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The Urban Food Desert Myth

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  • Gallowmere1984
    Gallowmere1984 Posts: 6,626 Member
    edited March 2017
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    RosieRose7673 wrote: »
    ladyannique2017 wrote: »
    Food deserts in general are not a myth. Yes, it's a myth that all poor urban areas are food deserts, but that doesn't mean food deserts don't exist. I've lived in a few. One was a poor urban area in the Midwest. Yes you can look at a street map and see there is a grocery store within walking distance, but street maps do not take into account gang territories or other hazards between you and the food. I lived in a place where it was not safe to go two blocks uptown which is where the grocery store was due to gang boundaries but I could go ten blocks down the hill to the river where there were bars and corner stores just fine. That area was a kind of a neutral zone because it was run by pimps and their hookers.

    Another food desert was also a water desert out in the west when I lived in a single wide trailer in a desperately poor rural area. Nearest grocery store was 45mikes away and although we had plumbing, the tap water wasn't safe to drink (EPA notice about arsenic in water) so my dad had to use our beat up rusted out truck to bring home a tank of water every week as well as food.

    Electricity wasn't too dependable in either place...urban or country and so we couldn't buy fresh veg or meat because it would rot to nothing in a day. Lots of canned and dried foods. I think people assume everyone has access to a refrigerator/freezer when many poor people don't.

    Thank you very much for posting this. I really feel that it is very easy for people to put horse blinders on when it comes to this.

    It's very easy to say that there's a supermarket a mile away. Why don't they go there?

    I live in Chicago currently and in a decent part of the city. However, for my job, I did have to travel to very high crime, poor areas. I've met a family who lived in an unfinished basement. 3 kids and a mom who was taking online classes to get a better job. However, the area was extremely dangerous. Homicides are high in the area as well as gang violence. Sure, if they could hop in a car and drive to a supermarket a mile or so away, they could. BUT- when you don't have a car, don't have any money to spare and have to walk that all the way to a supermarket that far with 3 kids in a high crime area, it's not the super market they are looking for. They are looking for something to eat that's both affordable and safe to get. Often times, that may mean the corner convenience store.

    I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you look a statistics about proximity to supermarkets, it's easy to overlook other factors that can influence the ability to get fresh food.

    This is another area where I am admittedly biased. I have lived in "the hood" in multiple cities over the years, and never once had a problem out of anyone. We'd regularly have people shot in the parking lots of two of the places I live, yet I never got so much as a sideways glance. I attribute this to the fact that I mind my own damned business, and never got tangled up in the things that tend to get people shot (drug money, *kitten* with someone's wife/girlfriend, having a big mouth, etc.)

    I don't give a damn if someone got capped right under my window, I didn't crack the blinds, I didn't see *kitten*, it's not my business. So yeah, even fat and nerdy whitey can live in some nasty neighborhoods without incident, if you know what you are doing. vOv
  • stanmann571
    stanmann571 Posts: 5,728 Member
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    Gallowmere1984 wrote: »
    RosieRose7673 wrote: »
    ladyannique2017 wrote: »
    Food deserts in general are not a myth. Yes, it's a myth that all poor urban areas are food deserts, but that doesn't mean food deserts don't exist. I've lived in a few. One was a poor urban area in the Midwest. Yes you can look at a street map and see there is a grocery store within walking distance, but street maps do not take into account gang territories or other hazards between you and the food. I lived in a place where it was not safe to go two blocks uptown which is where the grocery store was due to gang boundaries but I could go ten blocks down the hill to the river where there were bars and corner stores just fine. That area was a kind of a neutral zone because it was run by pimps and their hookers.

    Another food desert was also a water desert out in the west when I lived in a single wide trailer in a desperately poor rural area. Nearest grocery store was 45mikes away and although we had plumbing, the tap water wasn't safe to drink (EPA notice about arsenic in water) so my dad had to use our beat up rusted out truck to bring home a tank of water every week as well as food.

    Electricity wasn't too dependable in either place...urban or country and so we couldn't buy fresh veg or meat because it would rot to nothing in a day. Lots of canned and dried foods. I think people assume everyone has access to a refrigerator/freezer when many poor people don't.

    Thank you very much for posting this. I really feel that it is very easy for people to put horse blinders on when it comes to this.

    It's very easy to say that there's a supermarket a mile away. Why don't they go there?

