How to find your way out of a food desert
Ordinary citizens have been using the internet to draw attention to the lack of healthy eating options in inner cities
Over the last few months, a survey has been carried out of over 200 greengrocers and convenience stores in Crown Heights, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. As researchers from the Brooklyn Food Association enter the details, colorful dots appear on their online map, which display the specific location of each of the food stores in a handful of central Brooklyn neighborhoods. Clicking on a dot will show you the store’s name and whether it carries fresh fruit and vegetables, wholegrain bread, low-fat dairy and other healthy options.
The researchers plan eventually to survey the entire borough of Brooklyn. ‘We want to get to a more specific and detailed description of what that looks like’, says Jeffrey Heehs, who leads the project. He hopes it will help residents find fresh food in urban areas where the stores sell mostly packaged snacks or fast food, areas otherwise known as food deserts. The aim of the project is also to assist government officials in assessing food availability, and in forming future policies about what kind of food should be sold and where.
In fact, the Brooklyn project represents the intersection of two growing trends: mapping fresh food markets in US cities, and private citizens creating online maps of local neighborhood features. According to Michael Goodchild, a geographer at the University of California at Santa Barbara, citizen map makers may make maps because there is no good government map, or to record problems such as burned-out traffic lights.
According to recent studies, people at higher risk of chronic disease and who receive minimal incomes for the work they do frequently live in neighborhoods located in food deserts. But how did these food deserts arise? Linda Alwitt and Thomas Donley, marketing researchers at DePaul University in Chicago, found that supermarkets often can’t afford the amount of land required for their stores in cities. City planning researcher Cliff Guy and colleagues at the University of Leeds in the UK found in 2004 that smaller urban groceries tend to close due to competition from suburban supermarkets.
As fresh food stores leave a neighborhood, residents find it harder to eat well and stay healthy. Food deserts are linked with lower local health outcomes, and they may be a driving force in the health disparities between lower-income and affluent people in the US. Until recently, the issue attracted little national attention, and received no ongoing funding for research.
Now, more US cities are becoming aware of their food landscapes. Last year, the United States Department of Agriculture launched a map of where food stores are located in all the US counties. Mari Gallagher, who runs a private consulting firm, says her researchers have mapped food stores and related them to health statistics for the cities of Detroit, Chicago, Cincinnati and Washington, D.C. These maps help cities identify where food deserts are and, occasionally, have documented that people living in food deserts have higher rates of diet-related diseases.
The Brooklyn project differs in that it’s run by a local core of five volunteers who have worked on the project for the past year, rather than trained, academic researchers. To gather data, they simply go to individual stores with pre-printed surveys in hand, and once the storekeeper’s permission has been obtained, check off boxes on their list against the products for sale in the store. Their approach to data collection and research has been made possible by technologies such as mapping software and GPS-related smart phones, Google Maps and OpenStreetMap, an open-source online map with a history of involvement in social issues. Like Brooklyn Food Association volunteers, many citizen online map makers use maps to bring local problems to official attention, Goodchild says. Heehs, the mapping project leader, says that after his group gathers more data, it will compare neighborhoods, come up with solutions to address local needs, and then present them to New York City officials. Their website hasn’t caught much local or official attention yet, however. It was launched only recently, but its creators haven’t yet set up systems to see who’s looking at it.
Experts who visited the Brooklyn group’s site were optimistic but cautious. ‘This kind of detailed information could be very useful,’ says Michele Ver Ploeg, an economist for the Department of Agriculture. To make the map more helpful to both residents and policy makers, she would like to see price data for healthy products, too. Karen Ansel, a registered dietician and a spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association, found the site confusing to navigate. ‘That said, with this information in place the group has the tools to build a more user-friendly site that could be … very helpful to consumers’, she says. ‘The group also should ensure their map is available to those who don’t have internet access at home’, she adds. In fact, a significant proportion of Brooklyn residents don’t have internet access at home and 8 percent rely on dial-up service, instead of high-speed internet access, according to Gretchen Maneval, director of Brooklyn College’s Center for the Study of Brooklyn. ‘It’s still very much a work in progress’, Heehs says of the online map. They’ll start advertising it online and by email to other community groups, such as urban food garden associations, next month. He also hopes warmer days in the spring will draw out fresh volunteers to spread awareness and to finish surveying, as they have about two-thirds of Brooklyn left to cover.
