It is well-documented that the diets of the poor are not as healthful as those of higher-income Americans. There is debate over why this gap exists, but a new NBER paper suggests that lack of access to nutritional food, a common explanation for the divide, may not be its key driver.
First, some background on common theories.
Some suggest that this is a problem of financial resources: fresh fruits and vegetables can be more expensive per calorie than frozen pizza, and most low-income Americans will not choose a healthful diet if it means leaving the cupboard bare at the end of the month. In this lens, what’s needed is more generous nutrition assistance to make the purchase of good food possible for more low-income people.
Another variation is that the poor want healthful food and perhaps could afford it, but they don’t have time to prepare it—so they purchase heat-and-eat meals, which tend to be less healthy. In this lens, what’s needed is some intervention or form of assistance that gives low-income individuals and particularly parents more time to devote to meal preparation.
Others contend that this is primarily an issue of preference. The poor generally buy what they want to buy—they just prefer foods that are less healthy. Increased government assistance wouldn’t change diets because the underlying preferences of low-income consumers remain unchanged. Through this lens, what’s needed is something will help people want to make different decisions (such as better education on the benefits of healthful diets and how to prepare them) or force them to do so (perhaps by restricting the types or quantities of food that can be purchased).
Still others say that this is a “food desert” issue. This argument holds that low-income Americans want healthful food and would purchase it, but their local stores—if they have any stores at all—tend to favor Doritos and Fanta over broccoli and peas. What’s needed? More stores in poor communities that stock nutritious foods.
Federal and state governments have targeted most of these potential causes, even making efforts to restrict food purchases (though with less success).
But there is a growing body of evidence that, other policy levers held constant, improving access does little to close the nutritional divide. The latest working paper from Wharton’s Jessie Handbury, Princeton’s Molly Schnell, and the USDA’s Ilya Rahkovsky reinforces that understanding.
The authors use consumption data on grocery purchases from over 100,000 households, as well as the location of and products stocked by over 200,000 food retailers across the US, to tease out the extent to which changes in access to nutritious food affect the nutritional quality of food purchased by households with little income or education. Their findings (bold mine):
What happens when new stores arrive?
…[H]ouseholds change the mix of stores in which they shop when a new store is introduced, but that store entry has no lasting impact on the nutritional quality of household purchases at these stores.
Does access have any effect?
Improving the concentration and nutritional quality of stores in the average low-income and low-education neighborhood to match those of the average high-income and high-education neighborhood would only close the gap in nutritional consumption across these groups by 1-3 percent.
Lessons for policy?
Together, our results indicate that improving access to healthy foods alone will do little to close the gap in the nutritional quality of grocery purchases across different socioeconomic groups. While equating access would help reduce differences in nutritional consumption across different income groups, over 90% of the disparities would remain.
Perhaps these results would change if low-income individuals were given more generous nutrition assistance, could somehow devote more time to food preparation, or were provided with better education on the benefits of eating a nutritious diet. But, by itself, pumping more nutritious food into low-income neighborhoods does not appear to be a silver bullet.
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