food desert

English

WOTD – 16 October 2016

Etymology

A report by Cummins and Macintyre states that a resident of public housing in western Scotland supposedly coined the more specific phrase "food desert" in the early 1990s. The phrase was first officially used in a 1995 document from a policy working group on the Low Income Project Team of the UK's Nutrition Task Force.

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /fuːd ˈdɛzə(ɹ)t/
• (General American) IPA^(key): /fud ˈdɛzɚt/

• Audio (General Australian):

  (file)

• Hyphenation: food de‧sert

Noun

food desert (plural food deserts)

1. A populated region where food, especially healthy food, is difficult to obtain. [from early 1990s]
   • 2009 May 26, Steven Gray, “Can America's urban food deserts bloom?”, in Time‎^[1], archived from the original on 28 January 2016:

     For years, major supermarket chains have been criticized for abandoning densely populated, largely black and Latino communities in cities like Detroit, Los Angeles, Memphis and Newark, N.J. — contributing to what many experts call food deserts.

   • 2011 August 12, “America's ‘food deserts’”, in The Week‎^[2], archived from the original on 28 May 2016:

     More precisely, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) defines a food desert as any census district where at least 20 percent of the inhabitants are below the poverty line and 33 percent live over a mile from the nearest supermarket (or in rural areas, more than 10 miles).

   • 2012 October 5, Judy Valente, “Food Deserts”, in Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, PBS‎^[3], archived from the original on 10 September 2016:

     New Orleans' Ninth Ward is what the U.S. Department of Agriculture calls a "food desert." Food deserts are communities with little or no access to healthy food.

Coordinate terms

• food oasis
• food swamp

Further reading

• food desert on Wikipedia.Wikipedia