Chicago’s food desert is a cause of concern
August 9, 2010
Chicago is a town celebrated for its food. In many northern parts of this city, it is impossible for a person to make his or her way from an apartment door to a train stop without running into a handful of new-fangled restaurants and at least one grocery store. An article in this morning’s Red Eye Magazine also reminds many Chicagoans that despite the diversity and abundance of food the Northside has to offer, more than 600,000 Southside residents live in a “food desert.”
A food desert is any location where access to fresh and healthy food is limited. This could mean a multitude of things, including the physical distance to a grocery store, the financial ability a neighborhood has to purchase these goods, and even the amount of food knowledge an area has about what constitutes as a nutritious food. A 2006 study run by the Mari Gallagher Research and Consulting Group established an area in Chicago of more than 113,000,000 square meters where this was indeed the case.
Here in Chicago, nearly all of the food deserts reside on the Southside, an area that is predominantly less affluent than its Northside counterpart. This is a part of town strewn with convenience stores and fast-food restaurants, where residents without cars must rely on local transit to get them to the nearest grocery store. It’s not easy to carry home groceries during humid summers or cold winters from a store that is miles away, at least not as easy as grabbing a processed cheaper alternative from a local gas station or fast food drive-through.
Food deserts highlight another cause for concern as many of these areas’ residents suffer from obesity, heart disease, and other health-related maladies attributed to poor nutrition.
Many efforts are being made in Chicago to combat the presence of food deserts, including tax breaks for grocers and food stamp acceptance at farmers markets. Mobile grocers have also started delivering fresh fruits, vegetables and meat to residents in these areas. On a national level, Feeding America noted in February blog post that First Lady Michelle Obama had started the “Let’s Move” campaign to in part draw attention to the lack of nutrition plaguing America’s food deserts. Time will tell whether these tactics will decrease the size of food deserts in Chicago – Mari Gallagher Research and Consulting Group should have the results of a new study available in the next few months.
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