    I live in Chicago currently and in a decent part of the city. However, for my job, I did have to travel to very high crime, poor areas. I've met a family who lived in an unfinished basement. 3 kids and a mom who was taking online classes to get a better job. However, the area was extremely dangerous. Homicides are high in the area as well as gang violence. Sure, if they could hop in a car and drive to a supermarket a mile or so away, they could. BUT- when you don't have a car, don't have any money to spare and have to walk that all the way to a supermarket that far with 3 kids in a high crime area, it's not the super market they are looking for. They are looking for something to eat that's both affordable and safe to get. Often times, that may mean the corner convenience store.

    I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you look a statistics about proximity to supermarkets, it's easy to overlook other factors that can influence the ability to get fresh food.

    This is another area where I am admittedly biased. I have lived in "the hood" in multiple cities over the years, and never once had a problem out of anyone. We'd regularly have people shot in the parking lots of two of the places I live, yet I never got so much as a sideways glance. I attribute this to the fact that I mind my own damned business, and never got tangled up in the things that tend to get people shot (drug money, *kitten* with someone's wife/girlfriend, having a big mouth, etc.)

    I don't give a damn if someone got capped right under my window, I didn't crack the blinds, I didn't see *kitten*, it's not my business. So yeah, even fat and nerdy whitey can live in some nasty neighborhoods without incident, if you know what you are doing. vOv

    Growing up in the "deepest inner city" as a pasty white kid that was my experience as well.

    Certainly, there's a bit of art to walking such that you present as neither victim nor competition, but it can certainly be done.
  • brittyn3
    brittyn3 Posts: 481 Member
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    estherdragonbat wrote: »
    One thing I do know: if you don't drive, bulk store shopping isn't so simple. Carrying your shopping on transit is difficult, if not impossible. All those large boxes and cans are pretty heavy and take up space. Bundle buggies take up space and block aisles, to say nothing of trying to manoever them past the baby strollers.

    People with cars often have the time to go to different grocery stores to get the discounted food. For someone without a car, that can be a couple of hours they might not have to go traipsing about the city. If you're working more than one job, it's that much harder and it's understandable that people in that situation would head for the one supermarket and grab what they can in sizes they can carry, even if that means paying more for fewer servings. And if some items cost more there than they do elsewhere, it adds up.

    I'm a stress eater and a boredom eater, trying to change. I'm also an introvert who gravitates to the food tables at parties. I suspect that there are people of all incomes in a similar boat. No, it's not okay to overeat, but it's understandable that people do, rich, poor, or middle-class.

    You can dismiss what I've written in this post as more excuses, I suppose, but I'm curious about solutions.


    It depends on where you're living. If you're living in a large city - most people don't have cars. You learn to adapt. If you need to buy bulk - then you find a friend with a car or you use a taxi. If that's not in your budget - buying bulk likely isn't in your budget either, since that cost is quite high initially, although it's cheaper over time. I "graze" shop. I buy what I can carry. I usually go a few times a week until my list is complete. I cycle things so I don't need everything all at once. And I make sure I go somewhere on my way home. Sometimes it means I walk a little farther to get what I need/save money. But I make the adjustments.

    If that truly is the reason for not being able to afford healthier options - there are ways around it. That's my solution.
  • brittyn3
    brittyn3 Posts: 481 Member
    edited March 2017
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    RosieRose7673 wrote: »
    ladyannique2017 wrote: »
    Food deserts in general are not a myth. Yes, it's a myth that all poor urban areas are food deserts, but that doesn't mean food deserts don't exist. I've lived in a few. One was a poor urban area in the Midwest. Yes you can look at a street map and see there is a grocery store within walking distance, but street maps do not take into account gang territories or other hazards between you and the food. I lived in a place where it was not safe to go two blocks uptown which is where the grocery store was due to gang boundaries but I could go ten blocks down the hill to the river where there were bars and corner stores just fine. That area was a kind of a neutral zone because it was run by pimps and their hookers.

    Another food desert was also a water desert out in the west when I lived in a single wide trailer in a desperately poor rural area. Nearest grocery store was 45mikes away and although we had plumbing, the tap water wasn't safe to drink (EPA notice about arsenic in water) so my dad had to use our beat up rusted out truck to bring home a tank of water every week as well as food.

    Electricity wasn't too dependable in either place...urban or country and so we couldn't buy fresh veg or meat because it would rot to nothing in a day. Lots of canned and dried foods. I think people assume everyone has access to a refrigerator/freezer when many poor people don't.

    Thank you very much for posting this. I really feel that it is very easy for people to put horse blinders on when it comes to this.

    It's very easy to say that there's a supermarket a mile away. Why don't they go there?

