What Do We Need to Fix Food Insecurity in America
Contents
- The limitations of traditional food access assay
- The reality of nutrient insecurity in America
- Building a 21st century food security program
- Conclusion
The COVID-xix pandemic shined a spotlight on the shortcomings inside the country's social safety net— specially in the case of food security. The drastic rise in unemployment, lost admission to school meals, and volatile food supply chains all contributed to food insecurity rates doubling among all households from Feb 2020 to May 2020. Even worse, food insecurity among households with children tripled in the same menstruation.
While many Americans became aware of the country's nutrient insecurity issues in the by year, the phenomenon was not new. Fifty-fifty in 2019—before the pandemic and afterwards years of steadily declining food insecurity rates—10.v% of U.S. households still faced food insecurity. This rate was highest among households with incomes below the poverty line (34.9%) and single-mother households (28.7%). Latino or Hispanic and Black households experienced nutrient insecurity rates of 15.6% and 19.one%, respectively—unduly higher than white households (7.9%).
Why, even outside of economic crunch, do over one in 10 families notwithstanding face food insecurity?
For decades, academics, advocates, and policymakers pointed to unequal geographic access to food as the problem. This geographic focus eventually gave rising to the concept of the "nutrient desert"—a shorthand description for how a lack of fresh food retailers tin can predispose neighborhood residents to food insecurity. The concept resonated with the media and practitioners, giving rise to new indices and a push to bring fresh food directly to underserved neighborhoods.
However, there are structural issues with the food desert concept. For one, most people shop across their neighborhood for food. Food deserts also don't consider digital commitment services, which reduce the relative importance of ane's physical location. But maybe more importantly, the food desert narrative doesn't address the primary factor driving food insecurity: financial insecurity.
With nutrient insecurity once again top of heed, it's an ideal time to update the concept of geographic food admission for today'south digital economy and consider policies that volition marry the need to increase people's ownership ability with their ability to get the food they need.
The limitations of traditional food access analysis
Since the 1990s, most food access literature has been framed around the pop term "nutrient desert," defined in the 2008 Farm Bill every bit an "area in the United States with limited access to affordable and nutritious food, particularly such an surface area composed of predominantly lower-income neighborhoods and communities."
While scholars accept proposed myriad ways of identifying these areas, a representative case is the U.South. Department of Agriculture'southward (USDA) Nutrient Access Research Atlas, formerly the Food Desert Locator. This interactive tool highlights census tracts beneath certain income, supermarket proximity, and vehicle access thresholds. Others take attempted to refine food admission metrics by incorporating transit, bicycle, and walking thresholds; measuring travel time, toll distance, or network (street) distance rather than traditional Euclidian distance; and adding temporal data such every bit transit and store schedules or more than nuanced socioeconomic indicators.
Such research has drawn critical links between neighborhood-level food admission, legacies of redlining and segregation, and the function of structural racism in the congenital surroundings and food system. Yet, as noted in more recent literature, the deficit-focused nutrient desert narrative is still hindered by technical limitations and fake assumptions about how people navigate the modernistic nutrient surround.
Underlying nigh all nutrient access mapping is the supposition that individuals prefer to shop at the food retailer closest to their home. But research into food shopping behavior has shown that assumption to be false. A 2015 analysis of National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey information plant that the average American household does not store for food at the retailer closest their abode, instead bypassing information technology for a preferred store further abroad. Another study ended that the boilerplate distance to shoppers' preferred supermarket was greater than the distance to the closest supermarket—both for shoppers with and without vehicles. A 2009 study past the USDA Economic Research Service also constitute enormous diversity in nutrient shopping behavior, noting those living in low-income, low-access areas were more likely to shop for food well-nigh their workplace than their home. This access strategy—bundling multiple errands into a unmarried circuit, or "trip chaining"—is overlooked past traditional food admission mapping and analysis.
Traditional nutrient admission mapping also tends to overlook community-driven food security strategies. Many communities increase healthy food admission through pocket-size grocers, community and school gardens, farmers' markets, and other methods ignored in the classification of food deserts. More detailed investigations—such as a 2007 study of the San Francisco Bay Expanse and a 2015 study of Detroit—find that communities without supermarkets often have these kinds of alternative healthy food procurement networks.
Technical limitations can also misconstrue traditional food access mapping. Food desert analyses tend to strictly define a community'due south socioeconomic and nutrient establishment conditions by what's within the formal borders, whether it be a demography tract, municipality, or county. Even so, people's perception of their neighborhood and nutrient environment don't fit perfectly within externally drawn lines. To put information technology simply, nobody considers whether they are crossing a purlieus while traveling to the grocery store. Exacerbating the consequence is that nutrient retailers tend to choose locations directly adjacent to decorated and hands attainable roads, which frequently run forth census tract and other geographic boundaries; thus, residents in a tract with no grocery store may really alive directly across the street from 1. While researchers can slow the furnishings of this technical limitation—formally termed the "border effect"—past constructing buffers and catchments around areas of study, the most widely shared nutrient access maps and narratives rely on more bones (and less accurate) methods.
