• To learn more about food deserts or to access an interactive map that displays different ways of viewing food deserts, read NPR’s article “How to Find a Food Desert Near You” and follow the link to the USDA’s Food Atlas.
• Click here to read Voices from “Hunger in Oregon” for short descriptions from Oregonians who have used SNAP.
• To read more about how to find lead in your home environment and the effects of lead on children, click here for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s infographic.
• To see additional perspectives and proposed solutions to these social problems, watch LaToya Ruby Frazier detail the experiences of the low-income residents as well as a creative solution. She was hired to document the unfolding crisis in Flint and relates her history growing up with environmental racism in Philadelphia to the crisis.

1. Reflect on accessing healthy food. What kinds of access do families have in your community? Consider locations of grocery stores (not including convenience stores) as well as public transportation systems.
2. What role do government crop subsidies play in nutrition?
3. What role do government tax breaks and food banks play in food insecurity?
4. What influences families’ food purchases? How does what you’ve read relate to your own family’s experience with food?
5. What are the factors that affect a family’s access to safe water and sanitation?
6. What role does the government play in the water and sanitation system?
7. How would you improve water access and sanitation in your community if you had the chance?

• Environmental justice: an intersectional social movement pioneered by African American, Indigenous, Latinx, female, lower-income, and other people from historically oppressed populations fighting against environmental discrimination within their communities and across the world.
• Food desert: geographic locations where there is very limited or no access to affordable and nutritious foods.
• Food insecurity: low or very low access to food of reduced quality, variety, or desirability of diet (may or may not show patterns of disrupted eating).
• Food security: no or little reported indications of food access problems or limitations.
• Food stamps: the previous name for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, a federal program that provides food-purchasing assistance for low- and no-income people.
• Food system: The interconnected systems and processes that influence nutrition, food, health, community development, and agriculture.
• Poverty line: the estimated minimum level of income needed to secure the necessities of life, adjusted annually for inflation.
• Sanitation: conditions relating to public health, especially the provision of clean drinking water and adequate sewage disposal.
• Sharecropper: a type of farming in which families rent small plots of land from a landowner in return for a portion of their crop, to be given to the landowner at the end of each year.
• Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP): a federal program that provides food-purchasing assistance for low- and no-income people.
• U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA): the government department responsible for developing and executing federal laws related to farming, forestry, rural economic development, and food in the United States.
• Wastewater: water that has been used for domestic or industrial purposes and must be cleaned before it is used again.

Read this short article, “How to Find a Food Desert Near You.” It describes the federal government’s food atlas and demonstrates how to use the atlas to learn about a specific neighborhood.

Access and explore the Food Access Research Atlas for your own community. You can double-click to zoom in on the map of the United States to view information on a specific geographic area or use the search bar at the top left of the map to search for your zip code, city, county, or state.

Using the selection box in the top right of the map, select the first box (Green) labeled “LI and LA at 1 and 10 miles.” This label refers to a low-income census tract where a significant number or share of residents is more than 1 mile (in an urban area) or 10 miles (in a rural area) from the nearest supermarket. When it is selected, all of the green sections of the map indicate areas of the country in which people lack access to fresh, healthy food.

Discussion Questions

1. What areas of the country have the most food deserts? How might rural food deserts be different than urban food deserts?
2. Use the search bar in the Food Access Research Atlas to identify data for your zip code or city. Use the link “download this tract’s 2019 dataset” to create a list of what you can learn about food access in your own community. Identify specific information.
3. The U.S. Department of Agriculture also publishes a Food Environment Atlas. How might access to unhealthy fast food food impact low-income people with low access to a grocery store?