Literature Review on Food Desert | Articles

Running head: LITERATURE REVIEW ON FOOD DESERT
Title : Literature Review on Food Desert
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LITERATURE REVIEW ON FOOD DESERT1
Topic: Food Desert
In the article "measuring food access and food deserts for policy purpose," the authors
Ploeg, Dutko, and Breneman explore the relationship between food access and food deserts.
According to the authors, policymakers have developed various methods to measure the food
stock access in order to find out the areas of the united states that lack accessibility in food
(Ver Ploeg, Dutko, & Breneman, 2015). The study is concentrated in the U.S., and the
authors hail from different departments of the U.S government. However, the authors state
that there are methodological limitations in the work of the policymaker. The paper identifies
that the barrier faced by individuals in accessing healthy food is that instead of looking at
availing their own accessibility, they are concentrating in their neighborhood areas, which are
under the umbrella of a food desert. The report reviews and critiques on the current level
measure of food access and conclude that more attention needs to be rewarded to the singular
food store measure. It is concluded in the paper that as there is a problem in conceptual and
methodology while measuring the access of food, it is essential to first a broad set of
measures so that it can provide better target and evaluate policy intervention to measure in
order to improve the access.
In the article "Black and Latino urban food desert residents' perceptions of their food
environment and factors that influence food shopping decisions", the authors MacNeill,
Hardison-Moody, and Bowen claim that there is no unified consensus on the measurement of
the identification of food (MacNell, Elliott, Hardison-Moody & Bowen, 2017). The study
highlights the significance of participatory and qualitative approaches to food environment
research. In this study, the authors have interviewed forty-two black Latino women with low
income. The interviewee talked about their motivation for choosing food and their
understandings in handling deprived food access and their view on the unequal distribution of
food stores. The women stated that the strongest motivator for selecting the store as price.

LITERATURE REVIEW ON FOOD DESERT2
However, the authors also establish that the absence of conveyance and supplementary
nutritional program of assistance also had a strong effect on spending behavior. The author
has concluded that the findings demonstrate a prerequisite to re-examine how the food
measurement in contention for the method that does not limit itself quantity of and proximity
to the supermarkets so that it can incorporate more people who have been affected by the
situation.
Battersby and Crush in the article 'Africa's urban food deserts' focus on the urban food
desert in Africa and explains the situation of Africa as impoverished by low dietary activities
and high level of food uncertainty (Battersby & Crush, 2014). The author defines the concept
of food deserts and defines it to be characterized as economically disadvantaged areas that
have weak access to healthy as well as affordable food because no new outlets are present.
The authors try to put this European and North American concept to African cities. The study
reviews some experiments and complications of perceiving of very high food insecure zones
of Africa as conservative food deserts. The authors suggest that in the context of Africa, the
food deserts concepts require additional minute understanding because of the over-lapping
market as well as non-market food sources and the differences in inter-household that has
lead to food insecurity in Africa resulting in undernutrition and social exclusion.
Shannon in his article 'Food deserts: Governing obesity in the neoliberal city' aims to
state that the three types of research namely, GIS-enabled neighborhood analyses, anti-
obesity efforts, and public health's embrace of social ecology should be combined to form
proper research work that will be neoliberal governance rather than the promotion of self-
governing personalities (Shannon, 2014). The author proposes to conduct this research as the
concept of a food desert has received much political attention. The main aim of the paper is to
discuss about the areas which is located through geographic information system ( GIS ) to
categorise them food desert and non food desert areas. The study also analyses the equation