The Grocery Gap: Who Has Access to Healthy - The Food Trust

PolicyLinkThe Food TrustFindings1. Accessing healthy food is achallenge for many Americans—particularly those living inlow-income neighborhoods,communities of color, andrural areasResearchers have measured geographic accessto healthy foods in many different ways, andat nearly every imaginable scale: from nationalsamples to detailed assessments of specificneighborhoods. Only one study has sought tocalculate the extent of the problem nationally.The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2009 “fooddesert” study examined access to supermarkets anddetermined that 23.5 million people cannot accessa supermarket within one mile of their home.Most studies (a total of 113) examine whethersupermarkets or healthy foods are equitablydistributed across communities according tosocioeconomic status, racial composition, orlevel of urbanization (population density). 6Their findings are remarkably consistent: peopleliving in low-income neighborhoods, minorityneighborhoods, and rural communities facemuch greater challenges finding healthy food,especially those who lack good transportationoptions to reach full-service grocery stores.Ninety-seven of these studies found inequitableaccess to healthy foods, 14 had some mixedresults, and two studies did not find inequities.Disparities in supermarket access inurban areas by race and incomeMany researchers use supermarkets as a proxy forfood access because they provide the most reliableaccess to a wide variety of nutritious and affordableproduce and other foods compared to other typesof food outlets such as convenience stores andsmaller grocery stores. Several of these studies lookat the distribution of different types of food stores,such as supermarkets, smaller grocery stores, and“fringe retailers” such as convenience and cornerstores across different community types. They findthat lower-income communities and communities ofcolor have fewer supermarkets, more conveniencestores, and smaller grocery stores than wealthierand predominantly white communities.Eighty-nine national and local studies documentuneven geographic access to supermarketsin urban areas according to income, race, orboth 7-87 and nine had mixed results. 88-96Nationwide study findings include:• Low-income zip codes have 25 percentfewer chain supermarkets and 1.3times as many convenience storescompared to middle-income zip codes.Predominantly black zip codes have abouthalf the number of chain supermarketscompared to predominantly whitezip codes, and predominantly Latinoareas have only a third as many. 46• Low-income neighborhoods have halfas many supermarkets as the wealthiestneighborhoods and four times as manysmaller grocery stores, according to anassessment of 685 urban and rural censustracts in three states. The same studyfound four times as many supermarketsin predominantly white neighborhoodscompared to predominantly black ones. 38Another multistate study found thateight percent of African Americanslive in a tract with a supermarketcompared to 31 percent of whites. 4213