Food deserts in Winnipeg, Canada: a novel method for measuring a complex and contested construct

Abstract

Introduction “Food deserts” have emerged over the past 20 years as spaces of concern for communities, public health authorities and researchers because of their potential negative impact on dietary quality and subsequent health outcomes. Food deserts are residential geographic spaces, typically in urban settings, where low-income residents have limited or no access to retail food establishments with sufficient variety at affordable cost. Research on food deserts presents methodological challenges including retail food store identification and classification, identification of low-income populations, and transportation and proximity metrics. Furthermore, the complex methods often used in food desert research can be difficult to reproduce and communicate to key stakeholders. To address these challenges, this study sought to demonstrate the feasibility of implementing a simple and reproducible method of identifying food deserts using data easily available in the Canadian context. Methods This study was conducted in Winnipeg, Canada in 2014. Food retail establishments were identified from Yellow Pages and verified by public health dietitians. We calculated two scenarios of food deserts based on location of the lowest-income quintile population: (a) living ≥ 500 m from a national chain grocery store, or (b) living ≥ 500 m from a national chain grocery store or a full-service grocery store. Results The number of low-income residents living in a food desert ranged from 64 574 to 104 335, depending on the scenario used. Conclusion This study shows that food deserts affect a significant proportion of the Winnipeg population, and while concentrated in the urban core, exist in suburban neighbourhoods also. The methods utilized represent an accessible and transparent, reproducible process for identifying food deserts. These methods can be used for costeffective, periodic surveillance and meaningful engagement with communities, retailers and policy makers.

Spatial analysis of population at risk of food insecurity using the voices from a Photovoice study

“…Distance to large-scale, less expensive supermarkets as opposed to more expensive stores Among the important insights voiced by participants from both rural and urban case communities was the distance to food outlets. This was unsurprising, as the challenges related to distance are consistent with the existing literature on food security (Larsen & Gilliland, 2006;Sharkey, 2009;Slater et al, 2017;Smith et al, 2010;Wrigley, 2002). A photograph taken by one of the rural case community participants (Figure 1) illustrates the point that distance is always an underlying barrier that individuals mitigate through various coping strategies, such as asking friends to drive to the store, walking sometimes long distances, or taking a taxi.…”

Neighbourhood food environments revisited: When food deserts meet food swamps

“…Identification of food deserts, food oases, and food swamps often involves two basic criteria: (i) accessibility to food outlets and (ii) socio‐economic status of neighbourhoods or census tracts (Apparicio et al ; Jiao et al ; Slater et al ). Access has typically been measured as the physical distance between the centroids of spatial units of analysis and the nearest food outlets.…”

“…Smoyer‐Tomic et al () and Wang et al () used the shortest network distance measure to calculate actual distances between neighbourhoods’ centroids and supermarkets and identified food deserts by combing neighbourhoods with high population need and low supermarket accessibility in Edmonton. Slater et al () calculated the shortest distance from the centroid of dissemination blocks to the nearest grocery stores. The authors defined food deserts in Winnipeg as areas where the lowest‐income quintile population live greater than 500 m from a grocery store and found that a large proportion of the Winnipeg population lived in food deserts.…”

The Changing Landscape of Food Deserts and Swamps over More than a Decade in Flanders, Belgium

“…Overall, while food deserts are quite common in the US, evidence of their existence elsewhere is equivocal [ 22 ]. There is significant evidence of the existence of food swamps outside of the US however, e.g., Canada [ 32 ] and New Zealand [ 33 ].…”