Beachcombing for early humans in Africa
From the earliest modern humans to the present day, our species has evolved dramatically in both biological and behavioural terms. What forces prompted these momentous changes?
A Kenya has long been known as the ‘cradle of mankind’ following the discovery of fossils thought to be of the first members of the human family, which arose in Africa around 6–7 million years ago. Various distinct species evolved from these ancestors over millions of years, including our own – Homo sapiens – around 250,000 years ago. ‘A lot of the research on the origins of modern humans has focused on defining their point of origin, then understanding why humans left Africa about 60,000 years ago to colonise the rest of the world,’ says anthropologist Dr Marta Mirazón Lahr of Cambridge University. ‘But we have no idea what happened between 200,000 years and 60,000 years ago. We also have very little information on what occurred inside Africa after 60,000 years, when the different population groups and languages we see today evolved. The genetics suggest that the expansion out of Africa is just the tip of a massive population expansion inside the continent.’
B Along with fellow Cambridge anthropologist Professor Robert Foley, Mirazón Lahr is investigating the evolutionary history of modern human populations. ‘The challenge is to find the sites where evidence of these early people can be recovered – their stone tools, the animals they hunted, their ornaments and, ultimately, the fossils of the people themselves,’ she says. She has chosen to focus on East Africa based on the theory that its past environment was suitable for sustained occupation over time. But the region is huge, and finding the right place to look is absolutely crucial. ‘In the past there were periods of enormous rainfall in the tropics,’ she says. ‘The lakes were much higher and their margins were wider. We are looking at where the ancient lake margins would have been when the lakes were last high, and that’s where we look.’
C Some of their most spectacular finds have been on the ancient Turkana beaches in Kenya’s Rift Valley. ‘Ten thousand years ago, this area was wetter, with animals such as gazelles, hippos and lions, and the beaches are still there, even though the lake is long gone. We’ve found a great many shells on the surface, and a small number of harpoons the people fished with. A lot has already been exposed by the wind, and occasionally we find sites where things are buried, and then we dig,’ she says. ‘We’re looking at the stone tools and how these relate to times of particularly high water levels. Then we’re looking at the fauna and, if we’re lucky, we find actual human fossils. The oldest fossil ever found that looks like a modern human is 200,000 years old, and comes from the Turkana Basin. We’re trying to find the fossils that mark the origin of Homo sapiens.’
D The primitive technologies that our early ancestors left behind gradually evolve, and comparing finds dated to different times can advance understanding of our own evolutionary trajectory. ‘We think the evolution to modern humans is associated with changes in behaviour and in technology, for example in their tool use. We’ve already found evidence that they started using animal bones to make tools, which was rare in earlier populations,’ says Mirazón Lahr. ‘The people who lived around here 10,000 years ago used microliths – a form of miniaturised stone tool technology,’ adds her colleague Foley. ‘Instead of producing one or two big flakes like the earliest modern humans, they produced lots of very small flakes to make composite tools. We’ve also found a beach in the Turkana Basin from about 200,000 years ago and that has its own very different fossilised fauna, and very different stone tools. The technology and the people changed a lot during the past 200,000 years.’
E Mirazón Lahr emphasises that geography and climate played a critical role in the origins and diversification of modern humans. ‘The times when the lakes were high were periods of plenty in East Africa,’ she says. ‘When it was very wet there were lots of animals to hunt, the vegetation could grow, and you can imagine that the people would have thrived.’ East Africa had a unique mosaic environment with lake basins, highlands and plains that provided alternative niches for foraging populations over this period. ‘We think that early modern humans could live in the region throughout these long periods, even if they had to move between basins.’ With a network of habitable zones, human populations survived by expanding, contracting and shifting ranges according to the state of the environment at any given time.
