally located in low-income communities. It makes sense that they would move to make more profit, but it leaves those in the community left with essentially nothing. Also, most people living in a low-income community do not have access to transportation, so they cannot get to grocery stores that are outside of walking distance. This is why Gleaners, a local food justice organization, steps in and fills in places where grocery stores have left. The program that works to fix this is Mobile Pantries. As I will explore later, Mobile Pantries allows people who cannot reach grocery stores the ability to get nutritious foods they need. Mobile Pantries give people a sense of going to the grocery store and picking out healthy foods. While consumer choice is limited, as Patel mentions, Mobile Pantries still gives people healthy options (Patel, 2014). Gleaners is a part of the Food Justice Movement because while they are not changing consumer choice, they are providing individuals with the option of healthy foods and working to end hunger and obesity

Imagine a college student’s dinner. Is it a marbled, medium rare prime rib steak? How about an enormous ruby red lobster or even caviar, whatever that is? Unless you envisioned Tiffany Trump at a dinner party, the odds are pretty good that the luxurious surf and turf you might have imagined instead came about after mixing together shrimp and beef flavored ramen. “OK,” you might say, “of course they should eat ramen, they are, after all, college students.” But what if this theoretical college student did not have a car they could drive to a grocery store, and there were no grocery stores close enough for them to walk to? What if ramen was the only thing they could afford – and if they couldn’t afford it, they would have to skip meals? What if their lack of food caused them to suffer academically, potentially causing to them to fail out of school? What if a method could describe the where, how, and why of this student’s inability to buy fresh food?

Hundreds of thousands of Chicagoans live in what’s known as a food desert. A food desert is in an area of focus that is short on access to fresh meat and produce. These areas are usually over populated with packaged and processed foods, which are not always healthy. They also have a significant amount junk that you can easily find in convenience stores and fast food restaurants.

The concept of a Food Desert is not new, “British politicians introduced the idea of food deserts in the mid-1990s… suggested a link might exist between distance to a grocery store and the diets of poor people” (Gilligan, 2014). It took many years before the idea of a Food Desert was recognized in the United States of America but it is now estimated that, “About 23.5 million people live in food deserts” ("11 Facts About Food Deserts | DoSomething.org | Volunteer for Social Change," n.d.). The inability to obtain healthy food choices leads to, “people in low-income communities [suffering] more from diet-related diseases like obesity and diabetes” (Truehaft & Karpyn, 5, n.d.). The existence of these Food Deserts is a factor that works to keep those in poverty down and makes progress even harder for them to

Many people that lives in food deserts has tremendous possibility of being obese because the community in whole eats a lot of processed food, but some can become obese due to how they eat and burn those calories. Another health problem that people in a food desert can face is diabetes because majority of the food they eat has a lot of sugar in the food they eat. Even though, there are a lot of other health problems too, but one of the most major one is the following: cardio respiratory because the fellow person could die, but it also increases the rate of death in the US. Due to the problems of why we can’t get healthy food, our country’s obesity and death rate has gone up.

The United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) atlas on food deserts shows that most food deserts in California are in highly rural (USDA, 2017). Northern California, the Mojave Desert, and the Imperial Valley all have a high prevalence of food deserts (USDA, 2017). A closer look at the map also shows a significant amount of food deserts in urban areas of highly populated cities. Large portions of neighborhoods in urban areas like Los Angeles, San Diego, and Sacramento are food deserts (USDA, 2017). In this section, we will discuss the socio-economic characteristics of the people living in both types of food

Healthy food should be accessible to everyone. If healthy food isn’t available for everyone all it’s going to do is cause more and more health problems. If we made healthy organic food the same price as cheap unhealthy food there would be a big difference in the health of our country. It’s completely unfair to make healthy food too expensive for other people to buy, which causes them to buy cheap unhealthy food, like off a dollar menu at a fast food restaurant. This issue needs to be put to an end.