food desert
An area in which residents’ access to healthy, affordable food is highly restricted, for example, because of the absence of food retailers in a low-income urban neighbourhood. The metaphor of a desert inverts the idea of an oasis: food deserts, at least in developed countries, are patches of poor nutrition in an otherwise biodiverse metaphorical ecosystem that offers most people a very good diet should they choose to eat well. The metaphor was coined in the early 1990s in the UK and had been used widely in studies of socio-spatial inequality in Western countries. Poor diet is typically linked with low incomes, which are also linked with reduced life expectancy and higher rates of illness.... ...
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