Food Deserts

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Often the better foods can only come from the freshest ingredients and these ingredients are generally expensive. This limits the accessibility to a lot of people who can’t afford an expensive meal. Popular culture encourages us to think about different social classes and there are social and economic forces that influence our individual eating habits. Social class is believed to be the “way we organize people in a hierarchy of levels according to certain factors”(Pechey, 2016). These factors are based on education, occupation, and income(Pechey 2016). Generally, we are of the class that our parents occupy, and we are born into it just as we were born into a country and thrown into its culture. However, people in different cultures have different ways of living because they think about things differently, and for young children, it is their parents’ education, income, and occupation that can influence their food intake.
The relationship between low socioeconomic status and poor health is also influenced by gender, age, culture, environment, social and community networks, individual lifestyle factors and health behaviors …show more content…

The three main factors to eating a balanced healthy diet include cost, accessibility, and knowledge (EUFIC 2006). These factors lead to the development of areas known as food deserts. Food deserts are geographic areas where residents have limited access to affordable, healthy food options because of the lack of grocery stores within convenient traveling distance. They are most commonly found in communities of color and low-income areas(EUFIC 2006). According to the Food Empowerment Project (2018), studies have shown that wealthy areas have three times as many supermarkets as low-income areas. In addition, the price of healthy foods cost more in low-income areas(Food Empowerment Project

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