    I live in Chicago currently and in a decent part of the city. However, for my job, I did have to travel to very high crime, poor areas. I've met a family who lived in an unfinished basement. 3 kids and a mom who was taking online classes to get a better job. However, the area was extremely dangerous. Homicides are high in the area as well as gang violence. Sure, if they could hop in a car and drive to a supermarket a mile or so away, they could. BUT- when you don't have a car, don't have any money to spare and have to walk that all the way to a supermarket that far with 3 kids in a high crime area, it's not the super market they are looking for. They are looking for something to eat that's both affordable and safe to get. Often times, that may mean the corner convenience store.

    I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you look a statistics about proximity to supermarkets, it's easy to overlook other factors that can influence the ability to get fresh food.

    Thank you for providing a different point of view, I never considered it. It's incredibly sad that gangs need to be accounted for when trying to feed your family. Ugh. And that it is a very real and very serious issue.
  • Gamliela
    Gamliela Posts: 2,468 Member
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    Gallowmere1984 wrote: »
    spinnerdell wrote: »
    dfwesq wrote: »
    Gallowmere1984 wrote: »
    One would think, the truly screwed are the poor who live in areas where it can be 60+ miles to a reasonably sized town. However, these people often tend to be cash poor, but environment resourceful, so to speak.
    Are you talking about them having gardens, or at least knowing people who have gardens? (Same could apply to fishing, hunting, I suppose.)

    I live on the outskirts of a small rural town in Nevada with the nearest supermarket 3 miles away. Some of my neighbors who don't have cars rely on a gas station convenience store for their groceries, a limited and expensive resource.

    A vegetable garden, fruit trees, and backyard chickens supplement my diet very nicely, a luxury unavailable to most urban food-desert-dwellers, I'm guessing.

    This, but usually it's not that they can't do it, in a realistic sense. It's that often, draconian city zoning codes levy fines for such things. Kinda defeats the purpose of growing your own food when you end up getting hit for 10x the value of the food potential in fines. Can't have people dodging your shady local sales taxes, ya' know?


    Yeah, I know. When I was poor we got a milking goat and chickens to exist in the USA. The neighbor was beating his wife and after telling him to stop a few times, we called the police. The next week the animal control girl knocked on our door and after 7 years of having our milking goat and a few chickens she told us we were reported by an anonymous neighbor to have livestock in city limits. We were taken to court by the city, paid fines and had to find new homes for all our animals. We left the US of A a few months later.

    Its like poor people can't even do the right kind of work to look after themselves in 'merica without it being seen as screwing up somehow. Miss my goat and all that cheese and yogurt. :(
  • lemurcat12
    lemurcat12 Posts: 30,886 Member
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    brittyn3 wrote: »
    estherdragonbat wrote: »
    One thing I do know: if you don't drive, bulk store shopping isn't so simple. Carrying your shopping on transit is difficult, if not impossible. All those large boxes and cans are pretty heavy and take up space. Bundle buggies take up space and block aisles, to say nothing of trying to manoever them past the baby strollers.

    People with cars often have the time to go to different grocery stores to get the discounted food. For someone without a car, that can be a couple of hours they might not have to go traipsing about the city. If you're working more than one job, it's that much harder and it's understandable that people in that situation would head for the one supermarket and grab what they can in sizes they can carry, even if that means paying more for fewer servings. And if some items cost more there than they do elsewhere, it adds up.

    I'm a stress eater and a boredom eater, trying to change. I'm also an introvert who gravitates to the food tables at parties. I suspect that there are people of all incomes in a similar boat. No, it's not okay to overeat, but it's understandable that people do, rich, poor, or middle-class.

    You can dismiss what I've written in this post as more excuses, I suppose, but I'm curious about solutions.


    It depends on where you're living. If you're living in a large city - most people don't have cars. You learn to adapt. If you need to buy bulk - then you find a friend with a car or you use a taxi. If that's not in your budget - buying bulk likely isn't in your budget either, since that cost is quite high initially, although it's cheaper over time.

    Actually, bulk buying is a lot cheaper than buying at most small stores and it's not true that not having money to pay for a cab there are back means you can't afford to bulk buy items that are mostly reasonably cheap. I mostly don't bulk buy since I have no particular reason to (I could now that I have a car, for years I couldn't easily without a car, although yes I could have asked a friend, since I did have friends with cars). Cabbing to a bulk store and back is going to wreck any savings, as that's extremely expensive. I am not lower income, and yet even for me cabbing places is a luxury and waste of money.

