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Food Deserts And The Community

Figure 6 Cascade Food Mart
What is a Food Desert?

 

In order to understand legislation and community support behind solving the issue of food deserts, you have to understand what a food desert is. For years, there was never really a working definition of what exactly constituted a "food desert". In 1999, the Nutrition Task Force Low Income Project Team of the United Kingdom Department of Health used the term in a report and defined it as â€œareas of relative exclusion where people experience physical and economic barriers to accessing healthy foods." While this definition was a decent working start, there needed to be more guidelines and definitive definitions of a food desert, hence the USDA legal working definition of a food desert. According to the USDA, a food desert is "low-income census tract where a substantial number or share of residents has low access to a supermarket or large grocery store." ( USDA). 

 

By this standard, the government and citizens can understand and locate whether or not they are living in a food desert. According to a 2009 study done by the USDA, more than 23.5 million people have and currently still reside in food deserts. Most of the time, according a 2012 USDA Food Desert Report, low income, communities of color (specifically African American communuties) are on most impacted by lack of healthy food options thus, residing in most food deserts in the United States (USDA 2012). 

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