Food Deserts Around The World – Everyone eats. Regardless of politics, skin color, religion or how much money we have in the bank, we all need food to live. And we all need healthy food to be healthy.

Areas without access to nutritious, high-quality and affordable food are known as food deserts. The USDA defines it as any area with a poverty rate of 20% or higher, and where one-third or more of the population lives more than a mile away from a supermarket.

Food Deserts Around The World

Food deserts tend to be mostly low-income areas, areas where residents often don’t own cars, and they are almost always communities of color. The sad reality is that health outcomes are worse for those with low incomes. And because of the legacy of racism, people of color are more likely to fall into low-income groups.

Food Insecurity In The Us: An Explainer And Research Roundup

In fact, one study found that black Americans are nearly 400% more likely than white Americans to live in a neighborhood or community without a full-service supermarket.

Food Revolution Summit speaker Ron Finley, a food justice advocate in South Los Angeles, California, said it’s easier to get alcohol in his community than it is to get organic apples. He tells us, “A food desert is a place where there is absolutely no opportunity, possibility, or hope for healthy nutritious food. The food distributed in this community is equal and comes from different parts of the world. It is sprayed with poison and poison and harvested before its time… In addition, fast food is on the rise, which is often the only option that residents of these communities have… Thugs kill more people than driving cars ” .

It doesn’t necessarily mean that people living in food deserts don’t have much access to calories. In fact, these areas tend to be oversaturated with liquor stores, convenience stores, and fast food restaurants—establishments that sell highly processed foods that provide excessive levels of sugar, oil, salt, and artificial ingredients, as well as factory-raised meat. and dairy products. . There is no shortage of sodas and snacks, cakes and white bread, cookies and crackers; and has plenty of alcohol and tobacco products to boot.

Food deserts limit access to food resources, especially healthy and culturally appropriate foods. This can have a profound and lasting negative impact on people’s lives and their health outcomes.

The Cold, Hard Truth About Food Deserts

All over the world, there is a direct correlation not only between poverty and hunger, but also between poverty and obesity. As counterintuitive as it may seem, the less money you have, the more likely you are to struggle with your weight. The harsh reality is that poverty usually makes it difficult to feed your family at all—and even harder to prepare real, healthy food.

In developed countries, statistically speaking, the poorer you are, the more likely you are to rely, for the majority of your calories, on highly processed and nutritionally inadequate foods. And the more likely you are to die from diet-driven diseases like cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s and type 2 diabetes.

People living in food deserts who often rely on fast food have seven times the risk of stroke before age 45, double the risk of heart attack and type 2 diabetes, and four times the risk of kidney failure.

Unfortunately, the people who can least afford to be sick are also the most likely to develop chronic diseases.

Food Justice] End The Corporate Exploitation Of ‘food Deserts’

Not just one cause of food deserts. Let’s examine some of the factors involved in their development.

Currently, more than 820 million people worldwide, and as many as 54 million Americans, face food insecurity. As long as there is great poverty—as long as some people struggle to eat—there will almost certainly be disparities in health outcomes along class lines.

Many people living in food deserts work minimum wage, and often multiple jobs. In fact, many food deserts are also “wage deserts,” where available work does not provide the basic needs of at least 80% of primary workers. So even if people living in the desert work full-time, and even if they have access to a full-service grocery store with healthy products, they may not be able to buy healthy food because, thanks to a completely perverse subsidy system, food which is healthy. sometimes costs more than unhealthy choices.

Almost everyone knows that we all need to eat more fresh fruits and vegetables. But less than 1% of farm subsidies today support the research, production or marketing of these healthy foods. What food and what crops do we subsidize? Mainly, the mass production of large amounts of corn, soybeans and wheat.

Map Of World Desert Ecoregions

This highly subsidized crop has two main uses in the modern diet: as animal feed on factory farms, which lowers the price of industrial meat; and as an ingredient in highly processed and unhealthy snacks. This reduces the cost of products such as nutritious food, contributing to increased medical costs.

Food subsidies are the main reason why in the last four decades the price of processed food and industrial meat has decreased by 20-30%, while the price of fruit and vegetables has increased by 40%.

When we build societies that perpetuate intergenerational cycles of poverty and then subsidize unhealthy foods, we create market mismatches that essentially condemn the poor to nutritional disaster. And when a hugely disproportionate share of those struggling financially are people of color, we’ve created one of the conditions that actually perpetuates racial health disparities.

How are conditions created where poverty tends to be deeper and more devastating in communities of color? The history of slavery and genocide is followed by a red line, which imposes unfair treatment on people and communities of color. Red lines also mean the systematic denial—by federal government agencies, local governments, and the private sector—of many other services to people and communities of color.

No Food, Big Problem

Furthermore, the USDA’s discrimination against black farmers caused 93% of all black farmers in the US to lose their land. And a ZIP code-dependent tax base has kept low-income communities, many of which are also minority communities, entrenched in intergenerational cycles of poverty, with underfunded schools and health care programs, and higher levels of violence and environmental pollution. .

The net effect of all this is that black and Hispanic families today have far less wealth than white families. The average net worth of a black family is less than 11% of that of an average white family. The net worth of Hispanic families is less than 13% of that of white families.

In low-income communities, people who manage to make a decent living often have to spend extra money to cover the needs of less well-off family members. Instead of accumulating assets and passing them on to their children, they are more likely to use them to care for their elders and others in immediate need, and then die poor.

It is difficult to exaggerate the impact of poverty, whether racially related or not, on having access to food. Historically, as white and middle-class workers moved out of the inner city and into the suburbs, grocery stores and supermarkets followed, largely because they could save on overhead costs, sell more expensive and profitable goods to a more affluent customer base, and have lower insurance. legs.

Food Deserts In America

All of these have a direct impact on health outcomes. If you eat badly and get sick, it’s very difficult to get ahead in life or keep getting back up every time life knocks you down.

A clear example is in the comparison of two communities in Boston, Massachusetts. Back Bay is an upscale Boston neighborhood that has a Whole Foods Market and many affordable food options. Life expectancy in Back Bay is almost 90 years. But just a few miles away is the Roxbury neighborhood—one of two officially designated “food deserts” in the city of Boston. According to a recent study from the CDC’s “500 Cities” project, residents of Roxbury have a life expectancy under 60 years.

While it is important to recognize and work to combat the existence of food deserts, some thought leaders reject the term “food desert” altogether. Black agricultural activists Leah Penniman and Karen Washington prefer the term “food apartheid.” They argue that true deserts are a natural phenomenon, while food deserts are rooted in social inequality. Apartheid, we are told, refers to a system of segregation and unequal treatment based on skin color, and as such, it better defines the problems caused by long-term discrimination at almost every level of society—than redlining and housing discrimination. to unfair working conditions and lack of healthy food.

Some who prefer the term “food apartheid” believe that as long as there is profit to be made by employing large numbers of vulnerable workers – workers are willing to work for very little.

Best Desserts Around The World

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