Addressing the issue of food deserts

[Selah23]

Hi,

We're working on our university project which is focused on food deserts. Our brief is to design a solution which makes grocery shopping more convenient and to educate parents around food nutrition.

The solution we are proposing is a food package service which will be provided through your child primary school. Ingredients as well as fun, nutritious recipes will be provided for the whole family to get involved with making dinner.

Does this sound like a service you would use?
Are there any issues with this service?
Is there anything else that may make it easier for those living in food deserts to access healthy, nutritious meals?

What on earth is a food desert?

So, basically, it’s like Hello Fresh? And therefore expensive and wasteful - and perhaps patronising? My DC’s primary school already has a service providing a vegetable box, which you can sign up for, and pay for. I don’t use it, but others do -but they are sometimes left with the problem of what to do with a random selection of veg that they wouldn’t necessarily choose. It’s relatively expensive, though.

When I was young there was a mobile shop that came around.

Nowadays I think some supermarkets are able to deliver your shopping to your home.

Tiramisu, trifle, rice pudding etc?

No such thing as a food desert.

Dessert on the other hand...

Just reread the op and realise you did actually mean a 'food desert'.

Who makes this shit up?

Sounds really patronising. No I would not use anything like this.

I live in a Dutch village. That's pretty much a food desert unless you like bread, potatoes, cabbage, and peanut butter.
The coffee is good though.

Is a food desert full of sandwiches?

oh i see what you did there

ummm OP.........online supermarket ordering? Why would schools want to get involved? what is in it for the school? would you give the stuff away or sell it?

What is a food desert?

Schools really have enough on their plates, why is it necessary to use schools for your idea? How much work will it involve for the school ? If someone's not happy, they will complain to the school first.

I'm reading between the lines but imagining a box of food that you collect from school when you pick up you child? Picking children up from primary school often involves juggling bags, coats, water bottles, lunch boxes, homework, library books, precious junk modelling, scooters, younger siblings in pushchairs....... Multiply this by however many children you have. There is no way I'm walking home, however far, also carrying a box of food which i could otherwise shop for at a convenient time when I'm not juggling children or get it delivered direct to my house.

I don't know what a food desert is. It sounds patronising.

Also I resent the notion that people on low incomes or living in poverty aren't eating nutritionally out of ignorance and just need to be 'educated'. Plenty know about good nutrition, they just can't bloody afford it, either in time, money or other resources.

Food desert as a term has been around for years. It’s where people live far from supermarkets/places to buy nutritious food. Ie either they live very rurally or they live somewhere where all the nearby shops are corner shop types selling junk. It’s more commonly used in the US though - OP have you done any analysis of the characteristics of U.K. food deserts to see whether this would help? I think community pantries etc tend to be more useful.

Wtf is a food desert?

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert For anyone incapable of googling. The term has been used for decades.

Can you explain what a food desert is?

As someone working in a primary school-we are barely managing to keep sufficient staff numbers in front of classes at the moment-why wound you think schools have the capacity to take on something like this?!

Of course everyone is capable of googling but us not knowing the phrase off the bat is important information for the OP. They need to understand how people will react to the language they use in this piece of work.

Is that the full brief or have you summarised it? The reason that I ask is that Food Deserts affect more than just families with young children, so have you been assigned just the demographic of families with children under the age of 11 or should your solution be addressing everyone but then with an additional focus on supporting parents with learning about healthy eating?

I believe that there was a big report produced by Kellogg about this topic and it's generally an issue that impacts low income areas with elderly and disabled people being disproportionately affected so how would your initiate target those people?

Who would actually run the services within the primary schools?
When would the cooking sessions take place around school times/lunch/breaks/breakfast club/afterschool clubs and school cleaning?

Other than providing ingredients and cooking lessons which are short term immediate fixes could you build more holistic support into your initiative, things like pairing with existing organisations that offer food bank/community pantry services, assistance on checking benefits are correct, support in completing paperwork foe things like PIP claims, services that offer employability courses........

I always assumed from my time living in the Netherlands that it was some kind of law that you could find chicken satay within 200m of any home.

It certainly felt that way.

It’s pretty self explanatory though isn’t it? A desert is a barren place, a food desert is a place barren of food.

Not relevant. That’s a wiki - hardly a bastion on top-notch info -article, and even that says it “has multiple issues”, and it only refers to the US.

Food desert is not a term in common parlance in the U.K. Not to say it doesn’t exist, but that many people won’t know what it means, even if they are directly affected by it.

A food desert is an area where multiple indicators of deprivation are high, and in particular there are no supermarkets within easy reach (though there may be more expensive convenience stores) and also where delivery services might not operate.
OP hasn't coined the term.

Check you privilege and be very glad you're not in one.

@Bettethebuilder I agree that it’s more often used in the US (and said so in my post) but the wiki page says the term was used in a U.K. nutrition report in 1995.

Here's The Guardian from 2018

www.theguardian.com/society/2018/oct/12/more-than-a-million-uk-residents-live-in-food-deserts-says-study

The term has been in use in Britain for many years now.