WATSONVILLE, Calif. -- 10% of the United States is now a desert – a food desert, that is.
The United States Department of Agriculture compiled census data to determine that 13.5 million people in the United States live in food deserts, which are defined as low-income areas where "a substantial number or share of residents has low access to a supermarket or large grocery store."
A tract qualifies as "low access" if at least 500 people, or a third of the population, live more than a mile from a supermarket. For rural areas, the distance is more than 10 miles.
The Central Coast boasts a billion-dollar agriculture industry, but there are food deserts here. The USDA identified several in Santa Cruz, Capitola, Watsonville, Marina and extreme southern Monterey County. In Watsonville, almost 5,000 low-income families have poor access to healthy and affordable food, and a staggering 78.5% of them are children.
Second Havest Food Bank of Santa Cruz County officials said the map accurately portrays where they are seeing the most need.
"It really does overlap with our numbers," said Danny Keith, Chief Development Officer at Second Harvest. "It comes really close to what Second Harvest captures on a weekly, daily basis of the people in the community that we help service."
This spring, the USDA unveiled a "Food Desert Locator" online, with interactive maps, statistics and resources. Keith said it could help shine a light on the need across the country, which dovetails with Second Harvest's mission of community education.
"This is a great tool to be able to identify the areas in the community where maybe people don't understand why there are food deserts and why people don't have access to healthy food," Keith added. "It's a huge reason to support Second Harvest Food Bank because we've been identifying those areas for quite some time."
The food desert measuring tool has its critics. Some suggest that it fails to take into account farmers' markets or other healthy retailers that aren't supermarkets. For example, a New Leaf Community Market, a natural food store specializing in local and organic products, sits about a block away from the food desert in Capitola.
A recent article in The Economist seems to diagnose the greater issue: "The unpalatable truth seems to be that some Americans simply do not care to eat a balanced diet, while others, increasingly, cannot afford to."
The article adds, "Over the last four years, the price of the healthiest foods has increased at around twice the rate of energy-dense junk food. That is the whole problem, in an organic nutshell."
Regardless of how it's measured, though, the problem still remains – childhood obesity rates have increased threefold since the 1980's, and there is still a great need for healthy, affordable food in our communities.
Food Desert Locator: http://www.ers.usda.gov/data/fooddesert/index.htm
