usda food access research atlas

The Food Environment Doesn’t Impact Your Health…Unless You Use It

A lot of public attention has focused on so-called “food deserts.” These are food environments that lack low-priced healthy food options, and are often identified as areas that lack a full-service supermarket. (See Figure 1 for a map of Ohio.)

I have argued elsewhere that I prefer not to use the popularized terms of “food deserts” or “food swamps.” Food deserts suggest a lack of food, when these locations, particularly urban locations, often have a plethora of unhealthy food. Further, the terms “desert” and “swamps” are not asset-based approaches to characterizing community members’ residential locations.

Poor food environments are disproportionately found in poor urban and rural communities and communities of color. These communities are also associated with relatively higher levels of poor mental and physical health outcomes, such as greater levels of stress, diet-related disease, and insecurity [1-4].

Figure 1. USDA’s Low income, Low Access Census Tracts (previously termed “food deserts”) [7]

While an increasing amount of public funds at the federal, state and local level aim to improve food environments with the hopes of improving diet, many researchers have dismissed any significant relationship between the food environments and diet. There are two reasons for the lack of consistent and significant findings: (1) the way people go about measuring the food environment, and (2) people do leave poor food environments for better ones, particularly if they have a car, enough time and money, and feel safe (e.g., not going to face personal racism)[5].

A recent study lead by my advisee and PhD candidate, Alannah Glickman, and co-authored by myself and Darcy Freedman, addressed these issues by studying how people use their immediate food environment, rather than assuming everyone uses the space in the same way [5].  This gets to a fundamental way in which to conceptualize space [6]: as absolute – envision two convenience stores and one grocery store in a neighborhood; as relative – think about the position of the household relative to stores and the distance households travel; and as relational – how do households use the stores in their neighborhood. Nearly all research focuses on the second approach; we focus on the third.

Using a novel approach applied to two Ohio neighborhoods (Figure 2), we found that there is a significant relationship between the food environment and diet if people shop in their immediate, poor food environments. For people who do more than 50% of their shopping within their poor food environments, we found, all else equal, an eight point decrease in their healthy eating index (which is measured on a 100-pt. scale; the average American’s score is 58.7).

Figure 2. These are two images of the food environment taken in our study areas – Columbus, Ohio (left) and Cleveland, Ohio (right) [Google maps]

In my position now as an associate professor in the John Glenn College of Public Affairs, I ask questions, such as: is there a public purpose to intervene in the food environment? However, to understand the complexities of the food environment, I returned to my training in geography!

 

Jill Clark, Associate Professor

John Glenn College of Public Affairs

 

References Cited

  1. Walker, R.E., C.R. Keane, and J.G. Burke, Disparities and access to healthy food in the United States: A review of food deserts literature. Health & Place, 2010. 16(5): p. 876-884.
  2. Caspi, C.E., et al., The local food environment and diet: a systematic review. Health & place, 2012. 18(5): p. 1172-1187.
  3. Clifton, K.J., Mobility Strategies and Food Shopping for Low-Income Families A Case Study. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 2004. 23(4): p. 402-413.
  4. Ver Ploeg, M., Access to affordable and nutritious food: updated estimates of distance to supermarkets using 2010 data. 2012: United States Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service.
  5. Glickman, A., J.K. Clark, and D. Freedman, Residential Proximity to Low-Quality Food Retailers and Diet Behavior: Exploring the Micro Food Environment within Low-Income Neighborhoods, in Association of Public Policy Analysis and Management. 2020: Virtual.
  6. Harvey, D., Social Justice and the City 1973, London: Edward Arnold
  7. USDA. Food Access Research Atlas. 2020 [cited 2021 February 22]; Available from: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-access-research-atlas/go-to-the-atlas/.

 

Food Access: A Time Issue

In the US, the rising obesity rate and obesity-related comorbidities, such as cardiovascular diseases and Type-II diabetes, have drawn health geographers’ attention. It is generally understood that the lack of access to healthy food provisioning, such as grocery stores selling fresh fruits and vegetables, is driving this obesity crisis. Under this context, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Economic Research Service (ERS) develops an inquiry tool, the Food Access Research Atlas (1), generally known as the “food desert locator,” to highlight areas with both low-income and limited access to grocery stores. The tool also incorporates other variables, such as car-ownership, to identify communities at risk of food insecurity.

“Food deserts” identified by the USDA Food Access Research Atlas (1)

 

This spatial approach, however, has raised questions about the etiology of obesity. It has been found that the correlation between healthy food access and healthy diets is not statistically consistent and is somewhat insignificant (2). In order to articulate the health effects of the community food environment, health geographers argue that other non-spatial variables need to be considered. One such variable is time.

Time shapes food access in two dimensions. On the one hand, the time component, or “temporality,” manifests in the urban food system (3) — grocery stores have different opening hours, farmers’ markets operate in different seasons. For example, it is found that grocery stores in downtown Columbus, Ohio, although there are many of them, close relatively early than stores located in the suburb. This disparity in space-time access to food is visualized by a 3D Geographical Information System (GIS) (4). The plentiful spatial access but limited temporal access could be explained by the store type (e.g., mostly privately owned) and the relatively high crime rate in the downtown neighborhood. Since downtown stores have limited operating hours, local residents may restrict their food choices and could be subject to diet-related health consequences. On the other hand, time shapes individuals’ mobility to procure food. People burdened with multiple social roles, such as childcare while raising an income, may find themselves less available to procure healthy food (5). A study using a travel diary survey identifies that the difference in time use exists between genders and among different races. Full-time employed women and African Americans are at the disadvantage of having less discretionary time (6). The lack of time may victimize these vulnerable social groups and expose them to food insecurity.

A 3D visualization of space-time food access in Columbus (4)

 

Thus, food access is not only a spatial issue but also a temporal issue. Employing a spatial approach alone to evaluate food access is insufficient. Other tiers of non-spatial variables, such as time, should be factored in to produce knowledge about food access equity and justify the health effects of community food environments.

Xiang Chen

Department of Geography

University of Connecticut

Xiang Chen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, University of Connecticut, USA. He received a Ph.D. in Geography at The Ohio State University (2014). His research is focused on GIScience, community health, and food accessibility.

 

  1. https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-access-research-atlas/go-to-the-atlas.aspx
  2. Caspi, C. E., Sorensen, G., Subramanian, S. V., & Kawachi, I. (2012). The local food environment and diet: A systematic review. Health & Place, 18(5), 1172-1187.
  3. Widener, M. J., & Shannon, J. (2014). When are food deserts? Integrating time into research on food accessibility. Health & Place, 30, 1-3.
  4. Chen, X., & Clark, J. (2016). Measuring space-time access to food retailers: a case of temporal access disparity in Franklin County, Ohio. The Professional Geographer, 68(2), 175-188.
  5. Rose, D., & Richards, R. (2004). Food store access and household fruit and vegetable use among participants in the US Food Stamp Program. Public Health Nutrition, 7(8), 1081-1088.
  6. Kwan, M. P. (2002). Feminist visualization: Re-envisioning GIS as a method in feminist geographic research. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 92(4), 645-661.