A couple of comments on our report of the USDA’s Food Desert Locator have made me revise my initial enthusiasm. People who actually live there seem to disagree that they’re in a desert. One pointed out that “the Korean market where I go grocery shopping every week is in the middle of a food desert”. Another, at greater length, explained:
I don’t know about how they define food desert – I looked at Ames Iowa and half the town is considered at “food desert”. Ames has a population of 50,000 – about half are students at ISU. We have nine grocery stores. Three of which are low price stores – such as Aldi’s. We have a public transportation system throughout the city. So how does that make a food desert. In summer we have two small farmers markets.
What can I say? We quoted part of the USDA’s brief definition of a food desert in the original post. Here’s the whole thing:
The HFFI working group defines a food desert as a low-income census tract where a substantial number or share of residents has low access to a supermarket or large grocery store:
- To qualify as a “low-income community,” a census tract must have either: 1) a poverty rate of 20 percent or higher, OR 2) a median family income at or below 80 percent of the area’s median family income;
- To qualify as a “low-access community,” at least 500 people and/or at least 33 percent of the census tract’s population must reside more than one mile from a supermarket or large grocery store (for rural census tracts, the distance is more than 10 miles).
Maybe our commenters would care to comment on whether those criteria fit them. Or maybe they’d like to take it up directly with Vince Breneman (Breneman@ers.usda.gov) or Michele Ver Ploeg (sverploeg@ers.usda.gov) at the USDA, and let us know how they get on.