User:Bumblebee024/sandbox

Maps, showing the distribution of food deserts in the United States can be found in Morton and Blanchard's 2007 article.[1]

Despite differences in terminology, most research in the United States supports the hypothesis that on the neighborhood level, there are disparities in the retail food environment.[2]

In the interest of profitability, larger supermarkets have followed this trend and are most prevalent in these white suburban neighborhoods.[3] This also relates to the problem of "food swamps," which are regions that lack healthy and nutritious food choices.

According to a report to Congress prepared by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, assessing the extent of limited access to affordable, nutritious food, approximately 2.4 million households in the United States are more than a mile from a supermarket and lack access to a vehicle.[4]

Although food desert mapping has come a long way there are still a few factors that are not being mapped, such as public transit, community gardens and food banks. This lack of depth in information could be including or even leaving out communities affected by food deserts. Additionally there is a set of factors that may not even be mappable including how different stores welcome different groups of people, and the amount of time that people have to go shopping compared to hour of operation of food sources. Geographers will continue to work on ways to map these factors and create a more accurate picture of the effects of food deserts.[5]

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What I plan to contribute to the "Food Insecurity" and/or "Food desert" articles: I would really like to add/help build a subsection on food swamps and how the prevalence of them ties into race, class, and food insecurity. I am particularly interested in contributing information about how food swamps affect people, food security, and health in a different way than food deserts do. I also want to build a new article with my group, "Food insecurity in the Central Valley" in order to write about how agriculture workers don't always have access to food despite producing it, and how food and health are in jeopardy in Central Valley communities. Some potential sources are:

Minkoff-Zern, Laura-Anne. "Hunger Amidst Plenty: Farmworker Food Insecurity and Coping Strategies in California." Local Environment, vol. 19, no. 2, Feb. 2014, pp. 204-219. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/13549839.2012.729568.

Kaiser, LL, et al. "Food Insecurity and Food Supplies in Latino Households with Young Children." Journal of Nutrition Education & Behavior, vol. 35, no. 3, May/Jun2003, pp. 148-153. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=rzh&AN=106710206&site=eds-live.

Olson, Christine M., et al. "Factors Protecting against and Contributing to Food Insecurity among Rural Families." Family Economics & Nutrition Review, vol. 16, no. 1, Jan. 2004, pp. 12-20. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bth&AN=14397393&site=eds-live.

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Working draft of food swamp addition to "Food Insecurity" article:

Food swamps are regions where sources of unhealthy foods outnumber sources of healthy, fresh foods . It describes areas in which there is not a lack of food, but areas where there are many food options that are nutritionally deficient. These foods are high calorie but not necessarily high quality . Populations who live in food swamps, such as the urban poor, are often unable to obtain fruits, vegetables, and other unprocessed foods. Some commonly seen components of food swamps are corner stores and fast food restaurants (Ortega et el. 2016). Food deserts are typically recognized as regions that do not have healthy foods available, or in some cases, any food at all (KVPR 2014). Food swamps however have lots of unhealthy food as opposed to no food whatsoever (Rose et al., 2009). There is some overlap in that both are forms of food insecurity and both create health problems, but they do so in different ways. According to the USDA Economic Research Service, low food security is defined as “reduced quality, variety, or desirability of diet” with “little or no indication of reduced food intake,” so with food swamps having very little quality and variety of diet, populations living in and around them could be classified as food insecure (USDA ERS 2017). Food security encompasses both the physical availability of food, but also the choices that are or are not available. Many Latino households in particular suffer from food security in the form of limited access to fruits and vegetables (Kaiser et al. 2003).