    I don't think people are obese because they can't afford healthier options, but I do think that part of the hardship of being poor is that things that are necessities of life are often more expensive than for people who are somewhat better off.
  • lemurcat12
    lemurcat12 Posts: 30,886 Member
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    RosieRose7673 wrote: »
    Gallowmere1984 wrote: »
    RosieRose7673 wrote: »
    ladyannique2017 wrote: »
    Food deserts in general are not a myth. Yes, it's a myth that all poor urban areas are food deserts, but that doesn't mean food deserts don't exist. I've lived in a few. One was a poor urban area in the Midwest. Yes you can look at a street map and see there is a grocery store within walking distance, but street maps do not take into account gang territories or other hazards between you and the food. I lived in a place where it was not safe to go two blocks uptown which is where the grocery store was due to gang boundaries but I could go ten blocks down the hill to the river where there were bars and corner stores just fine. That area was a kind of a neutral zone because it was run by pimps and their hookers.

    Another food desert was also a water desert out in the west when I lived in a single wide trailer in a desperately poor rural area. Nearest grocery store was 45mikes away and although we had plumbing, the tap water wasn't safe to drink (EPA notice about arsenic in water) so my dad had to use our beat up rusted out truck to bring home a tank of water every week as well as food.

    Electricity wasn't too dependable in either place...urban or country and so we couldn't buy fresh veg or meat because it would rot to nothing in a day. Lots of canned and dried foods. I think people assume everyone has access to a refrigerator/freezer when many poor people don't.

    Thank you very much for posting this. I really feel that it is very easy for people to put horse blinders on when it comes to this.

    It's very easy to say that there's a supermarket a mile away. Why don't they go there?

    I live in Chicago currently and in a decent part of the city. However, for my job, I did have to travel to very high crime, poor areas. I've met a family who lived in an unfinished basement. 3 kids and a mom who was taking online classes to get a better job. However, the area was extremely dangerous. Homicides are high in the area as well as gang violence. Sure, if they could hop in a car and drive to a supermarket a mile or so away, they could. BUT- when you don't have a car, don't have any money to spare and have to walk that all the way to a supermarket that far with 3 kids in a high crime area, it's not the super market they are looking for. They are looking for something to eat that's both affordable and safe to get. Often times, that may mean the corner convenience store.

    I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you look a statistics about proximity to supermarkets, it's easy to overlook other factors that can influence the ability to get fresh food.

    This is another area where I am admittedly biased. I have lived in "the hood" in multiple cities over the years, and never once had a problem out of anyone. We'd regularly have people shot in the parking lots of two of the places I live, yet I never got so much as a sideways glance. I attribute this to the fact that I mind my own damned business, and never got tangled up in the things that tend to get people shot (drug money, *kitten* with someone's wife/girlfriend, having a big mouth, etc.)

    I don't give a damn if someone got capped right under my window, I didn't crack the blinds, I didn't see *kitten*, it's not my business. So yeah, even fat and nerdy whitey can live in some nasty neighborhoods without incident, if you know what you are doing. vOv

    It's good for you that you didn't care and kept to yourself. That means only gang members and drug dealers get shot?

    There are so many bystanders shot yearly by stray bullets or simply because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time. Sure- a percentage of them were involved in drug or gang activity but that definitely doesn't account for all of those affected by the violence.

    I was going to make this point, so am glad you did. Living in an unsafe neighborhood can affect people who aren't involved in the violence and certainly affects where one can engage in outdoor activity. Just read something like There Are No Children Here. I have interviewed people who grew up in some of the worst CHA projects back in the day, and even people complaining about how things are now will admit that in the old days it was horrible, they wouldn't allow their children to go outside to play, etc.

    That said, I do think the issue is more complex than "it's impossible to safely go to the store." It's typically not, and I'm not sure that stereotype really helps either. There's a pretty good discussion of the food desert/availability issue (as well as many other issues) in Natalie Moore's The South Side (http://us.macmillan.com/thesouthside/natalieymoore/9781137280152), which I would recommend.
  • HeliumIsNoble
    HeliumIsNoble Posts: 1,213 Member
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    dfwesq wrote: »
    fascha wrote: »
    Most people that aren't actively trying to lose weight would choose .99 box of Kraft Dinner over a 2.99 head of broccoli. I don't think the link between poverty and obesity is that much of a stretch.

    They probably would. They would probably also choose 99 cents' worth of Kraft macaroni dinner over 50 cents' worth of dried beans. I think that is part of what makes this an intractable problem.
    Well, yes. Fuel costs.

    I once bought dried kidney beans as part of an economy drive. I soaked them overnight and boiled them for over an hour as directed. At the end of that, some of them were still worryingly hard (cue angst about poisoning myself). I think now that it was a dud packet of beans that were just too old, but point is that the beans were cheaper in the shop than the alternative, but I'm not sure they remained cheaper when you take in to account fuel costs. The other thing is that you need more than a microwave to cook them.
  • ritzvin
    ritzvin Posts: 2,860 Member
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    Gamliela wrote: »
    ritzvin wrote: »
    Gallowmere1984 wrote: »
    Theo166 wrote: »
    Yup, life's not fair to people who don't have cars. Obama's cash for clunker's program should have been used to give them cars, so life would be more equal.

