This is Courtney. Like you and me, she shops for her food at a grocery store. But there’s one really big difference.
It takes her over two hours to travel there and back. She uses the bus. That’s a lotta schlep.
Like lots of people in the U.S., Courtney can’t take fresh groceries for granted.
23.5 million people in our country live in food deserts — places where people living on lower incomes do not have good-quality, low-cost produce nearby (within one mile for an urban area or 10 miles for a rural area). If that doesn’t sound tough to you, then you probably don’t have kids, do have good transportation, and have always had enough money to eat out.
There are food deserts all over our country:
It isn’t just that these people don’t have good-quality, affordable food nearby, but often they live in areas full of small convenience stores selling heavily processed, high-salt, high-sugar snack foods.
Um, not a good combination. That means hungry people see this…
…instead of this:
There’s good news for Courtney’s neighborhood though.
“Having a store in my neighborhood would be wonderful,” she says. She’s pretty happy to hear about The Food Trust‘s plans to provide support and funding for grocers who want to open a store in underserved neighborhoods.
Dwayne Boudreaux’s New Orleans grocery store has been closed for over eight years. The Food Trust is helping him reopen his market.
Food access is also about building a great community where people want to live. Having access to healthy food is just one piece of building a better life, along with having the time and know-how to feed a family in a healthy way, good education, reliable and affordable housing, and feeling safe.
