It’s known as the barbecue capital but grocery stores closing on both sides of Kansas City have created food deserts.
A Sun Fresh grocery store in Kansas City, Missouri closed in August, and six miles away in downtown Kansas City, a Merc Co+op grocery store will shutter at the end of the year.
Both stores were the only nearby places for residents to get fresh and healthy groceries as opposed to processed and fast food.
The stores were in historically redlined neighborhoods, and residents from those areas who still want to buy fresh groceries will be forced to travel at least a mile in both directions and transport heavy bags of food on public transportation.
Kristina Bridges, a research assistant professor at the University of Kansas Medical Center’s department of family medicine and community health, explained that you live in a food desert if you can not get to a full service grocery store easily.
She told The Beacon: Kansas City that the University of Kansas’s Medical system has been mapping food insecurity among its patients since 2017 and found a strong correlation between historic redlining and rates of type-2 diabetes and food insecurity in those neighborhoods.
‘We have big food insecurity bubbles, big Type 2 diabetes bubbles,’ she said.
‘They were north, where downtown KC and the Merc is, and the east side where the Sun Fresh was. If we pull out our old redlining maps, it’s exactly the same pattern.’
The correlation between food insecurity and redlining has led some to label the problem as ‘food apartheid’ instead of food desert, because deserts occur naturally and they contend the problem was actually created by man-made systems.
Chronic diseases such as type-2 diabetes, obesity and hypertension are more common in food deserts.
Bridges said even some doctors need to be educated as she had an experience where a medical practitioner told her he didn’t believe food insecurity was an issue because, ‘his patients were all fat.’
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