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Large food stores may prove an oasis for consumers in `food deserts`

September 06, 2002

A major study into the phenomenon of `food deserts` has shown that the opening of a substantial new food store in an area with previously poor access to food shops can result in an immediate improvement in the diet of local households.

Professor Neil Wrigley of the University of Southampton will be presenting the results of the study `Food Deserts in British Cities` to the British Association for the Advancement of Science on Monday 9 September.

`This is an important finding on a topic in which policy development has run ahead of systematic evidence-based research,` says Professor Wrigley. `And it raises questions about current government thinking that local community-based small-scale, retail-oriented solutions may offer the best way of tackling the `food deserts` problem.`

The study was commissioned three years ago to investigate links between access to food and food poverty in so-called `food deserts`. The term `food deserts` having been adopted in the late 1990s as a metaphor for urban neighbourhoods with poor access to healthy affordable food, typically areas of deprivation with run down shopping centres and few remaining food shops.

The cross-disciplinary team from the Universities of Southampton, Leeds and Cardiff involved experts in geography, public health nutrition, and city and regional planning. They focused their research on the Seacroft/Whinmoor area of Leeds, a deprived local authority housing estate area of around 15,000 households, which in the 1990s had a severely degraded district shopping centre and extremely poor levels of retail food provision.

When a leading food retailer was given planning permission to demolish the Seacroft shopping centre and rebuild around a new superstore, the opportunity arose for a comprehensive study of patterns of food consumption of local residents both before and after the arrival of the new store - the first study in the UK of food consumption patterns (and by extension diet-related health) in a deprived, previously poor-retail-access community experiencing a sudden and significant change in access.

`Based on a study of over 600 households, we found evidence of both direct and indirect improvements in the diets of some groups as a result of the opening of this large-scale retail outlet,` said project leader Professor Neil Wrigley.

`Using the level of fruit and vegetable consumption as a measure of a `healthy diet`, we found that respondents classified as having poor diets prior to the new store opening increased their fruit and vegetable consumption by one-third after the opening - and that switching of food purchasing to the new store was associated with an improvement in diet,` he added.

`Although the changes in diet recorded were relatively small, and the average fruit and vegetable consumption levels of the majority of people in this deprived area remain significantly below government recommended levels, we believe this is the first UK evidence that a retail intervention in a previously poor food access area can have a positive impact on diet.

`Our findings have potential policy implications for retail planning and debates concerning local-community-based versus large-scale corporate regeneration scheme solutions to food poverty. They also raise questions about appropriate policy responses to the improvement of diet-related health.`

The Food Deserts in British Cities project is continuing, with researchers currently exploring more qualitative aspects of the retail intervention in Seacroft, and the impact of the intervention on other areas of Leeds.

The study was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and J Sainsbury plc.

Southampton, University of