Food deserts are areas in residential areas that have limited access to affordable and healthy food that can be sold in places like vegetable shops and supermarkets. The research looks into food deserts and how they affect the accessibility of nutritious food. It seeks to discover the answer to this research question from the perspective of those affected by the issue. The research concludes that while supermarkets offer a wider variety of healthier food than neighborhood stores, they are often located far from the residential areas. Furthermore, healthy food found in these neighborhood stores is about 25% more expensive than in supermarkets. Since people prefer to travel far to access healthy food increases the cost and time of shopping especially for those that do not have personal vehicles. This finding disputes earlier literature on food deserts which assume that people shop at the nearest store. It also concludes that people only shop once a month but would consume more if they could shop more meaning that the biggest factor affecting what people eat is not its accessibility but that they don’t have enough money to spend on food ( Bowen, MacNell, & Shipman, 2017) .
Symbolic interactionism is a theory that sees society as a total of the subjective meanings that people attach to the things and other people’s behavior that they encounter. Thus people react to something based on what they believe and not what is actually true. In this situations, the people who live in places where there are food deserts have learned to associate good nutrition with food that they can find in the supermarkets because they believe it is fresher and cheaper than what they can find in the neighborhood store. In truth, supermarkets can afford to store food for long periods of time so it may not be fresh. The cost it takes to travel to the supermarket and back may also be equal or lesser than the 25% more they have to pay at the local store for the same food ( Bowen, MacNell, & Shipman, 2017) .
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However, the theory focuses on several aspects of beliefs, thoughts, ideas, and conversations in finding the interactions between communications. Hence there are so many resultant subjective interpretations of reality depending on whose perspective it is and their social economic power. For instance, in a food desert, a person with a car sees the situation differently from one that has to ride a bus to the supermarket and a cab back ( Bowen, MacNell, & Shipman, 2017) . This makes it too wide in addressing the issues in the society relating to food deserts other than giving clear directions in understanding reality as socially constructed in line with cultural or community beliefs.
A two-pronged approach involving surveys and in-depth interviews for this research and it is prone to challenges. For instance, setting up of the area of research, mapping the stores, collecting data from the women and analyzing the data collected before giving the feedback consumes much time hence making the exercise tiresome. Some of the information by the interviewees may be biases as due to the different understanding of the situation or influence to respond in a certain way, for instance, immigrants may prioritize their needs first and disregard the actual situation. The use of surveys provides little evidence to ascertain the validity of the information that was given by the respondents. Overall, reconciling primary and secondary data can be difficult due to inconsistencies.
More research should be done on the underlying reasons why people have little money to spend on food and what can be done to change this or make healthy food more accessible instead. This should also look at whether improving economic status would improve people’s food choices and its accessibility.
References
Bowen, S., MacNell, L., & Shipman, M. (2017). Money, Not Access, Key to Resident Food Choices in 'Food Deserts? Retrieved from https://news.ncsu.edu/2017/03/money-food-deserts-2017/https://news.ncsu.edu/2017/03/money-food-deserts-2017/
