Beyond the Supermarket Solution: Linking Food Deserts, Neighborhood Context, and Everyday Mobility

Jerry Shannon

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2016, vol. 106, issue 1, 186-202

Abstract: Most research on urban food deserts has employed spatial measures of accessibility, recording distances to various food stores from place of residence. Despite the popularity of this approach, empirical support for its prediction of dietary and health outcomes has been inconsistent. One reason might be the ways in which food deserts frame food access as fundamentally an issue of food supply. This article suggests a complementary approach that examines how store characteristics, neighborhood context, and individual mobility interact to shape food provisioning practices. I recruited thirty-eight participants living in two low-income neighborhoods of Minneapolis, Minnesota, tracking their daily mobility and the food sources they used over a five-day study period. Follow-up interviews gathered more information on the food stores used by participants. Project results show that participants were highly mobile in their food shopping, visiting 153 different locations on 217 different shopping trips at an average distance of 3.4 km from home. Reported store quality was closely tied to neighborhoods' economic and racial composition, and in several cases, food purchasing and consumption occurred en route to other destinations. Future research on urban food access could benefit by studying how food access is intertwined with broader livability issues such as housing and transportation.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00045608.2015.1095059 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:raagxx:v:106:y:2016:i:1:p:186-202

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/raag21

DOI: 10.1080/00045608.2015.1095059

Access Statistics for this article

Annals of the American Association of Geographers is currently edited by Jennifer Cassidento

More articles in Annals of the American Association of Geographers from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().