New Mexico Mercury

What separates you from affordable healthy food?

Do you wait at your house for someone headed to town to catch a 36-mile ride across the reservation to the closest grocery store to buy fresh foodstuffs for yourself and your family? Probably not. 

At this point in your life, you acquire your nutritious diet through a monotonous trip to the grocery store. You wander around the one-stop shop’s confusing aisles to get more than you wrote on the list, or, maybe it’s so routine, you don’t even make a list anymore. You maneuver around clusters of humanity, obtusely parked carts and the man talking too loud on his cell phone about what to buy for dinner. At any time of year, you can fill your basket with a worldwide assortment of goods: 20 types of fruits, nearly 40 varieties of veggies, at least a dozen items baked daily, an array of fresh seafood and meat options, and the shelves and shelves of assorted dry goods. You are a little perturbed today because your favorite drink is not in its normal place, and you think it’s too much trouble to see if they have any in the back.  At the end of the chaos, you wait in line until your close to the edge as your favorite prime-time TV show starts, but today you don’t boil over because you remembered to take your reusable bags out of the trunk before shopping. You finally check out and begin to make the harrowing trip across the parking lot with the cart that has the one wheel that pulls maddeningly to the right. As you meticulous pack your truck and backseat, you thank a higher power that another trip to the grocery store is complete.

If you’re like me, you take this trip for granted, but we shouldn’t. You see, right here in New Mexico, miles of roads, many of which are dirt, separate families from supermarkets, and a significant percentage of these households don’t have a vehicle.  These challenges create difficult scenarios for people to eat well and stay healthy. 

According to the USDA, over 23 million Americans live in a food desert: an area with a concentration of low-income households and low access to a supermarket.    In an urban environment, a low access area is defined by being at least one mile from a major grocery store.  Imagine the odyssey of walking for blocks or taking public transportation carrying handfuls of plastic bags stretching ever closer to rupture or pulling an overfilled personal shopping cart only to arrive at your building to begin climbing flights of stairs to your kitchen. The trip--resulting in red pressure marks across your palms, tired legs and a weary back--would stifle an abled-bodied person’s desire to buy fresh produce.  Now imagine an elderly person, a person with a disability, someone who is ill, or a single parent shopping in a food desert.  The necessity of eating well becomes, at best, an occasional luxury as people resort to buying highly-processed items at the closer convenience stores or fast food restaurants.

While Albuquerque deserves its own analysis, New Mexico’s most prominent food deserts are rural.  A food desert in a rural area is defined as a concentration of low-income households living at least ten miles from a major supermarket, and the USDA’s Food Access Research Atlas reveals stark disparities in the counties of Cibola, McKinley and San Juan.  These three counties host vast food deserts like other rural counties in the Southwest, but the jarring statistic is the percentage of households without vehicles. Of the 21 census tracts in these counties deemed food deserts by the USDA, 18 have at least 8 percent of the households without vehicles; the highest rate, 27 percent, occurs in a census tract in Cibola County.

In the last decade, bushels of research discuss the health trends of urban food deserts.  Recent studies challenge the assumption that providing access to nutritious food will improve a population’s health,  but research in Chicago shows that simply the location of a person’s residence in relation to a supermarket affects one’s health.  Increased rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease among populations living in food deserts appeared statistically significant even when controlling for income, education and ethnicity.  

As the urban researchers may expect, the food desert figures from our rural communities correlate with a set of health indicators: high rates of childhood obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease and diet-related cancers. More research is required to conclude causality.

With today’s food deserts covering much of the Navajo Nation, social justice issues and progress on diet come into question across the reservations in our state.  Living near Newcomb in San Juan County, going to a grocery story means traveling at least 36 miles to Shiprock or 58 miles to Gallup. Catching a ride to town from a family member, a friend or a stranger is a necessity as 18 percent of households in Newcomb’s census tract do not have a vehicle--and, after catching the ride to town, you still have to get back home with what you bought.  Contemporary American Indian literature offers childhood stories of destitute lifestyles strung out by commodity cheese, cured meat and TV dinners. Will the next generation’s songs be filled with soda, canned vegetables and processed snacks?

So, next time you are at the supermarket, enjoy your privileges and blessings to purchase affordable healthy foods.  As you choose which one of the 50 cheeses to buy, think about how fresh--never been frozen--seafood made it to your dinner table in the middle of New Mexico. And while you fill your cart with bananas from Costa Rica, Oranges from Brazil, grapes from Chile, rice from India, coffee from Vietnam, beef from Wyoming, tortilla chips from Texas and canned green chile from Hatch, consider why these foods have travelled thousands of miles to you and why they will not travel another 200 miles to someone who has not had fresh foodstuffs in months.  Then, maybe for a minute on your way out to your car when your shopping cart’s wheel begins to act autonomously, consider how we can make our state’s diet better for everyone.