USDA Puts Food Deserts On the Map

May 6, 2011 Miller-McCune

In Northeast Washington, in a census tract just two miles east of the U.S. Capitol building, 61 percent of residents are both low-income and have little access to healthy food options. The area does not have a single supermarket. The U.S. Department of Agriculture calls this area inside the nation's capital a "food desert."

The neighborhood is marked off in pink in an online "food desert locator map" unveiled this week by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service. Much of the surrounding area is pink. So, too, is a massive chunk of New Mexico, several patches of Los Angeles and just about the entire southern tip of Chicago. The mapping tool leverages census data to identify low-income tracts where at least one-third of the population (or at minimum 500 people) lives more than a mile from the nearest supermarket or large grocery store (or more than 10 miles in rural areas).

According to the USDA, 10 percent of the 65,000 census tracts in the country - containing 13.5 million people - meet this definition. Almost all of these people - 82 percent of them - live in urban areas where convenience stores, or even liquor stores, offer the best bet for dinner.

These neighborhoods are a byproduct, in many ways, of the country's shifting demographics into the suburbs since World War II and the consolidating food system that has elbowed out local chains in favor of big-box stores with produce sections (and big-box stores that shy from pro-union inner cities). In the 1990s, in particular, Walmarts began stocking groceries. It quickly became the country's largest food seller, prompting a wave of national consolidation by smaller regional chains.

"The term 'food desert' kind of implies it's a natural phenomenon," said Phil Howard, an assistant professor of community, agriculture, recreation and resource studies at Michigan State University, who has done local mapping work of such communities in Lansing, Mich. "What's really been happening in some areas described as 'food deserts' is that they used to have supermarkets or chain grocery stores, and those stores have been shut down as they've been opening new stores in the suburbs. It's not a natural phenomenon at all."