What is Food Insecurity?
Food Insecurity is the state of being without reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, nutritious food.
The following is an excerpt from the 2019 SAVI study, “Getting Groceries: Food Access Across Groups, Neighborhoods, and Time” by Unai Miguel Andres and Ross Tepe. To read the full report, visit their website here.
Executive Summary
When people do not have access to healthy food, this can impact their diet, their health, and their quality of life. Food deserts are a way of defining communities that lack healthy food access. These are neighborhoods with both low healthy food access and low income.
There are 208,000 people living in food deserts in Indianapolis. Importantly, 10,500 households without a car live in a “transit food desert,” with no grocery easily accessible by bus. The number of people in food deserts has risen by 10 percent since 2016, mostly driven by the closure of Marsh Supermarkets, one of Central Indiana’s major grocery chains. Despite the Marsh closings, there are actually more grocery stores in Indianapolis now than in 2016, but the existing stores tend to be grouped together and so offer access to fewer people than they once did.’
When it comes to food access, center city neighborhoods have fared better than townships and older suburbs. Two former Marsh locations downtown reopened under new ownership, and neighborhoods within four miles of Monument Circle actually have better food access today than in 2016. But for neighborhoods outside that four mile radius, the number of people in food deserts rose by 21 percent. Several Marsh locations in older suburbs either closed and were not reopened or reopened and closed again. This left many neighborhoods without a nearby grocery.
Black residents are more likely to live in food deserts than any other race or ethnicity in the county. People in poverty are fifty percent more likely to live in food deserts than people above the poverty threshold, and households without vehicles are also more likely to live in food deserts than households with vehicles. White and Latino residents have experienced the largest increase in the people living of food deserts since 2016.
When looking at food access by different transportation modes, access to healthy food changes drastically. Households with cars appeared to have access to grocery stores within a short drive almost everywhere in the county. Only 6,100 people lived farther than a 10 minute drive from a grocery store. On the other hand, food access was the worst for those households depending on bus transit or walking to purchase their groceries. Over 40 percent of Marion County lives in a pedestrian food desert, including over 60 percent of carless households. Also 236,000 people live in transit food deserts, including 10,500 households without cars.
Food Access Through Time
Photo: Food Access Through Time. Credit: SAVI.