Understanding Urban Hunger : Food Deserts, Behavior, & Poverty

In the past decade, we have come to understand food deserts as the primary cause of urban hunger and as an easily treatable problem. Americans have started to advocate for the construction of new grocery stores and have increased the accessibility of famers markets. As advocacy has gained steam, so has the research. Recent studies have turned our ideas about urban hunger upside down.

Health outcomes are not boosted by having access to better food alone. Combating food deserts is a small piece of a larger, American food insecurity puzzle.

What is a food desert?

Food deserts are areas where people lack access to affordable, healthy foods. In cities, food deserts tend to be low-income areas where people have access to fast-food places and convenience stores, but lack nearby grocery stores with quality produce. In rural areas, a food desert is an area where people live more than ten miles from their nearest grocer. Technically, rural areas have much larger food deserts, but food insecurity makes a substantial impact in all regions.

Fighting Hunger by Increasing Access

Addressing food deserts came to the forefront of local and national policy when Michelle Obama kicked off her Let’s Move campaign. That focus has brought along some really exciting results: 23 states are receiving funds to help improve the effectiveness of SNAP programs at famers markets, a D.C. program has doubled food stamps spending power at farmers markets, and private-public partnerships have formed to ensure that food deserts gain greater access to fresh fruits and vegetables.

Still, the contrast between high- and low-income Americans is stark. According to a study from April 2015, wealthy, educated, American households purchase foods that are forty percent closer to the USDA nutrition recommendations than lower-income, less-educated households. Income and education are determining health outcomes across America. It is clear that efforts to increase access to affordable, healthy food are necessary. But, has increasing grocery store access actually been an effective tool to fight hunger and close the nutrition gap? According to the Chicago Policy Review, improving our grocery stores isn’t enough.

One in seven Americans struggle with hunger and 48 million Americans live in food insecure households. Food insecurity is a lack of sufficient access to affordable and nutritious food and the South has been hit hardest. In Mississippi, twenty-two percent of households suffer from food insecurity; in Arkansas, nineteen percent; and seventeen percent in Louisiana, Kentucky, and Texas.

A look at demographic risk-factors for food insecurity shows that the South has a lower high school graduation rate and a larger proportion of the population on food stamps than the rest of the nation. Wyoming, North Dakota, Vermont, and New Hampshire appear to struggle the least with hunger.

If You Build it, They Still Won’t Come

Research shows that increasing access to quality food only solves a small portion of the nutritional gap. When researchers Schnell et al. controlled for income, differences in access only accounted for ten percent of the nutritional gap across education groups.

“It is easy to advocate for more grocery stores, but if you are looking for what you hope will change obesity, healthy food access is probably just wishful thinking.” Dr. Kelly Brownwell of Yale’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity

Better food access is an important, but it is a small piece of the larger puzzle. Joe Cortright, Director at CityObservatory.org, advocates for efforts that raise the incomes of the poor. Given the research, that is a smart move. However, it doesn’t seem like a tangible action for local governments in the short-run or address the issue of human behavior. When we give kids healthier school lunches, they leave the fruits and vegetables untouched. Even when consumers from a food desert begin to shop at grocery stores with a wider-variety of healthy foods, they do not increase their consumption of fruits and vegetables.

Our eating habits are largely influenced by how we were raised and what we ate as children. People in poverty are often working multiple jobs, jumping through hoops to keep their government assistance, and caring for a family. It is no surprise that people might lack the time, energy, and skills to cook healthy meals.

Programs that teach people to cook healthy meals might be another important piece of the puzzle.

More Than an Inconvenience

This burden of food deserts lays heaviest on people without cars. After driving people in his community to the next city to buy groceries, Burnell Colton of New Orleans’ Lower-Ninth Ward set out to open a small grocery store. By opening a tiny shop, Burnell lent his community a lifeline. The response has been gratifying. Of his customers, Burnell says, “Some people come and cry. I have people come and take pictures. I have total strangers come and give me a hug.”

For city leaders, providing a neighborhood with a small lifeline can be transformative. When affordable real estate alone does not encourage grocers to open up in food deserts, the next move might be to host a biweekly famers market or to rethink the public transportation system with food insecure citizens in mind.

