The Food Desert of LA

One of the issues that has been bothering me this year while supplying and making my own food is finding healthy and affordable food. Moving into a house with my friends and gaining a great deal of independence has been really exciting but I have found that a big struggle of mine is trying to eat healthy without spending too much money and giving myself enough time to cook it all. During a trip to the grocery store, I have tried starting to meal prep for the week, but the ingredients add up and there’s only so much I can spend. It becomes more enticing to purchase a cheap and easy microwaveable meal, especially if that means I can use my money on something else for that week. When I am shopping it comes down to deciding between a meal that’ll be much easier to make meaning I can spend more on something else or a more time-consuming one that cost significantly more (you can guess which one I end up usually choosing). There is also only so much time in the day and when it comes down to it dedicating the time to cooking these meals is not my top priority and in most cases, I do not have the time to do it. I could simply buy a bag of lentils and cook a pot of that at a cheap price, but it becomes hard to choose that over a $5 microwave Mac n Cheese. By the end of the week if I have not had the time to cook and use all the food most of it has gone bad and become a waste of food. This leaves me frustrated at the waste and annoyed at how impractical it becomes to try and find a balance between completing my usual tasks and having the time to cook and eat a nutritious meal.

While dealing with this dilemma it also made me think about how difficult and impossible it has become for people living in low-income to try and live a healthier lifestyle, especially in Los Angeles. I am lucky enough to be able to have a much better opportunity at healthy living but for people with low incomes it is not so easily accessible. A resident of LA had to say this about her struggle with finding a healthy balance in Melody Yuan’ “Nourishing Healthy Life Options in L.A.’s Food Desert”,

There’s honestly not enough time in the day to travel to a grocery store with fresh produce, and then come home to cook for my family of eight,” says South L.A. resident Mildred Z., who has asked not to have her full name disclosed. “People always tell me that I need to have a healthier lifestyle, but try doing that when you’ve got two jobs, kids, and the closest grocery store is 35 minutes away with traffic (Yuan, 2017).

Food deserts which have been a long ongoing issue are low-income urban areas with almost no access to grocery stores with fresh produce. Although Los Angeles provides countless healthy markets and produces not all areas are so lucky more specifically the region of South Angeles which is considered to be a food desert (Borrelli, Gunn, and Leung, 2020). There are not enough grocery stores in a reasonable distance that provide fresh foods but instead are filled with fast food restaurants or convenience stores. Just as Mildred Z. said there is not enough time in the day to make the trip to a healthier grocery store while also dealing with two jobs and taking care of her family. Not all of these individuals have access to their own mobile vehicle and can’t take a quick walk or drive to the store therefore having to take public transportation and bring all their bags back becoming a much more time-consuming and difficult ordeal.

It is not fair that they have to deal with so many blockades to live a healthier lifestyle because of the area that they live in. I find this issue especially frustrating because local stores that used to be able to provide fresh food cannot afford to anymore because of chain grocery stores and the expensive price of the produce, forcing them to close. After looking more into the issue I have found that there have been more efforts and studies completed to advocate for easier accessibility to fresh food and healthier grocery stores located in low-income areas but I believe there are still more strides to be made. There is an extreme difference in the grocery stores you find in Beverly Hills compared to the ones in South LA. Obviously, it is unrealistic for those two places to have the same stores but South LA should not be shunned to fast food restaurants and have little to no access to healthy foods. The efforts that are being made are promising and hopeful but should continue on and not be a forgotten project.

Work Cited

Borrelli, Dominic, et al. “Food Deserts in South L.A.” ArcGIS StoryMaps, Esri, 19 Nov. 2020, https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/4ef7d78c52ec4b29a6073ffdc6809e83.

Yuan, Melody. “Nourishing Healthy Life Options in L.A.'s Food Desert.” EastWestBank ReachFurther, East West Bank - Reach Further, 7 Dec. 2017, https://www.eastwestbank.com/ReachFurther/News/Article/Nourishing-Healthy-Life-Options-in-LA-s-Food-Desert.