The style nosotros choose to navigate the built environment is constantly irresolute, merely food admission analysis is not keeping upwards. The share of national retail sales conducted through east-commerce has been steadily increasing over the past 20 years, and that includes buying food. A Pew Enquiry Centre survey found that during the COVID-xix pandemic, nearly i-3rd (32%) of U.S. adults ordered nutrient online or through an app from a local restaurant, and 21% ordered groceries online or through an app from a local store. The SNAP Online Purchasing Pilot also recently expanded to 48 states, growing aslope the online grocery manufacture. Despite the potential for online food shopping to increase food access, traditional nutrient access maps omit this selection.
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The reality of food insecurity in America
The food desert narrative got America talking virtually the of import connexion between geography and the food system. The concept besides raised awareness near how systemic racism impacts access, including the persistent furnishings of redlining (including supermarket redlining) on communities across the country. While such communities use a diverseness of resilient and adaptive food security strategies, concrete and geographic food access barriers tin have a prohibitive event on food security for some individuals, especially the elderly and those with disabilities.
Only food deserts are a red herring in terms of ending food insecurity in the United states of america. Every bit the USDA stated frankly in a 2014 study of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Plan (SNAP) participants: "Geographic access to food was generally not associated with the percentage of households that were food insecure."
Even with perfect, universal access to food retailers, millions of Americans would non be able to afford plenty food, or enough of the kinds of nutrient, to meet their household's needs. The food desert narrative overlooks the basic relationship betwixt supply and need; increasing the supply of food will but increase consumption if in that location is enough demand to come across information technology. In the example of nutrient, need is suppressed among lower-income households. Depression-income households spend less than a third of what high-income households spend on food each year, yet nutrient expenditures business relationship for a disproportionate share (36%) of their dispensable income. This forces families to make impossible decisions between food and medicine, heating and cooling, housing, and education.
The lack of available income only serves to limit the benefits of supply-oriented solutions. For example, the Healthy Nutrient Financing Initiative is a public-private partnership to incentivize grocers to locate in depression-access areas, increasing convenience of admission and bringing more jobs to these communities. Merely adding some other grocer to a designated food desert will not address limited income, only reduce travel times.
Instead, upstream antipoverty and social safety net policies address limitations in demand, empowering people to access and purchase the food they demand in the means that work all-time for them. SNAP supports low-income households through a monthly benefit based on income and household size. This highly constructive programme directly increases household buying power, leading to increased food spending and food security. Increased SNAP benefits, such as the implementation of Pandemic EBT over the past year, have a strong positive impact on food security. More broadly, increasing incomes and financial security increases food security.
These programs are but insufficient when they are too small; households often run out of SNAP benefits by the end of the month. Barriers such as work requirements, the chilling effects of the Trump administration's public charge immigration rule (at present rescinded), and time-intensive awarding processes mean that not all nutrient insecure households are able to take advantage of the program.
Data from the past year only confirms the power of increased, flexible income to meet household needs. Timely information from the Census Bureau's Household Pulse Survey demonstrates the continued demand for—and impact of—the first wave of Child Tax Credit (CTC) payments for American households. Households that spent their offset CTC payment tended to spend it on food, and nutrient insufficiency (comparable to very depression food security) rates among respondents dropped iii% immediately after the outset wave of CTC payments was dispersed.
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Building a 21st century nutrient security plan
Even with prevailing challenges to electric current food desert practices, geography is still an important component of food insecurity. A customs can be healthier if there are more than private and civic food distributors within a reasonable travel altitude and if community members can afford to patronize them. Neighborhood residents can benefit from emerging delivery services if they're inside delivery service areas and broadband is available and affordable. Offer more than affordable transportation services, particularly for low-income households, tin facilitate trips to people'southward preferred food establishments.
Equally federal, land, and local practitioners pursue more impactful nutrient insecurity policies, the following framework tin can address some of the remaining structural barriers to food security.
Measurement
Meaning measurement gaps are nevertheless holding back our understanding of food geographies in the U.Southward. Notably, the nearly decade-old 2012 Food Conquering and Buy Survey is the only nationally representative dataset to ever track how households acquire (purchase or otherwise) nutrient over the form of a calendar week. Data from this and smaller local surveys underly much of the research calling into question mutual nutrient desert assumptions. A second moving ridge of the Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey is currently underway and should better reflect the modern food environment, although other information gaps even so need to be addressed.
Measuring and mapping resilient community food access assets—rather than just "naming and shaming" communities with depression supermarket access—tin can support more than diverse nutrient admission strategies. Academics and community organizations have explored the use of participatory mapping techniques to empower communities to share their local cognition of food landscapes. In one written report, researchers employed "critical cartography, counter-mapping, customs asset mapping, participatory geographic information systems, and radical cartography" to map the Providence, R.I. food environment. The resulting map shows a dynamic "food topography" including both the "valleys" and "peaks" of local food access—a community-driven narrative absent from other maps. Another report found that participatory mapping techniques not only revealed insights overlooked by traditional public health analyses, merely that the mapping process itself informed and supported local policy advocacy efforts.
