For good reason, most people believe that food access causes food insecurity in communities across the United States. When there are no grocery stores near you – or the ones that are tend to be on the expensive side of things, it follows that you might have trouble buying enough food to maintain a healthy diet for yourself (and the rest of your family if you have one). However, is it possible that the opposite might be true as well: a community’s food insecurity driving away prospective grocery stores, causing limited food access? Evidence exists that suggests this just might be the case.
In a study I did on this exact topic, I turn the well-known cause-and-effect relationship between food access and food insecurity on its nose to find out if in fact food insecurity could cause food access (instead of the other way around). I suspected that food insecurity – like all of the other known contributors to limited food access – would have a significant impact on food access; if a community of people cannot afford to pay for groceries on a regular basis, then grocery store owners are probably not going to set up their businesses in that area because the grocery store being there does not change the fact that the people don’t have money.
By controlling for several variables in a poisson regression model, I concluded two things in my analysis. First, there is a positive relationship between food insecurity and limited food access. Among approximately 3,000 counties across the United States, there is a clear relationship where if the number of people who are food insecure increases, so does the number of people who have limited food access. This finding supports my previous assumption that this relationship is indeed present within the United States.
Second, I found the level of impact food insecurity had on limited food access. Converting my data into a per 100,000 people ratio, I got a shocking result from my statistical analysis: for every 100,000 people experiencing food insecurity, the number of people who have limited food access increases by about 94,532. Although this is just an estimate, the graph below further supports this finding.
Unfortunately, neither of these findings controlled for extreme external factors that also might influence limited food access; economic downturns, natural disasters, and other, large-scale events that occur on a year-to-year basis. These can all greatly decrease food access within the United States. For example, hurricanes in the South East region of the U.S. commonly result in extensive destruction of both businesses and peoples’ homes. If there are high numbers of natural disasters that occur in one year – like it did in the year 2015, which also happened to be the year of the data I collected on food access, then mass property damage would cause limited food access in the affected areas. This is just one example of a large-scale catastrophe that I did not account for; however, there are so many more that I could not have feasibly accounted for.
Gary Thompson is a senior at Indiana University.
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