What is swamp food?

A food swamp is an area where an abundance of fast food, junk food outlets, convenience stores, and liquor stores outnumbers healthy food options. It's distinct from a food desert, which is a neighborhood with little access to affordable, nutritious food.

What are food mirages?

In a food mirage, grocery stores are plentiful but prices are beyond the means of low-income households, making them functionally equivalent to food deserts in that a long journey to obtain affordable, nutritious food is required in either case.

What does food apartheid mean?

In contrast, the term “food apartheid” is used to highlight the racially discriminatory political structures that past and present impact food access and control. The fight to end “food apartheid” is community driven.

What makes a food desert?

Commonly referred to as “food deserts,” these regions of the country often feature large proportions of households with low incomes, inadequate access to transportation, and a limited number of food retailers providing fresh produce and healthy groceries for affordable prices.

How do food deserts and food swamps make it harder to be healthy?

A lack of healthy options could lead to poor diets and to diet-related conditions such as obesity or diabetes. If low-income households in food deserts can only purchase food at higher prices, they may be more prone to food insecurity—not having enough food for active, healthy living.

Poor neighborhoods at risk to become food swamps

Why are food swamps bad?

A new study by the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at the University of Connecticut found that living in a food swamp is a stronger predictor of obesity than living in a food desert.

How do you stop food swamps?

In the long term, Cooksey Stowers said, solutions include better zoning to limit clusters of fast-food outlets, incentives to build grocery stores and farmers markets in disadvantaged areas, and even requiring convenience stores to stock a certain percentage of healthy food.

What is the difference between a food desert and a food swamp?

In food deserts, interventions aim to increase access to healthy foods, whereas in food swamps, the goal is to reduce the availability of or exposure to less healthy foods.

How many food deserts exist in the United States?

The Locator identifies about 10 percent of the approximately 65,000 census tracts in the United States as food deserts. About 13.5 million people in these census tracts have low access to sources of healthful food.

What is an example of a food desert?

The closure of a grocery store in Macon, Georgia, is just one example of how food deserts are continuing to develop in today's world. According to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation, nearly 2 million Georgia residents, including about 500,000 children, currently live in a food desert.

Why is food desert a bad term?

Using the term desert implies that the lack of healthy and affordable food is somehow naturally occurring and obscures that it is the direct result of racially discriminatory policies and systematic disinvestment in these communities. Building more grocery stores won't necessarily make things better.

What is wrong with food desert?

In food deserts, healthy foods like fruits, vegetables, whole grains, dairy, peas, beans, meat, and fish are often expensive or unobtainable. The lack of access to healthy foods in these communities translates to health disparities and high rates of chronic disease ( 4 , 5, 6 ).

Why is food desert controversial?

Controversy over "food deserts" term

It is not accidental." Herrera says that communities "that lack access to fresh, healthy, affordable food result from structural inequities, deliberate public and private resource allocation decisions that exclude healthy from those communities.

Are food deserts real?

However, recent research questions the concept of food deserts. For more than two decades, much evidence has supported their existence, but current studies suggest people in low-income areas actually live in food swamps, where they're inundated with a wide variety of both healthful and unhealthful foods.

What is a food desert 2021?

Food insecurity occurs when food is either too far away or too expensive to purchase. A food desert is one type of food insecurity. When a person lives in a food desert, this means that a supermarket is more than 1 mile away in an urban area or more than 10 miles away in a rural area.

How do deserts eat healthy?

What is the opposite of a food desert?

The opposite of a food desert is a place where there's so much good, healthy food that much of it winds up wasted. In other words, the opposite of a food desert is much of the rest of America.

What do you do if you live in a food desert?

Is the Bronx a food desert?

Many Bronx communities, including the Moribana neighborhood, are considered “food swamps” – inundated with fast food and limited healthy options. With that in mind, one organization is looking to educate local kids about the importance of identifying quality foods to foster a healthier living.

Can a food desert be a food swamp?

Food deserts are neighborhoods where healthy foods, like fresh fruits and vegetables, are not available in local stores. Food swamps are a corollary: neighborhoods where there is an abundance of food lacking in nutrition. These conditions prevail in neighborhoods occupied primarily by minority households.

Do food deserts cause obesity?

Study results also showed that the individuals who live in food desert are at an elevated risk for obesity. Together, these findings suggest that Americans who either do not have enough to eat or live in areas without access to stores that sell affordable nutritious foods are at greater risk for obesity.

Why do poor neighborhoods have unhealthy food?

A lack of access to healthy food options has been identified as an important driver of disparities in diet quality. Current economic conditions foster a food environment that places the poor at the highest risk for unhealthful diets, obesity, and obesity-related diseases, stress the researchers.

Are swamps unhealthy?

Background. Food swamps are environments saturated with unhealthy foods because of the large numbers of corner stores and fast-food outlets in them (2).

Is it beneficial or negative to have a food swamp in a residential area?

Our results suggest that the presence of a food swamp is a stronger predictor of obesity rates than the absence of full-service grocery stores. We found, even after controlling for food desert effects, food swamps have a positive, statistically significant effect on adult obesity rates.

What is a food desert Canada?

Many Canadians live in “food deserts”: neighbourhoods where residents have little or no access to stores and restaurants that provide healthy. and affordable foods. Geographical constraints will inevitably impact our dietary choices and, ultimately, our likelihood of developing obesity or a chronic disease.