Food Desert Study Shows Troubling Conclusion

Food Desert Study Shows Troubling Conclusion

By Deborah Bayliss

A recently published study found that low income residents who live in food deserts make unhealthy food choices even when they travel further to shop outside their neighborhoods.

According to the study, “The Geography of Poverty and Nutrition: Food Deserts and Food Choices Across the United States,” conducted by Jean-Pierre Dubé, a professor with the University of Chicago Booth School of

Business, New York University’s Hung Allcott and Stanford University’s Rebecca Diamond, exposing low-income households to the same products and prices available to high-income households reduces nutritional inequality by only 9 percent while the remaining 91 percent of the nutrition gap is driven by shoppers’ preference.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture defines food deserts as parts of the country void of fresh fruit, vegetables, and other healthful whole foods, usually impoverished areas.

When asked why he conducted the study and what purpose it would serve, Dubé said that no one commissioned the study, but it’s something he’s been interested in for years.

“One of the conclusions in our study is that opening a supermarket in a food desert has very little impact on the nutritional composition of households’ shopping baskets,” Dube said. “People in food deserts shop in

supermarkets almost as frequently as people living in higher income neighborhoods; they just travel longer distances to stores.”

High-income households making more than $70,000 a year are willing to pay almost double for the daily recommended quantity of vegetables and nearly three times more for daily recommended quantity of fruit, the

researchers estimate. However, low-income households making less than $25,000 a year are willing to pay more for sugar and saturated fats.

Education and knowledge of nutrition are strongly associated with preference differences across income groups.

“My paper is about nutritional inequality,” Dubé said. He added a new study is needed to discern whether education and knowledge are cause for the difference in healthy eating. “I don’t know if I’ll take that on, not sure,”he said.

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