ABSTRACT
Food deserts are a relatively established concept in studies of inequalities around food. The idea has its origins in the UK from the mid-1990s but has since spread widely to other wealthy countries and aligned ideas of food environments. Implicitly, the focus is on inequalities in access (geographic or economic) to food, ideally healthy food, for all households. This chapter outlines the development of research across the US and the UK around food deserts. The key challenges with using a food deserts approach are noted, specifically, how to define and measure neighbourhood access and considerations of if and how the impact of food deserts on diet quality and population health are described. Concerns that confining people (in theory) to the areas immediate to their homes, would lead to an underestimation of their access to stores (because people do not always shop at the nearest store) has led to newer methods of capturing how people define their food environment. There have been calls to ‘retire’ the food desert metaphor, largely as it is overly simplistic. However, as this chapter details, it remains highly relevant to applied local research, especially its capacity to capture locational disadvantage.
