This is so true

Food Deserts make it difficult for the poor to find adequate nutrition

Until I moved a month and a half ago, I had spent seven years in food deserts, albeit urban ones. There are no groceries in downtown Lexington; the closest are between a mile and two from the city centre, and if you have no car, which I didn't for the most part, going to the grocery meant taking the bus (which has become increasingly unreliable of late), a cab (expensive here, where there has only recently been any taxi company competition), or walking (which usually meant a limit to what could be carried). Going to the local food co-op was even harder, because it is on a road not serviced by the buses, so I had to do a combination of both riding and walking. It could easily take me four hours for one grocery trip. For someone who was elderly, it would have been even more difficult. Thankfully, for the last three and a half years I did have access to some groceries at Walgreens, including soy milk even, but no produce. Prior to that, there was at least the Farmer's Market during part of the year. Ironically, I have a car now and that enabled me to move further out from my work and away from the other services I need, and because I am now in suburbia--but right off a main intersection, I live within a couple of blocks of a Kroger, a Wal-Mart, a library, and a hospital. (Since there's only one general hospital located away from the UK area, you can probably pinpoint my area within a half-mile or so.)

Of course, before I moved to Lexington, I'd lived in small towns with only one or two groceries max, and on or near Air Force bases where we'd do one monthly trip to the comissary.

I'm glad they're studying this, though; I think the way we do unplanned development really wreaks havoc on our communities' landscape and affects lives. New neighbourhoods really should be planned so that you can walk to the store or ride a bike; it's not just the convenience of fast food that leads to our epidemic obesity today; it's the fact that many people cannot safely go anywhere for necessities without getting into a car and driving there. Here in Lexington we have Hamburg Pavilion, the world's biggest strip mall, and you can't even walk from store to store without taking chances with your life...at some point they stopped going into the parking lots with the buses and I could just imagine some poor lady with a cane trying to deal with that.

We need sustainability community planning, with multi-use and diverse areas, one based on logic, not politics. I just don't know how to get cities to go for that. I do think we're heading towards it--the growth of the 50s through the 80s I think made many feel like they were fighting the Hydra. But I hope we can eventually get our communities back--and help everyone in the community access basic services by building for people--something that also should be good for business.