Food Apartheid and Food Insecurity: Public Health Concerns in Urban, Low Income, and Minority Communities

Problem Statement

According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Economic Research Service reported that as of 2012 there were over 6,500 food deserts in the U.S. (Dutko et al., 2012). It is also sad that women, the LGBQT+ population, blacks and Hispanics in the U.S. seem to make-up the majority of the residents experiencing food insecurity (NewsRx, 2020). For example, in Chicago (as of 2015) there were still about 384,000 people living in food desserts (Edwards, 2015). Out of those, the majority was found to be African Americans, since Hispanics still seemed to have more access to local stores with some healthy options (Edwards, 2015). This type of disparity is a public health risk that needs to be properly identified in order to formulate various ways to address it. Therefore, this work will go over various approaches, theories and models used to identify food deserts. Once the methods in which food deserts are identified have been explained, the focus will shift to action plans that have been offered by various researchers to tackle the problem and improve the concerns about food apartheids.