In Houston, 43 thousand households are without access to a car and are also more than half a mile from the nearest supermarket. Can you imagine carrying a week’s worth of groceries for a family of four half a mile? I couldn’t even carry that load to the parking lot.

Good public transportation can play a huge role in addressing food insecurity. Unfortunately, we aren’t there yet in most U.S. cities. For example, Houston’s service is infrequent, requiring users to schedule their trips carefully, and the route neglects poor neighborhoods.

Jarrett Walker of Human Transit (a favorite blogger around the office) reimagined Houston’s transit system to be a grid system, rather than a radial system. Walker argues that when it comes to transit, ‘frequency is freedom’.

A gridded network allows people to travel in all directions so that people in low-income areas can easily access services and employment across the city. You can find Walker’s full analysis here.

Gaining New Insights

There isn’t a clear roadmap outlining how to end hunger, fight food insecurity, and close the nutrition gap. The Let’s Move campaign has seen considerable success and organizations like Feeding America, No Kid Hungry, and local food banks are making a big difference in people’s lives.

So what can city leaders do? First, we can identify which neighborhoods need assistance.

According to Google Trends, citizens of Chicago, Philadelphia, and Atlanta have conducted among the most searches for ‘Food Deserts’ in the past decade. By comparing data that included Total Population Receiving Food Stamps by Housing Units and High School Graduation Rates, (two factors we know can lead to food deserts), I was able to pinpoint neighborhoods that are more likely to suffer from hunger and poor nutrition. These areas could currently be a food desert or, be in the process of becoming one.

Use this key for the maps below:

In the following maps, pink neighborhoods have a high proportion of high school graduates and also have few households that receive food stamps. Green neighborhoods have a high proportion of households on food stamps. Blue neighborhoods have high concentrations of both populations.

The green map in the upper left-hand corner represents the city’s population density by neighborhood.

The multicolor maps represent total population receiving food stamps normalized by household with high school graduation rate by neighborhood.

The shaded areas in the lower right-hand corner are neighborhoods where the graduation rate is lower than 80% and over a quarter of residents receive food stamps. These neighborhoods are most at-risk for food insecurity.

By filtering out neighborhoods with a higher high school graduation rate (over eighty percent) and only including areas where more than a quarter of the population was reliant on food stamps, I discovered the following:

Neighborhoods at risk in Chicago:

Neighborhoods in northern Chicago have high high school graduation rates and are generally wealthier. In Chicago, the neighborhoods of Fuller Park, Washington Park, Oakland, and Riverdale (shown in teal) are all at risk for remaining food insecure at the household level without intervention.

Neighborhoods at risk in Philadelphia:

Neighborhoods in the south of Philadelphia have exceptionally high graduation rates and few residents on food stamps.Hunting Park, Upper Kensington, Fairhill, Harrowgate, Kensington West, and Ludlow are all at high-risk for food insecurity.

Neighborhoods at risk in Atlanta:

Neighborhoods in north Atlanta are educated and generally above the poverty line. Concentrating efforts to end food insecurity in the greenest and bluest neighborhoods will allow Atlanta to focus their resources in a few areas. Approximately forty-five percent of the households in Carey Park and Thomasville Heights are on food stamps and have a low high-school graduation rate.

Your Move

Addressing urban hunger is far more complex than increasing access to fresh food. We do know that raising incomes will result in a healthier population, improving transportation infrastructure may be a necessary starting point, and that more educated people are able to make smarter choices about nutrition. However, there is still a lot to learn.

We need to innovate and experiment with other interventions. Your city could interview people in food insecure neighborhoods in order to find out what they want and need more of. Maybe your school board will introduce nutrition and culinary classes into the middle schools, high schools, and community centers in food insecure neighborhoods to make sure people are familiar with healthy cooking early on.

This is your time to lead, to make educated guesses, and to succeed (and fail) out loud until we discover the best approach to helping people in our communities stay happy, healthy, and full.

Are you a public health official or a transit planner? Chat with us to discover how our mapping tool can help you reach your most at-risk populations on their terms.

About the Author: Michelle Stockwell is a senior politics major at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas. The second-most food insecure state in the nation, Arkansas is taking some bold moves to fight hunger and reignite the local food movement.