While participatory mapping can be more time- and resource-intensive than traditional food access analyses, the benefits are substantial and can exist scaled using emerging best practices, including the International Fund for Agricultural Development's "Skilful practices in participatory mapping." The USDA should utilize pilots conducted with local partners to test which participatory mapping practices could calibration to all communities.
Data on broadband and food delivery zones as well constitute a significant measurement gap. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is currently implementing the 2020 Broadband DATA Deed to provide more than authentic and complete information on network availability across the country, but most localities do not yet have granular data on the prices, speeds, availability, and barriers to broadband adoption in their customs.
And while the SNAP Online Purchasing Pilot (OPP) is growing alongside the increment in online food ordering beyond the economy, our understanding of the online delivery nutrient landscape is remarkably limited. The Economic Research Service estimated that past June 2020, over xc% of SNAP participants lived in states where the SNAP OPP was available, and that share can only take increased as the 39 participating states grew to 48 by March 2021. Nonetheless commitment zones are adamant at an establishment level, and none of the major retailers included in the pilot have publicly bachelor commitment zone data. Early in the pilot, researchers manually searched retailer websites for delivery availability by Cipher code for eight states, only this method is unsustainable because the rapidly growing and irresolute grocery delivery environment.
As online ordering becomes an increasingly common food access strategy, broadband and delivery zone information will exist an of import factor in agreement the geography of online food admission. The FCC could work with the USDA to test new digital delivery pilots, such as merging eRate practices (broadband programs targeting schools and libraries) and the new Emergency Broadband Do good (broadband discounts for income-qualifying households) to focus on nutrient insecure households with children.
Modernization
To keep pace with the evolving food surroundings, nutritional assistance policy needs a refresh. The growth of the SNAP OPP shows the potential of modern, flexible approaches that support depression-income households in a variety of food shopping strategies. Yet the program is withal limited to a subset of the many retailers and food types bachelor to American consumers through straight and third-party online purchasing systems. Online purchasing is a new and exciting direction for nutritional assistance policy in the U.S., but the system is likewise overdue for more than fundamental modernization.
For case, past research has constitute a meaning link between local food prices and food insecurity rates amidst SNAP participants. In areas with higher nutrient prices and higher costs of living, low-income individuals are more than likely to exist forced into incommunicable choices between essentials like nutrient, medicine, housing, and utilities. However, SNAP benefits are calculated using income and household size formulas; benefits are not adjusted for regional price of living and food price.
A quick glance at the Feeding America's Map the Repast Gap tool reveals troubling disparities in how far SNAP budgets can stretch. In Willacy County, Texas, for example, the average meal cost is $2.24; only in Washington, D.C. the average repast costs $iv.35.
Currently, maximum SNAP benefits are based on the nationally averaged cost of the Thrifty Food Plan, a set of market baskets originally created in 1961 that include common and affordable groceries. The plan recently received a much-needed update to account for changing nutrient prices, nutritional guidance, and food preferences, resulting in a historic increment in SNAP benefit levels. Despite these updates, the cost of the Thrifty Nutrient Plan is even so required by police to remain equal across the face-to-face 48 states. With the notable exceptions of Alaska, Hawaii, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, the utilise of a single average price to determine SNAP benefits across the country ignores dramatic food cost variation households confront, and leaves households in high-cost areas with significantly less back up in the face of food insecurity. The Thrifty Food Plan also fails to account for other geographically varying costs associated with acquiring food, such every bit transportation or delivery fees. The process for determining SNAP benefit levels is in urgent need of modernization to better reflect the state'southward economic, dietary, and geographic diversity.
In addition to modernizing our land's central nutritional assistance programs, policymakers should scale support for successful community-driven nutrient security strategies to promote non just nutrient security, simply food justice. Programs such as the Senior Farmers' Market Diet Plan increase buying ability amidst low-income elders and support resilient local food systems and healthy food access in tandem. Other programs, including Double Upwardly Food Bucks and the Connecticut Fresh Match Program, multiply SNAP'due south impact at farmers' markets, again simultaneously supporting demand and local supply of healthy foods.
These programs accost nutrient security by increasing admission, supply, and buying power—simply they too refocus local food narratives on resilience and community power. Information gathered during participatory community food mapping can be used to scale these community-driven nutrient security strategies and test new ones.
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Conclusion
Food insecurity is a persistent trouble in our country, and structural inequalities increase its prevalence in certain populations and geographies. Singling out neighborhoods without grocery stores as "nutrient deserts" has failed to produce a successful solution. Merely lessons tin exist fatigued from decades of food access analysis to inform new methods to better measure the geography of nutrient insecurity in the United States, and modernize our state'south nutritional aid policies.
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Source: https://www.brookings.edu/research/beyond-food-deserts-america-needs-a-new-approach-to-mapping-food-insecurity/
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