The Health Consequence of Food Deserts (2010)

You're welcome, Jay. Now the connections between obesity and geography, health correspondent Betty Ann Bowser reports on the prevalence of so-called food deserts in the south. It's the second of her two-part report on America's obesity epidemic. The Health Unit is a partnership with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The small towns of the Mississippi Delta have a tempo of life all their own. The landscape is dotted with rural enclaves like Lambert, here in the northwest part of the state, population 1700. It's the kind of place where everybody knows each other. Like Sunday morning, the good book rules supreme. So people here have no trouble getting their souls nourished. The problem is getting nourishment for their bodies.

Lambert is what's known as a food desert, because finding a place that sells good fresh food is like looking for a needle in a haystack. If you live in Lambert and you need groceries, your only option is this convenience store. On the day we were here, there were no fresh fruits or vegetables, a few cold cuts, and the prices were high. The Department of Agriculture says 23.5 million Americans, including six and a half million children, live in low-income areas more than a mile from a supermarket. Lifelong resident Jennifer Hoskins says it's not easy to find healthy food for her family. It's really hard, because when I was coming up, we had greens and gardens and all... now and do you have to buy produce. So it's really hard for the kids, I mean, and the majority of them, they eat like pieces, and that's obesity. Like so many Delta towns, Lambert was once the heart of a thriving farming community in Quitman County.

Most of its residents are African-American and descendants of sharecroppers. As farm workers were replaced by machines, many found work in nearby textile mills. But over the past decade, those jobs have also dried up. Today, nearly half the town lives below the federal poverty line. First, it was growing up a girl here in the town, everything we even had, dry goods store, we had a grocery store, we had a pharmacy, we had our little doctor's office. But now there's nothing here. Except in a few cases, the food that's grown here is rarely eaten here. That's because the rich farmland is used to grow commodity crops that are shipped out. The closest grocery store is over three miles away, and even their produce is pricey, and locals say, often, the pickings are slim. We were permitted inside with our cameras. It's more than a 20-mile drive to get to a store with better and less expensive selections.

And in this part of Mississippi, there is no public transportation, no taxis. In American food deserts, gas stations, convenience stores, and fast food restaurants are the only places to buy something to eat. And when money is tight, the dollar menu at the local fast food joint is tempting. At the only McDonald's in Quitman County, the salad menu isn't served. So it's burgers, McNuggets, and the like. The variety of foods that are available are poor quality nutrients. Dr. Al Rouser is the District Health Officer for 18 counties in Northwest Mississippi. He's been working as a public health official in the Delta for 40 years. I had a malnutrition problem when I arrived. I have a malnutrition problem now. Back then, it was the absence of food or the unavailability of food that was the problem. And now I've got this abundance of food.

The problem now, Rouser says, is that the food people eat is loaded with calories and fat and they're leading more sedentary lives. Medical studies show that people who live in these food deserts have higher rates of obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes than those in areas served by mainstream grocers. We can't tell people to buy fresh food if there's no place to buy it, right? First Lady Michelle Obama has zeroed in on food deserts as part of her signature campaign to end childhood obesity. And the Obama administration pledged $400 million to help underserved areas. Last month, she visited the state's capital, Jackson. If you've seen it, you know how hard it is. So we got to make it easier. We got to eliminate food deserts and make sure that there are more grocery stores and farmers markets and communities. But it's not all bleak.

A group of local growers and community organizers is trying to expand farmers markets in the Delta and get their produce into local school cafeterias. Farmer Cornelius Tool is part of an effort to help students grow their own vegetables. We just got to teach our kids about health eating and teaching where food come from and teaching what they need to know about it. And at the New Mountain Zion Baptist Church in Lambert, Pastor Michael Jossel and his wife