The USDA’s “My Plate” recommends that preschool-aged children consume specific amounts of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. These foods contain essential nutrients that children and adults alike require to maintain good health. Researchers have shown, however, that a significant number of children do not consume the recommended amounts of these foods, specifically vegetables and whole grains. Investigators have become increasingly interested in food deserts and whether living in these areas results in lower consumption of healthy foods. Food deserts by definition are areas where inhabitants have limited access to nutritious food. This study investigated the fruit, vegetable and whole grain consumption levels for preschool age children living in food desert or non-food desert areas. The NATFAN (National Food and Nutrition Questionnaire) survey of WIC participants was compared to the USDA’s food desert location data in order to learn the impact of living in a food desert. Using IBM SPSS to test the hypothesis, separate two-sample t-tests were conducted to determine if the mean difference between frequencies of fruit, vegetable, and whole grain consumption equaled zero. The data showed no difference in consumption of fruits and vegetables between food desert residing children and their non-food desert counterparts. There was, however, a difference in means for the consumption of whole grains. Specifically, food desert residing participants were consuming less brown rice. Using consumption amounts estimated from frequency data, it was discovered that, overall, WIC participants were under consuming fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.

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The ‘food desert’ has become a popular metaphor for describing fragmented pockets of America’s retail food environment characterized by limited access to affordable healthy foods and consequent heightened incidences of obesity and other diet-related health problems. Although researchers have addressed the locations and boundaries of food deserts, influential cross-sectional analyses are limited in that they cannot identify the direction of causality between the food environment and health outcomes. This study approaches the problem from an ecological perspective that examines the interplay between retailer and consumer in urban and rural settings of both food desert and non-food desert areas in the Texas South Plains centered on Lubbock. The principle methods of data collection entailed observations of purchases at full-service grocery stores and administration of a short survey as a means to determining what foods are being purchased and why. Additional semi-structured interviews with store representatives, along with several individuals located in underserved areas, and a general familiarization with the larger retail food environment, focusing on convenience and discount stores, provided important context to the research. The results challenge many existing assumptions, indicating problems associated with linking food deserts to poor health outcomes without accounting for additional variables, and further provides strong evidence that consumer choice is responsible for the larger retail food environment. / text

Food insecurity is one of the biggest challenges facing American society today. Over 13.7 million US households were food insecure in the year 2019 and 19 million Americans lived in food deserts in the year 2015 (USDA, 2020, 2017). Despite food insecurities affecting communities in every corner of the country, there is a dearth of research on food security and food deserts. Therefore, the main objectives of this study are 1) to identify underlying neighborhood characteristics that predict the communities at higher nutritional risk, 2) to analyze the impacts of household characteristics on household food insecurity, and 3) to examine the combined influences of both household and neighborhood characteristics on household food insecurity. Through exploratory factor analysis, eleven socioeconomic characteristics of neighborhoods were systematically grouped into two factors. The first factor represented the neighborhoods with lower socioeconomic status and the second factor represented the declining neighborhoods. Both neighborhoods are less attractive to the big retail stores economically (Bonanno, 2012), and are sometimes subject to malpractice like supermarket redlining (Eisenhauer, 2001).The food desert vulnerability index (FDVI) was created by ranking the variables of factor 1 and factor 2, and the ranking was based on percentiles. This index identified the census tracts of the Southern United States, Maine, Oregon, New Mexico, and Arizona as the socioeconomically vulnerable neighborhoods thereby their possibility of being food deserts. Additionally, analysis of the effect of household characteristics using the regression models suggested that households that were large, minorities, single-parent, male-headed, and lived in the metros, and Midwestern and Southern regions were food insecure. Combined assessment of household and neighborhood characteristics using hierarchical linear modeling revealed that only 2.03 percent of the variance in the household food security score was attributable to differences between counties, thereby implying household food security was mostly dependent on the household’s characteristics. The major limitation of this study is that it does not incorporate the cross-sectional variations in food prices, the role of social capital, and the analysis of the food environment to assess household food insecurity. Research examining the influence of these aspects on household food security would be beneficial.

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8 THE FOOD DESERTS ISSUE - THE CASE STUDY OF ZLÍN ABSTRACT This thesis attempts to provide an introduction to the 'food deserts' theme by outlining how the problem of access to food for households has become an increasingly important issue in the transforming Czech retail market. The first part reviews the development of new types of retail space in the Czech Republic in the past two decades. The emphasis is principally on the growth of new formats of food retailing - supermarkets, hypermarkets and discount stores - which to a greater or lesser extent have affected every local market and supported spatial restructuring of the Czech retailing. On the other hand, it has also changed the pattern of traditional shopping facilities, which in turn have often experienced decline. The second part of this work describes the retail change in Zlín and analyses the local distribution of food retail stores. It takes both quantitative and qualitative approach to define areas with relatively poor access to adequate food provision. There, it particularly focuses on consumers with lower mobility who are thus more restricted in their grocery choice. The last section includes conclusions, mainly the discussion of resulting policy responses, possibilities of prevention of this phenomenon, as well as implications for...

Master of Arts / Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work / Gerad Middendorf / Despite ideals of justice and equality, certain segments of the U.S. population are denied the rights and privileges available to the more affluent. This thesis examines the relationships between 1) neighborhood race and class composition and 2) food availability. We explore the extent to which physical and social isolation affects healthy food availability to groups marginalized by race and class. Specifically, we examine the relationship between residential racial and income composition and the availability of healthy foods. We use census tract data from the 2010 U.S. census and 5-year estimates from the 2006-2010 American Community Survey for Topeka, Kansas. For data on food stores we use InfoUSA, a professionally maintained database that provides detailed information on a variety of businesses. We verify this data with various “on the ground” techniques. We conclude with a discussion of the relevance of this work to the knowledge base regarding food environments in the United States.

Adequate access to affordable, healthy food has long been a public health concern and has become a more pressing societal issue following the Great Recession and rising incidents of diet-related diseases. In response, research and government efforts have largely focused on identifying disadvantaged areas with poor food access and formulating policies to improve accessibility. However, the approaches that have been widely relied upon by researchers and practitioners for food access assessment are severely flawed, which may lead to inconsistent research findings or neglect of the needs of under-served/un-served neighborhoods. This dissertation identifies three important aspects of food access for improvement: the appropriate scale/neighborhoods for analysis, the use of food outlets as a proxy for affordable, healthy food; and the assessment method. In particular, three studies are conducted to: (1) examine how varying spatial scales and aggregation methods affect accessibility assessments; (2) explore the role of independent grocers, which have been neglected in previous food access studies as elements of the food landscape that may change the perception of food deserts; and (3) investigate how individual-level food access patterns compare to the widely used, area-based neighborhood measures of expected accessibility. While the dissertation discusses and addresses theoretical challenges in food access, the empirical studies conducted in the Tucson, Arizona metropolitan area contribute to a better understanding of the real-world complexity of food access. The results shed light on some predicaments identified in recent studies and have important policy implications for how best to efficiently and effectively design strategies and initiatives to enhance food-provision access.