Poor Areas are Not Food Deserts
Poor urban neighborhoods…not only have more fast food restaurants and convenience stores than more affluent ones, but more grocery stores, supermarkets and full-service restaurants, too. And there is no relationship between the type of food being sold in a neighborhood and obesity among its children and adolescents.
Within a couple of miles of almost any urban neighborhood, “you can get basically any type of food,” said Roland Sturm of the RAND Corporation, lead author of one of the studies.
Full article on “food deserts” in The New York Times.
Very interesting. My own casual observations are the opposite. I see a lot of payday loan stores in depressed neighborhoods, but hardly ever see a supermarket.
I always thought the so-called food desert was an artificial construct. The notion came about by public health advocates that want to manipulate the food supply available to people in the inner-city. Retail stores will supply whatever food people are willing to pay for. Consumers purchase the type of food they want to eat. Convenience stores have often been criticized for not providing more fruits and vegetables. Yet, convenience store managers report some of the foods that public health advocates want people to buy are products consumers don’t seem to want to purchase.
Rebuffs the conventional wisdom.
What a surprise. People aren’t obese because they have no access to healthy food. Its easier to come out in support of supermarkets and be seen as “pro-vegitable” than come out against subsidies for corn and been seen as “anti-farmers”.