Lawyer Andy Weisbecker recently posted an opinion piece in Food Safety News in which he discusses the problem of limited access to healthy food and its contribution to the burden of obesity and diet-related disease.
The term “food desert” refers to a location-generally, a low-income neighborhood-from which residents must travel twice as far as those living in wealthier neighborhoods to reach the nearest supermarket.
As Weisbecker points out, awareness is growing that people who live in food deserts face “significant obstacles to the purchase and consumption of affordable healthy food.” It is often easier for these people to purchase meals from fast food establishments and corner stores than it is for them to shop at supermarkets or large grocery stores.
While the negative health effects of fast food are generally well understood, the obstacles created by small local grocery or convenience stores are perhaps less intuitive. These establishments often lack a selection of nutritious food and are more expensive than supermarkets and large grocery stores. Even when they do offer healthier options such as fruit, vegetables and milk, these items are often of lower quality than their counterparts in large grocery stores: a study conducted in Philadelphia found higher microbial indicator counts in these items in low-income markets than in comparable items in higher-income area markets.
Results of a year-long study conducted by the US Department of Agriculture in 2008 linked distance between dwelling and supermarket, along with poor transportation, with limited access to affordable nutritious food. According to this study, food access-related problems affect almost 6 percent of all households in the United States. This translates to an estimated 23.5 million people, including 6.5 million children, who live in low-income neighborhoods more than a mile from a supermarket. Read More >
When super-chef and restaurateur Mario Batali, self proclaimed lover of all forms of pork, decided to join the Meatless Monday movement, Washington Post food writer Jane Black took notice. In an article published today, she wrote, “when Mario Batali starts to push people to eat their vegetables, you know something is happening.”
Black does an excellent job of laying out the many issues surrounding the public health campaign’s call for everyone to cut meat out of their diet just one day a week. The current Meatless Monday campaign was launched in 2003 in association with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health to reduce the amount of saturated fat in our diets by about 15 percent. The Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future (CLF) serves as a scientific advisor for the campaign. CLF recognizes that by adopting Meatless Monday individuals can improve their health and potentially reduce demand for meat products, particularly industrially produced meat, which use huge amounts of natural resources and pose significant public health and environmental risks. Read More >
On Tuesday, Animal Welfare Approved and the Pew Environment Group presented a public panel discussion about raising pasture-based animals, and reclaiming these sustainable farming systems as the source of our meat and dairy. The star-studded panel included Nicolette Hahn Niman, attorney and author of Righteous Porkchop, Carole Morison, former Purdue chicken farmer turned whistleblower and sustainable farming consultant, David Kirby, investigative journalist and author of Animal Factory and Dr. Patricia Whisnant, vet, rancher and president of the American Grassfed Association. As farmers, Carole Morison and Dr. Whisnant have had personal experiences with the industrial animal agriculture system currently producing most of the meat in our country today, and have chosen another path. Nicolette’s husband Bill Niman founded Niman Ranch, which he has since left as he felt that the standards declined to a point he couldn’t live with, after a management change in 2006. They continue to raise beef on pasture but sell under a private label. Kirby has turned his investigative skills on factory farming – the way we raise most of our meat today – and what he found out has spurred him to let out a battle cry to put an end to these factories that call themselves farms. Read More >
