Research Article: Food Availability and the Food Desert Frame in Detroit: An Overview of the City's Food System

Urban Farm DB summary

A study of Detroit, Michigan, United States, combining environmental justice analysis with systems thinking to examine the city's food environment. Data were collected from ReferenceUSA, Orbis and the Michigan Department of Agriculture between 2011 and 2013 to build a database of food outlets, analyzed and mapped using SPSS 22 and ArcGIS 10.1. The study examined the locations of 3,499 food outlets across 34 categories, including 96 supermarkets or full-line grocery stores, 1,110 small groceries/convenience stores/mini marts/liquor stores, 279 specialty food stores, 306 pharmacies/dollar/variety stores, 1,245 full-service and fast-food restaurants and other food service outlets, 157 supply chain operations, 206 farms/community and school gardens/farmers markets/produce markets, and 100 food assistance programs. It found that although Detroit has areas lacking food outlets, characterizing the entire city as a "food desert" is misleading, and that the traditional food desert research approach — relying only or primarily on the presence or absence of supermarkets and full-line grocery stores — ignores many important venues people use to obtain food and the coping strategies people employ in response to limited food access.