Overcoming Food Deserts in Your Community

Overcoming Food Deserts in Your Community
Author: Cathy Harris
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Total Pages: 124
Release: 2017-06-16
Genre:
ISBN: 9781545408681

This book not only lays out several action plans to gain access to good, clean, organic foods, but it will help all family members gain access to job and business opportunities, while they eliminate food deserts in their communities. Face it we will never get back to totally living off the land like our ancestors did, but families must come together today for the sake of future generations. We need to seriously look at solutions because this is the first generation that will not outlive their parents. However, there are economically empowered ways we can feed, clothe and shelter our own families. Food is not always only about the most expedient way to suppress hunger. Many community organizations have long understood this and believe that food access and quality is tied to both racial and economic justice. Over the past few years we have heard quite a bit about food deserts, or high poverty areas where a lack of grocery stores makes it difficult for residents to purchase fresh food. However, we know far less about the food realities of people who live near stores where fresh food is sold, but because of their limited incomes, they simply cannot afford it. Affordable healthy food is an issue of both equity and justice that disproportionally affects working-class and poor people of color in cities and rural areas. Reducing the economic necessity for some to rely so heavily on food that is unhealthy, is not only a tool for fighting health concerns, there are other benefits too. Time and time again it shows when many schools team up with healthy venues and swap out soda machines and offer instead -- juices, water and low-sugar energy drinks and also prepared meals entirely free of additives and chemicals, but with abundant amounts of fresh fruit, vegetables and whole-grain breads, this have led to reduced behavioral problems, higher grades, lower expulsion rates, decreases in the use of ADD prescription drugs, and teachers are reporting that the students were more attentive and could concentrate for longer periods of time. Gaining access to clean, sustainability, grown food is a basic human right so we need venues to offer education to inspire family members to live healthy lives, by offering hands-on education in urban farming, sustainability, and nutrition and this is what this book will do.

The Public Health Effects of Food Deserts

The Public Health Effects of Food Deserts
Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 114
Release: 2009-07-02
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0309137284

In the United States, people living in low-income neighborhoods frequently do not have access to affordable healthy food venues, such as supermarkets. Instead, those living in "food deserts" must rely on convenience stores and small neighborhood stores that offer few, if any, healthy food choices, such as fruits and vegetables. The Institute of Medicine (IOM) and National Research Council (NRC) convened a two-day workshop on January 26-27, 2009, to provide input into a Congressionally-mandated food deserts study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service. The workshop, summarized in this volume, provided a forum in which to discuss the public health effects of food deserts.

Access to Affordable and Nutritious Food: Measuring and Understanding Food Deserts and Their Consequences

Access to Affordable and Nutritious Food: Measuring and Understanding Food Deserts and Their Consequences
Author: Michele Ver Ploeg
Publisher: DIANE Publishing
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2010-02
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 1437921345

The Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008 directed the U.S. Dept. of Agr. to conduct a 1-year study to assess the extent of areas with limited access to affordable and nutritious food, identify characteristics and causes of such areas, consider how limited access affects local populations, and outline recommend. to address the problem. This report presents the findings of the study, which include results from two conferences of national and internat. authorities on food deserts and a set of research studies. It also includes reviews of existing literature, a national-level assessment of access to large grocery stores and supermarkets, analysis of the economic and public health effects of limited access, and a discussion of existing policy interventions. Illus.

People of Color and Food Deserts in Low-Income Communities

People of Color and Food Deserts in Low-Income Communities
Author: Roberto Alvarenga
Publisher:
Total Pages: 61
Release: 2019
Genre: Dissertations, Academic
ISBN: 9781085650786

This master's project will focus on the critical need for creating a counseling program for low-income individuals who live in a food desert; food deserts can determine their accessibility to nutritional foods, the prices of the food, and the quality of the food. The purpose of the proposed counseling program is to provide support for people of low-socioeconomic means, who are living in a food desert, to overcome the challenges of an unhealthy lifestyle and provide resources and access to more food choices, better nutrition and quality of life. The integrated counseling program is a psychoeducational support group for residents of Richmond, California designed to share knowledge and tools, and develop the awareness and skills needed to make healthier food choices and live more fulfilling lives.

