Food Deserts: A Look into Food Accessibility in Southern California

• In Event: 50620 - Section on Environmental Sociology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 13: Food Consumption and Waste

Abstract

Every single day individuals and families are either growing or purchasing food to feed
themselves or others close to them. Unfortunately just based off of where they live, the food they
are consuming could be categorized as either healthy or unhealthy for human consumption. This
reasoning is controlled by institutions and local political leaders that control how their counties
are mapped geographically based on social structure, norms, culture, and even economics. For
the most case, cities are structured and divided into socioeconomic groups and institutions tend
to fluctuate their resources to better support what group they are in. There are many factors that
go into place how someone may get accessed to food; utilizing their own space (i.e. garden),
transportation (i.e. car, bus), outside support (family, food bank), and by walking. The level of
these factors do changed based on environmental concerns in certain zip codes people live. In
this case, if healthier options are located in a higher socioeconomic area where public
transportation does not exist, an individual that may be affected heavier under transportation
could not have access to those healthier options. This research will outline and address these
concerns using data collected from locals in Southern California, the 2020 US Census, and
various descriptive data from outside research. It will address that there are institutional policies
in place that limits people to what they have easy access to. It will end by showing you data from
various instruments that supports this hypothesis.

Author

• DeJuwuan Pope, California State Univ-Dominguez Hills