Armchair sociologists have been wielding the food desert sword ever since a team of researchers at the University of Southampton coined the phrase when they published research that examined the disappearance of grocers in low-income neighborhoods in 2002.
But the U.S. Department of Agriculture didn't look on in ignorance at food desert research for long. The agency now hosts an online Food Access Research Atlas that combines data from several sources to show exactly where Americans are living with low food access.
Under the USDA's prescribed set of conditions that define a food desert, as set forth in the embedded .pdf below, data are separated by census tracts, and residents of any given tract must meet two conditions in order to qualify as a food desert. In major metropolitan areas, the tract must be low-income, as defined by a poverty rate of at least 20 percent, and have low food access, as defined as a distance of one mile from a supermarket or large grocery store.
Using that criteria, along with a separate set of criteria for rural food deserts, the USDA identified 6,529 food desert census tracts containing an estimated 13.6 million people -- 82.2 percent of which live in urban areas.
According to the USDA's own data, 18 of those tracts, which are home to 52,839 residents, are located in Chicago. Those areas are indicated in red on the map below.
Also on the map are the locations of every grocery store in Chicago that has been inspected since Jan. 1, 2010. Since the Chicago Department of Health's Food Inspection Division requires that grocery stores undergo an inspection upon approval and at least every two years thereafter, this list should be considered exhaustive. Highlighted in blue are major chain supermarkets, including Dominick's, Jewel, Whole Foods, Wal-Mart, Aldi and Trader Joe's.
