Food Deserts Need Farmers Markets

Lets bring farmers market options to food deserts.

Convenience store style grocers are the main source of food shopping in these 'deserts'—a shocking contrast to affluent neighborhoods with more than one option for food shopping. There's major health consequences to this reality.

Over 3 million residents in New York City are impacted by food deserts. Across boroughs, the inequity couldn’t be more clear as the Bronx has the least grocery stores carrying fresh produce and the highest diabetes death rate in the city.

Food Deserts are at the core of health inequity and contribute to the American obesity epidemic. What exactly is this ‘desert’? The term refers to neighborhoods where residents don’t have nearby access to any grocery stores and are essentially forced to shop at convenience stores and bodegas for their food.

Atlanta, Chicago, and Detroit also rank at the high end of cities where an overwhelming number of residents are not able to shop for fresh, clean and affordable produce.

You might be wondering how this could be possible. Some of the cities have higher number of food deserts due to low profit margins, especially in New York while other cities have replaced grocery stores with fast food restaurants when small grocers were forced to close as a result of placed like Walmart opening up in the vicinity.

Fresh food is less accessible to low-income residents in these areas and lack of access to fresh food is associated with diet-related chronic diseases, such as diabetes, migraines, mental illnesses, infertility and more.

Zoning laws and incentives for supermarket proximity are some ways that citizens can vote for better intervention in food deserts, but the idea of farmer’s markets and volunteering comes into play as a turn-key solution for impact that can be seen as soon as this month if you can get a few vendors on board. Proposals for pop-up farmers markets to help resolve the issues surrounding food deserts, health inequity and food availability are increasingly shared and slowly being implemented.

There is a lot of work left to do to impact the system that disproportionately affects minority groups who live in underserved and/or low-income communities in America. The work can start with us—stay tuned for more updates on All Well gatherings and volunteer events.

Sources

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/obesity-prevention-source/obesity-prevention/food-environment/supermarkets-food-retail-farmers-markets/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7007308/