Sorry Hugh, there is nowhere in England where people can't buy cheap fresh vegetables

And they're off again on the food deserts line - all as part of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's mission to lecture the life out of us about being chubby (and doubtless shift a few books while getting well paid to front a dire TV series):

When Julie, who collared me on the very first day of filming in Newcastle, took me to Church Walk in Walker, where she grew up, I began to get another insight into the problem. If you played a game of Hunt The Fresh Vegetables in this part of town, you could be looking for weeks.

This is the food desert lie. It has been around for a while - poor people are fat and ill because there are no shops selling fruit and veg on the corner. It is rubbish. Here's a handy little map showing why:



That's right folks - this terrible place with no fruit and veg is less than two miles from a massive ASDA super store. There's even a convenient bus service.

The rest of Fearnley-Whittingstall's argument is equally crass, featuring as it does the usual 'shoot the messenger' rubbish about advertising, a slew of snobbish nonsense about fast food takeaways, and an utterly ignorant reference to evolution. Even without the map, we know that the food deserts argument is rubbish because people have done the research:

When examined in a multi-level modeling framework, differential exposure to food outlets does not independently explain weight gain over time in this sample of elementary school-aged children. Variation in residential food outlet availability also does not explain socioeconomic and racial/ethnic differences. It may thus be important to reconsider whether food access is, in all settings, a salient factor in understanding obesity risk among young children.

This is from Helen Lee of the Public Policy Institute of California and, unlike Fearnley-Whittingstall's TV nonsense it's peer reviewed research in a top journal. She found that not only was there no link between child obesity and exposure to different sorts of food outlets but most poor communities had more choice and variety than upscale communities. If the kids are fat (and we can argue the point here) they're not fat because their mum can't buy a cabbage.

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The wrong diet - supply or demand?

The bien pensant foodies sorts like to believe there's a thing called a 'food desert' wherein poor folk reside. And in these deserts there is no healthy food - no greens, no beans, no fruit. Just stodge and junk.

For the campaigners this is all down to the evils of the market - that fresh stuff can't be afforded by those poor folk so they pile in the pie and pile on the calories. Or maybe it's not:

...people writing about food deserts make a mistake when they assume that food deserts are all about inadequate supply, instead of inadequate demand.  I suggested that food deserts might exist because people who don’t want to eat healthy will live in neighbourhoods without healthy food, not because they choose not to move elsewhere, but because companies that sell healthy food — and this goes for all types of food stores, not just supermarkets — will not make money there.

Ah, you say, this is just some bloke holding forth, where's the evidence?

The evidence goes like this:

...there is really no relationship, according to this one recent study of nearly 100,000 Californians, between the distance between your body and a full-service supermarket (or any other kind of food store), and whether or not you are obese.  Distance, which is a proxy for access (the idea of a food desert is that the nearest supermarket, which has fresh produce, is distant), is for all practical purposes a non-factor.

Yet we have whole legions of well-meaning folk running healthy food projects in poor neighbourhoods - funded mostly by our taxes. And the people who live there would rather eat pizza and chips!

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The myth of the food desert...

Pie!

Today, as is my wont when I've a time to spend in Bradford without meetings, I wandered round John Street Market. It is a little sad to see some of the gaps appearing in the market - partly because some of the rag trade and fancy goods stalls have decanted to the emerging Asian bazaars and partly because it's a pretty tough time right now for retailers. However, there's still the food to marvel at - the row of butchers (now joined by a halal butcher to meet that demand), the fishmonger, the greengrocers, the spice stall and the stalls selling produce for the East European, African and Caribbean customers.

Yet we - by which I mean the well-off, middle classes - tell ourselves that there is something called a 'food desert'. A place peopled with the poor where there is inadequate access to fresh food and especially fruit and vegetables. It would appear that, in the nation where this idea was first invented, the USA, it is revealed to be a myth - especially the myth that this lack of 'good' food leads to obesity:

Such neighborhoods not only have more fast food restaurants and convenience stores than more affluent ones, but more grocery stores, supermarkets and full-service restaurants, too. And there is no relationship between the type of food being sold in a neighborhood and obesity among its children and adolescents.

Indeed this research tells us that:

Within a couple of miles of almost any urban neighborhood, “you can get basically any type of food"

Perhaps it's different here in Bradford? Somehow I doubt it - most of the City's poorest districts are within a short walk of the city centre where the wonderful John Street Market sits. And there are any number of corner shops, mini-markets and such - almost all selling fresh fruit and vegetables in abundance.

If people aren't eating fresh fruit and vegetables it isn't for lack of availability! And it certainly looks like there's not much of a link with obesity (although it defeats any logic for there to be such a link). Truth be told, the obesity problem is overstated by the assorted nannying fussbuckets who campaign on these things but such as it is, obesity is caused by choices people make rather than dysfunction within the market or the unfairness of society.

Rather than blaming society or seeking for a convenient business scapegoat, we should perhaps ask why it is that some people get so very fat. And try to help them with their problem rather than making up myths about obesity and its causes. To be pretty blunt, this study shows once again that obesity is not a public health problem but something that relates to the health (or ill-health) of individuals and the choices they make in their lives.

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