As a new student, it is very important to become aware of the communities that extend
beyond your college campus. Specifically in Baltimore, there are many issues facing the city and it is essential that the thousands of college students in the area learn about them in order to help their new community—one of which being the dilemma of food deserts. A food desert is a region that has limited access to affordable and nutritious options, in contrast with an area with higher access to supermarkets. This also includes communities where the distance to a supermarket or shopping alternative is more than ¼ mile away. Low income families are more likely to not have means of transportation to the nearest grocery stores, so they are more negatively affected by food deserts. This lack of accessibility to healthy choices results in higher risks of diabetes, obesity, and high blood pressure within the demographic.
College students have access to dining halls, and many are not buying their own food—at least in the first year of school—so they likely are not aware of food deserts in their vicinity. The map on the right shows the many areas in Baltimore that do not have access to healthy food and the Johns Hopkins study it came from found that 1 in 4 Baltimore residents live in a food desert.
As a student that now knows this information, there are many ways you can help. First, you can visit the United States Department of Agriculture website and search your area to find the food deserts near you. This website has three goals and they are stated as:
Presents a spatial overview of food access indicators for low-income and other census tracts using different measures of supermarket accessibility;
Provides food access data for populations within census tracts; and
Offers census-tract-level data on food access that can be downloaded for community planning or research purposes.
Additionally, you can also check if your school offers any programs aimed at helping those affected by food deserts. This will be a community of people coming together with the common goal of working on this evidently very prevalent issue in Baltimore. Many colleges and universities have programs where you can donate your time or local produce to help bring healthy food to low income areas. It is also important to reach out to the local officials, who can create policy change in the city to help these lower income areas.
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