More Like this

1. Examining local food deserts using visual analytics

   https://doi.org/10.54941/ahfe1003957  

   Washington, Henry ; Jiang, Steven ; Davis, Lauren ; Kim, Hyung Nam ( January 2023 , AHFE International)

   Food insecurity, an economic and social condition where households have limited access to nutritious food, is a long-standing and growing problem in both the rural and urban areas of the United States. Food deserts refer to areas that do not have adequate food access to affordable and nutritious food. Food deserts can be characterized by availability, accessibility, accommodation, affordability, and acceptability (5A’s). This research investigates food deserts in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, which includes the city of Charlotte. The food insecure population estimate in Mecklenburg County is about 15% which is higher than the national average of 11%. Using visual analytics, a combination of analytics and human factors, this study aims to examine how age, education, and income are related to food deserts in Mecklenburg County. Data gathered from US Census Bureau was used for analysis. Results indicated that education and food desert status, and age and food desert status in Mecklenburg County were related.

    

   more » « less
2. Food Access Restoration Model:Food Access Impact Survey for Harris County and Southeast Texas after Hurricane Harvey in 2017

   https://doi.org/10.17603/ds2-bpxr-ck20  

   Rosenheim, Nathanael ; Watson, Maria ; Casellas Connors, John ; Safayet, Mastura ; Peacock, Walter Gillis ( January 2024 , Designsafe-CI)

   Access after disasters to resources such as food poses planning problems that affect millions of people each year. Understanding how disasters disrupt and alter food access during the initial steps of the recovery process provides new evidence to inform both food system and disaster planning. This research takes a supply-side focus and explores the results from a survey of food retailers after Hurricane Harvey in three Texas counties. The survey collected information on how the disaster affected a store’s property, people, and products and the length of time a store was closed, had reduced hours, and stopped selling fresh food items. We find that a focus only on store closures and property damage would underestimate the number of days residents have limited fresh food access by nearly two weeks. Further, stores in lower-income communities with chronic low-access to supermarkets (food deserts) were closed longer than other stores, potentially compounding pre-existing inequalities. We conclude that to plan for a more equitable food supply post-disaster, planners should embrace more dimensions of access, encourage retailer mitigation, and assess the types of retailers and their distribution within their communities. This mission includes social science collections related to models for predicting days to restoration of food access after a disaster. These collections include the programed workflow to replicated results for the journal article: Rosenheim, Nathanael, Maria Watson, John Cassels Connors, Mastura Safayet, Walter Gillis Peacock. “Food Access After Disasters: A Multidimensional View of Restoration After Hurricane Harvey”. Journal of the American Planning Association. doi.org/0.1080/01944363.2023.2284160Food insecurity is a chronic problem in the United States that annually affects over 40 million people under normal conditions. This difficult reality can dramatically worsen after disasters. Such events can disrupt both the supply and demand sides of food systems, restricting food distribution and access precisely when households are in a heightened need for food assistance. Often, retailers and food banks must react quickly to meet local needs under difficult post-disaster circumstances. Residents of Harris County and Southeast Texas experienced this problem after Hurricane Harvey made landfall on the Texas Gulf Coast in August 2017. The primary data collected by this project relate specifically to the supply side. The data attempt to identify factors that impacted the ability of suppliers to help ensure access to food, with a focus on fresh food access. Factors included impacts to people, property and products due to hurricane-related damage to infrastructure. Two types of food suppliers were the foci of this research: food aid agencies and food retailers. The research team examined food aid agencies in Southeast Texas with data collection methods that included secondary data analysis, a focus group and an online survey. The second population studied was food retailers with in-person surveys with store managers. Food retailers were randomly sampled in three Texas counties: Jefferson, Orange, and Harris. The data collection methods resulted in 32 food aid agency online survey responses and 210 completed food retail in-person surveys. Data were collected five to eight months after the event, which helped to increase the reliability and validity of the data. The time-sensitive nature of post-disaster data requires research teams to quickly organize their efforts before entering the field. The purpose of this project archive is to share the primary data collected, document methods, and to help future research teams reduce the amount of time needed for project development and reporting. This archive does not contain Personally or Business Identifiable Information. 