    But life isn't equal and people in suburbia and rural areas have their own set of issues, especially if they are poor.

    This was something I had thought about. The focus is often in urban areas, but due to their very nature, things tend to be relatively close. One would think, the truly screwed are the poor who live in areas where it can be 60+ miles to a reasonably sized town. However, these people often tend to be cash poor, but environment resourceful, so to speak.

    Exactly! I live on the west side of Buffalo, and have a bunch of grocery stores within 2 miles (and multiple bus lines much closer). I can't think of ANY areas w/in my city where you would be more than half a mile from a bus route that has a full-fledged supermarket on it. In comparison, getting to & from work generally requires a bunch of bus/subway transfers. If someone opts to be lazy and waddle 200 ft to the bodega for chips instead of grabbing a backpack and getting on the bus, that is totally on them. Many little old ladies manage to do it just fine with their pull carts. And no- when you are poor, you don't go to multiple stores...you go to the one that is most convenient of those with reasonable prices and deal with the selection they have.

    Now, poor rural areas are a different story. You are pretty much screwed if you don't have a car outside of the city.

    Other people tend to forget that people ate a certain way in the winter in the north for a reason. If it looks like the frozen tundra outside, don't *kitten* that strawberries and broccoli are expensive. No *kitten*. It's a luxury of the modern age that we can buy these items up here at all in the winter at any price. Traditional northern soup vegetables are generally quite cheap.
    ritzvin wrote: »
    Gallowmere1984 wrote: »
    Theo166 wrote: »
    Yup, life's not fair to people who don't have cars. Obama's cash for clunker's program should have been used to give them cars, so life would be more equal.

    But life isn't equal and people in suburbia and rural areas have their own set of issues, especially if they are poor.

    This was something I had thought about. The focus is often in urban areas, but due to their very nature, things tend to be relatively close. One would think, the truly screwed are the poor who live in areas where it can be 60+ miles to a reasonably sized town. However, these people often tend to be cash poor, but environment resourceful, so to speak.

    Exactly! I live on the west side of Buffalo, and have a bunch of grocery stores within 2 miles (and multiple bus lines much closer). I can't think of ANY areas w/in my city where you would be more than half a mile from a bus route that has a full-fledged supermarket on it. In comparison, getting to & from work generally requires a bunch of bus/subway transfers. If someone opts to be lazy and waddle 200 ft to the bodega for chips instead of grabbing a backpack and getting on the bus, that is totally on them. Many little old ladies manage to do it just fine with their pull carts. And no- when you are poor, you don't go to multiple stores...you go to the one that is most convenient of those with reasonable prices and deal with the selection they have.

    Now, poor rural areas are a different story. You are pretty much screwed if you don't have a car outside of the city.

    Other people tend to forget that people ate a certain way in the winter in the north for a reason. If it looks like the frozen tundra outside, don't *kitten* that strawberries and broccoli are expensive. No *kitten*. It's a luxury of the modern age that we can buy these items up here at all in the winter at any price. Traditional northern soup vegetables are generally quite cheap.

    The thing is Ritz, is that a bag of chips is just so much lighter to carry than a pound of potatoes when you have to take three or four public transits and wait in between and walk several blocks and up stairs to your shabby little apartment to and from the food source.

    A lot bulkier though for what you get. . All that air takes up valuable space in a backpack compared to raw potatoes.
  • Theo166
    Theo166 Posts: 2,564 Member
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    It costs less than $0.25 to run a crock pot for 8 hrs,
    ample time to soften up any vegetable matter we normally eat.
  • dfwesq
    dfwesq Posts: 592 Member
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    Theo166 wrote: »
    It costs less than $0.25 to run a crock pot for 8 hrs,
    ample time to soften up any vegetable matter we normally eat.
    I use a crock pot and I didn't think of that - good point. I was also surprised to find out how cheap they have become.
  • Gallowmere1984
    Gallowmere1984 Posts: 6,626 Member
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    dfwesq wrote: »
    Theo166 wrote: »
    It costs less than $0.25 to run a crock pot for 8 hrs,
    ample time to soften up any vegetable matter we normally eat.
    I use a crock pot and I didn't think of that - good point. I was also surprised to find out how cheap they have become.

    Yeap. Everything we do has "hidden" costs that escape most people. Microwaves are murder on the electricity bill, especially when you have to run it for upwards of 20 minutes making multiple frozen dinners for a family of however many.

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