Food Deserts and Access to Food in the United States

Food Deserts and Access to Food in the United States
Author: Juste Roche
Publisher: Nova Science Publishers
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013
Genre: Food security
ISBN: 9781624178795

The USDA's Economic Research Service previously identified over 6,500 food desert tracts in the United States based on the 2000 Census and 2006 data on locations of supermarkets, super-centres, and large grocery stores. This book examines the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of these tracts to see how they differ from other census tracts and the extent to which these differences influence food desert status. Relative to all other census tracts, food desert tracts tend to have smaller populations, higher rates of abandoned or vacant homes, and residents who have lower levels of education, lower incomes, and higher unemployment. Efforts to encourage Americans to improve their diets and to eat more nutritious foods presume that a wide variety of these foods are accessible to everyone. But for some Americans and in some communities, access to healthy foods may be limited.

Food Deserts in Chicago

Food Deserts in Chicago
Author: United State Commission on Civil Rights
Publisher:
Total Pages: 44
Release: 2016-04-28
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 9781365078712

The Illinois Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights submits this report, "Food Deserts in Chicago," as part of its responsibility to examine and report on civil rights issues in Illinois under the jurisdiction of the Commission. The Committee has been monitoring the issue of health disparities in Chicago for several years and this report is the culmination of research, a briefing, numerous working group sessions, and, finally, a fact finding meeting on the issue in August 2010. The report was approved by a vote of 18 to 1. At the start of this project, it did not take long to realize that many Chicago neighborhoods are considered food deserts because of the difficulty residents of these areas have in accessing fresh, nutritious foods, in particular fruits and vegetables. Of note to this Committee is the fact that these food desert neighborhoods are almost exclusively in African American neighborhoods.

Food Deserts, Food Insecurity, and the Community Food Movement

Food Deserts, Food Insecurity, and the Community Food Movement
Author: Douglas A. Monroe
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2022
Genre:
ISBN:

This dissertation incorporates data and analysis from three distinct but related research projects that took place in Tallahassee Florida between 2010 and 2015, with the goal of placing food insecurity in sociocultural context. The first project used focus groups to explore how people think and feel about their neighborhood food environments, and how they go about obtaining, preparing, and consuming food. The second used Food Frequency data to examine similarities and differences in consumption behaviors between people who experience food insecurity and those who do not. The third project used social network analysis to investigate the compositional and structural features of a community-based organization that included in its mission goals of improving neighborhood food environments and eliminating food insecurity. Taken together, the results of these three projects demonstrate complex and multi-dimensional relationships that people have with food, including how they interact with each other and their environments, as well as how they organize to address challenges to food access and food security in their communities.

The Grand Food Bargain

The Grand Food Bargain
Author: Kevin D. Walker
Publisher: Island Press
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2019-03-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1610919475

When it comes to food, Americans seem to have a pretty great deal. Our grocery stores are overflowing with countless varieties of convenient products. But like most bargains that are too good to be true, the modern food system relies on an illusion. It depends on endless abundance, but the planet has its limits. So too does a healthcare system that must absorb rising rates of diabetes and obesity. So too do the workers who must labor harder and faster for less pay. Through beautifully-told stories from around the world, Kevin Walker reveals the unintended consequences of our myopic focus on quantity over quality. A trip to a Costa Rica plantation shows how the Cavendish banana became the most common fruit in the world and also one of the most vulnerable to disease. Walker’s early career in agribusiness taught him how pressure to sell more and more fertilizer obscured what that growth did to waterways. His family farm illustrates how an unquestioning belief in “free markets” undercut opportunity in his hometown. By the end of the journey, we not only understand how the drive to produce ever more food became hardwired into the American psyche, but why shifting our mindset is essential. It starts, Walker argues, with remembering that what we eat affects the wider world. If each of us decides that bigger isn’t always better, we can renegotiate the grand food bargain, one individual decision at a time.

More Than Just Food

More Than Just Food
Author: Garrett Broad
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2016-02-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520962567

The industrial food system has created a crisis in the United States that is characterized by abundant food for privileged citizens and “food deserts” for the historically marginalized. In response, food justice activists based in low-income communities of color have developed community-based solutions, arguing that activities like urban agriculture, nutrition education, and food-related social enterprises can drive systemic social change. Focusing on the work of several food justice groups—including Community Services Unlimited, a South Los Angeles organization founded as the nonprofit arm of the Southern California Black Panther Party—More Than Just Food explores the possibilities and limitations of the community-based approach, offering a networked examination of the food justice movement in the age of the nonprofit industrial complex.

The Death Of Food Deserts

The Death Of Food Deserts
Author: Taurian J Wolfe-Deveaux
Publisher:
Total Pages: 70
Release: 2019-05-19
Genre:
ISBN: 9781098637729

A 30 day teaching handbook on transforming food deserts through low cost individual and community initiatives