F By comparing the fossil records from different basins over time, Mirazón Lahr is trying to establish a spatial and temporal image of human occupation over the past 200,000 years. She believes that the way to find novel insights is to consider each problem from various angles. Drawing on her wide-ranging interests from molecular genetics to prehistory, and combining genetic, fossil, archaeological and palaeoclimatic information, she hopes to form an accurate and complete picture of our early ancestors’ lives and the external forces that shaped their evolution, both biological and behavioural.
Planet Earth’s blue heart
Water covers over 97 percent of the habitable ‘living space’ on our planet, yet it could be argued that we know more about distant stars than we do about the deep blue ocean. We understand why it is important to reach for the stars, to look at ourselves in perspective, and to ask big questions such as ‘where did we come from?’ And we have devoted a great amount of resources to making progress in this area, but meanwhile we have neglected understanding how the heart of our life support system really functions.
Ocean exploration and the need to alert people to the ocean’s plight are critical to a better understanding of the planetary systems that support us. Never before has the need been so great to dive below the surface of the sea to explore and to understand the significance of our actions, or to be more precise, the significant scale of current inactions and the consequences they hold for all of us. It is like trying to understand your own body – is it good enough to only look at the skin? Do we not have to delve in and understand how the lungs work, or do we just take that for granted? Most people are still under the impression that the ocean is so vast and so resilient that humans do not have the capacity to harm it – and if we do, that it does not matter.
We look at the scale and how unchanging the ocean seems to be and decide it is not really something we should worry about – it might be an issue for future generations but not for us! What has become increasingly clear, though, is our ability to really undermine the way the ocean works by what we take out and by what we put in.
People ask – what is the biggest threat to the ocean? Overfishing, pollution, or climate change are all usually mentioned. But by far and away the biggest threat to the ocean is a lack of understanding that what we put in and take out matters – not just to the ocean, but to other aspects of our lives. The ocean cannot be regarded as the planet’s ultimate dumpster or the ultimate place to get free food. It is our life support system, and not being aware of the importance of the ocean to every breath we take, every drop of water we drink, to a benign set of conditions that make the planet work – that is the biggest threat.
By exploring the ocean we now understand better than ever before the consequences of what is happening and how the ocean is being damaged. In a sense we now realise that we are sleepwalking into a nightmare. This is because changes are slow but progressive, and at some point occur to a level where we have to sit up and take notice. However, given the nature of progressive change, this point is often reached when it is no longer possible to do anything about it.
The ocean is difficult to study, much more so than dry land, but really there are no shortcuts to gaining knowledge. The advent of SCUBA diving in the 1950s provided the current generation with new tools to explore the shallowest margins of our watery world, and an explosion of knowledge quickly followed. But what of the deep ocean? Our temptation is to turn to machines as we have done in most aspects of our daily lives. But are machines good enough to take the place of humans? James Cameron – one of only a few people alive today who have travelled to the deepest part of the ocean – believes (as does the author), that humans lie at the centre of ocean science. It is therefore unfortunate that just as we reach an era when we have the analytical powers to start to make sense of how our planet works we see a reduction in funding of manned exploration of the ocean.
It wasn’t until Florida International University stepped in that the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Aquarius underwater laboratory, located off Key Largo, Florida, was saved from closure. However, the number of countries with submarine research capabilities continues to shrink. With the vast majority of the ocean yet to be explored this is a mistake, and the hopes are that private donors will step forward to balance out the loss of government funding for underwater exploration.
The value of seeing beneath the ocean surface is immense. It helps us understand how our wellbeing is linked to the wellbeing of the ocean. We now know that since the mid-1900s about half of the world’s coral reefs have either gone or are in serious decline. Coral reefs are important ecosystems with approximately one quarter of all ocean species depending on them for food and shelter. Ninety percent of many of the big fish that we consume are gone – down to about ten percent of what they were 50 years ago. And we are changing the very nature of the blue part of our world that sets us apart from any other planet we have so far discovered in the universe. Excessive carbon dioxide emissions from our activities are not just changing the climate, they are driving the balance of the ocean waters towards more acidic conditions with as yet unclear but likely significant consequences.
The impacts of these changes will be felt by people around the world – not just by those who live by the sea but, with our super-efficient supply systems, people in inland areas too. It matters because we cannot be blind to the fact that we are degrading the very part of our planet that enables us to live here.