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Comment by Qworg | Hacker News Reader

According to the USDA, about 6.2% (19M) Americans have limited/no access to a grocery store.

https://www.aecf.org/blog/exploring-americas-food-deserts covers the research (and links to the paper).

I'm sorry, but I've read that article twice and I'm still not sure what they're actually saying.

Are we talking about neighbourhoods not having a store selling fresh fruit and vegetables, or not having a grocery store of any kind?

It's pretty clever - they use SNAP benefits as a proxy (you can buy what they call staples; fruits/veggies, bread, meat & fish, milk, etc but no hot or prepared food: https://fns-prod.azureedge.us/sites/default/files/snap/SNAP-...) but they map to all of the stores who accept SNAP and combine that with a map of supermarkets from a Nielson directory. They then map the number of census tracts and compare against that map -- the 6.2% figure is the "1 and 10" method which counts households >1 mile from a store in an urban area and >10 miles in a rural one.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/82101/eib-165....

Being more than 10 miles from a real market of some sort in an actual rural area seems a pretty low bar. Population density is certainly lower but 10 miles isn't very far if you need to drive to the next town over.

It's not just 10 miles, it's 10 miles and being a low income tract which they define as average household income below 80% of state median or >20% households in the tract being below the poverty line. So trying to measure where the poorest areas have the most limited access.

I'm guessing the income criteria is satisfied in a lot of rural areas however.

How are you defining rural? The people who live in small towns in farm country, or the farmers living on their farm. In general farmers are not poor, but the people who live in the towns around them often are. It takes a lot of money to run a farm, you have to be great at business as you will have several years in a row where you lose $100,000 - over the long term though things work out to making a lot of money on farms.

Yeah, you're not wrong, here's the 2010 map;

https://assets.aecf.org/m/blogimg/blog-exploringamericasfood...

That map looks to me as if it's much more about poorer rural areas that are more than 10 miles from a grocery store than inner cities.

It's as misleading in that way as the big silly maps they show around election time -- since we care about the number of people, not the number of acres.

There are 19 million people in the shaded areas. If we bump up the criteria to 1 mile urban / 20 miles rural, it's still over 17 million people, so clearly a lot of the people at discussion are in urban areas. Even so, it looks like another half million people are over 20 miles from a store who don't have access to a vehicle. Not great!

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