Food Diversity And Food Deserts

Food deserts are areas where the population has limited access to fresh produce and healthy, affordable choices for food. Many of those living in food deserts are in poverty, restricting their budget for food. For this reason, they revert to fast food and cheap, processed food. The root of the issue lays at the problems of race and poverty, as the gap between rich whites in power and poor people of color grows. Some offer simple solutions to the problem such as planting a garden while others consider food alternative programs, but for long lasting change, legislature is to address the issue.

Examining the Impacts of Food Deserts and Food Imbalance on Public Health: Mari Gallagher

Mari Gallagher, a former president at a technology company, shifted her focus to public health and urban planning with an emphasis on Food Deserts around the United States to offer attainable solutions. She uses her background in business and development to address food access issues in a sustainable way. Her qualitative and quantitative research projects in urban areas across the United States have led to her current method of block-by-block planning as she mentions, “vitality and health of any urban community is a block-by-block phenomenon” (5). She uses information collected directly from these blocks along with the Census tract to build maps and color codes them to demonstrate the large amount of areas living in an area of food imbalance. The balance score attributed to the cities she researches are calculated based on how many fringe versus healthy grocers are close and accessible to each block in the city.

Gallagher defines a food desert as “a large, continuous area with poor access to mainstream grocers” and a food imbalance as a food desert wher...

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...the issues of food justice in particular with food deserts. While all mention poverty as the main, deeper issue, they also acknowledge race, culture and class as other systematic issues attributing to today’s food system inequalities. Gallagher’s block-by-block methodology is innovative and successful, as seen in both her research as well as some of Winne’s stories. Winne’s book aligns with Gallagher’s article in that they both promote food alternatives and programs to assist the people living in food deserts. While Winne warns readers to be cautious of some programs, Guthman puts most of them down, arguing that these programs do not tend to community wants and needs, but to those of outsider, whites. The more hopeful accounts of Winne and Gallagher offer more solutions at the small and large scale, but Guthman’s analysis of such programs must be taken into account.