Abstract
Deserts in New Orleans? Illustrations of Urban Food Access and Implications for Policy
Donald Rose, J. Nicholas Bodor, Chris M. Swalm, Janet C. Rice, Thomas A. Farley, and Paul L. Hutchinson, Tulane University
Description
Food access among low-income populations has long been a concern in the United States.
Recent research on the geographic dimensions of access has focused on economically deprived
areas with little retail food activity, referred to as 'food deserts.' We illustrate concepts of urban
food access in this descriptive case study from post-Katrina New Orleans. We augment
conventional definitions of food deserts by considering a variety of retail food outlets from a
complete mapping of the city and by incorporating data on in-store contents on availability and
shelf space of fruits and vegetables from a stratified sample of outlets. We show that the
existence of food deserts depends on the definitions employed; commonly-used constructs in the
food desert literature result in prevalence rates for New Orleans of anywhere from 17% to 87%
of the city's 175 census tracts. Ambiguities inherent in the construct do not diminish the fact that
long travel distances to procure food do increase at-home food costs and that contextual effects
on individual health and community development are often associated with areas of
impoverished food resources. Describing poor geographic access can improve assessments of
household resource inadequacy; we illustrate how transport costs can be used to inform federal
food assistance policy. We also show how identifying areas of need can be used at the local
level to prioritize retail food projects. Given the current problems of over-nutrition, the paper
concludes by suggesting a more useful geographic metaphor would be “food swamps,” areas in
which large relative amounts of energy-dense snack foods, inundate healthy food options.
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