Giving the Poor Easy Access to Healthy Food Doesn’t Mean They’ll Buy It [View all]

[brooklynite]

The New York Times:

In 2010, the Morrisania section of the Bronx was what is commonly called a food desert: The low-income neighborhood in New York’s least-healthy county had no nearby grocery store, and few places where its residents could easily buy fresh food.

That’s why it was the target of a city tax incentive program designed to bring healthy food into underserved neighborhoods. In 2011, a 17,000-square-foot supermarket opened, aided by city money that paid some 40 percent of the costs of its construction. The neighborhood welcomed the addition, and perceived access to healthy food improved. But the diets of the neighborhood’s residents did not.

This verdict comes from a study that compared shopping behavior in Morrisania with a neighborhood a mile away with similar demographic characteristics. “There were not a lot of things that really changed,” said Brian Elbel, an author and an associate professor of medicine at New York University. “Consumption didn’t really change. Purchasing didn’t really change.”

...snip...

Another study, published this week as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, looked across the country and found that no more than a tenth of the variation in the food people bought could be explained by the availability of a nearby grocery store. The education level of the shoppers, for example, was far more predictive. “If you were going to put all Americans in the same retail environment, you’d end up only dealing with 10 percent of this disparity between college-educated and high-school-educated households,” said Jessie Handbury, an assistant professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and an author of the paper.