   more » « less
3. A Life Cycle Assessment Approach for Vegetables in Large-, Mid-, and Small-Scale Food Systems in the Midwest US

   https://doi.org/10.3390/su132011368  

   Stone, Tiffanie F. ; Thompson, Janette R. ; Rosentrater, Kurt A. ; Nair, Ajay ( October 2021 , Sustainability)

   Although vegetables are important for healthy diets, there are concerns about the sustainability of food systems that provide them. For example, half of fresh-market vegetables sold in the United States (US) are produced in California, leading to negative impacts associated with transportation. In Iowa, the focus of this study, 90% of food is imported from outside the state. Previous life cycle assessment (LCA) studies indicate that food consumption patterns affect global warming potential (GWP), with animal products having more negative impacts than vegetables. However, studies focused on how GWP, energy, and water use vary between food systems and vegetable types are less common. The purpose of this study was to examine these environmental impacts to inform decisions to buy locally or grow vegetables in the Midwest. We used a life cycle approach to examine three food systems (large-, mid-, and small-scale) and 18 vegetables commonly grown in/near Des Moines, Iowa. We found differences in GWP, energy, and water use (p ≤ 0.001 for each) for the three food systems with the large-scale scenario producing more emissions. There were also differences among vegetables, with the highest GWP for romaine lettuce (1.92 CO2eq/kg vegetable) approximately three times that of leaf lettuce (0.65 CO2eq/kg vegetable) at the large scale. Hotspots and tradeoffs between GWP, energy, and water use were also identified and could inform vegetable production/consumption based on carbon and water use footprints for the US Midwest. 

   more » « less
4. County-level analysis of current local capacity of agriculture to meet household demand: a dietary requirements perspective

   https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac5208  

   Nixon, Peter ; Ramaswami, Anu ( April 2022 , Environmental Research Letters)

   With the goal of informing local food-action planning, this paper develops the first county-level database detailing agrifood consumption and production across 3114 counties in the United States. The database covers 12 070 food items that comprise the entire diet, mapping them to the production demand of 95 agrifood commodities. Agrifood demand is delineated further into fresh and processed components, along with characterization of animal feed, and compared with local food production to yield the current local agrifood capacity (CLC). CLC results are shown for individual agrifoods and for aggregated categories (e.g., on average, 0.03 for fruits and nuts, 0.24 for vegetables, 0.31 for non-meat animal products) across all US counties. CLC results for the entire diet find that a large proportion of US counties can be self-sufficient in individual agrifood commodities (ranging from <0.5% of counties for agrifoods like hops, papayas, and artichokes to 59% of counties for beef), and 23% of US counties can supply over half of their total human dietary demand through local production, but only 9% of the US population resides in these counties. Such granular, subnational baselines are essential to inform future goal-setting for urban agriculture.

    

   more » « less
5. Introducing an innovative design to examine human-environment dynamics of food deserts responding to COVID-19

   https://doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2021.102.037  

   Liang, Chyi-Lyi ; Kurkalova, Lyubov ; Hashemi Beni, Leila ; Mulrooney, Timothy ; Jha, Manoj ; Miao, Haoran ; Monty, Gregory ( January 2021 , Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development)

   null (Ed.)

   Food desert communities face persistent barriers in accessing affordable fresh and healthy foods, particularly for the underserved and limited-resourced minority population. This research brief proposes an integrated design concept examining human-environment dynamics of food deserts to identify strategies that would provide effective planning to prevent, prepare for, or respond to disruptive events such as natural disasters or pandemics in the future. The North Carolina example we describe identifies the potential overlapping areas between food deserts and number of COVID-19 cases to demonstrate how an unpredictable event could exacerbate public health in food desert communities to a greater extent than in communities with better food access, availability, and accessibility. The improved understanding of food systems could help in addressing unprecedented challenges such as those due to the COVID-19 crisis. 

   more » « less