A food desert is a geographic area, typically an urban neighborhood or isolated rural community, where residents have limited practical access to affordable, nutritious food, most often because no full-service grocery store or fresh-food market operates within a reasonable distance and residents lack the transportation to reach one. The term is used mainly in the public-health and food-policy literature of wealthier countries and is debated for how well distance to a store actually predicts a household's real diet and nutrition.
Facts
Origin YearA report by Cummins and Macintyre credits an unnamed resident of public housing in western Scotland with coining the phrase in the early 1990s; 1995 is the first documented official use. Classification
Concept ClassFood Security, Land and Rural Livelihoods 1 Connections
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Sources
1. Food Desert (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia FoundationHistory section, first paragraph
The phrase was first officially used in a 1995 document from a policy working group on the Low Income Project Team of the UK's Nutrition Task Force.
lead description (concept-class)
A food desert is a geographic area, typically an urban neighborhood or isolated rural community, where residents have limited practical access to affordable, nutritious food, most often because no full-service grocery store or fresh-food market operates within a reasonable distance and residents lack the transportation to reach one.
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