Summary and Response to "Conquering Food Deserts With Green Carts"

Summary:
The article “Conquering Food Deserts With Green Carts", written by David Bornstein and published in Fixes discusses the problems of “food deserts” in low-income areas in America where poor people live far away from grocery stores with fruits and veggies and have little opportunity to buy healthy foods. The article shows that the government tries to fix the absence of healthy food by passing initiatives to promote businesses that provide healthy foods. Some of the initiatives are Green Cart initiative, farmer’s market Health Bucket program and Healthy Food Financing Initiative. The government is trying to create more opportunities for poor people to buy more healthy foods by increasing the number of stores and vendors who provide healthy foods. At the one hand the government is trying to solve the problem of obesity and the lack of healthy food in poor areas with electronic foot stamps and coupons but at the other hand it doesn’t allow the sale of bottled water, nuts and dried fruit, which are very healthy, in the Green Cart stores.

 

 

Response:

I think that the government did an important step in the right direction to solve the problem of obesity and to provide more healthy foods in poor areas but there is still a lot of space for improvement. The article shows the shocking statistic that “23.5 million people live in low-income areas that are more than 1 mile from a supermarket, which represents 8.4% of the total U.S. population.” I really believe that this is a big problem and even though the government is trying to solve the problem, it should do more about it. In my opinion there should be more fresh foods markets and the government should be thankful for the vendors from Green Cart. They should try to support them better. It is not acceptable in my opinion that they don’t allow Green Cart stores to sale nuts, dried fruit and bottled water. This is ridiculous.