Last week, I examined how obesity among low-income households cannot be explained by simply claiming that low-income people don’t have access to healthy food. It is claimed that supermarkets and other places that sell food are too far away from low-income neighborhoods for households to access them. It is assumed that low-income people will eat fast food instead. This is known as the “food desert” concept in which some places are devoid of food choices.
In that article I quoted sources which concluded that there is not actually compelling evidence that low-income neighborhoods have fewer grocery stores than other neighborhoods.
Now, it appears that the USDA (as of May 2016) has recently caught up with a multitude of other sources and found that “the effect of food store access on dietary quality may be limited” and in many cases, is “negligible.” When the USDA report says “limited” they mean very limited. The study concluded that when food choices are less constrained (i.e., when low-income shoppers experience an increase in choices for food stores) “low-access consumers purchased 0.42 percent more fruits, 0.55 percent more vegetables, 0.61 percent more low-fat milk products, and 0.33 percent less nondiet drinks.”
The study did find, not surprisingly, that people will travel further to stores they believe to offer lower-prices. But, this further travel did not lead to significantly improved dietary habits. Indeed, two recent studies showed that putting a new grocery store in the neighborhood did nothing to improve diets:
This post was published at Ludwig von Mises Institute on June 14, 2016.
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