Is the focus on food deserts fruitless ? Retail access and food purchases across the socioeconomic spectrum ∗

Despite an absence of causal evidence showing that limited access to healthy foods is to blame for unhealthful consumption, policies aimed at improving poor diets by improving access are ubiquitous. In this paper, we use novel data describing both the healthfulness of household food purchases and the retail landscapes facing consumers to measure the role that access plays in explaining why some people in the United States eat more nutritious foods than others. We first confirm that households with lower income and education purchase less healthful foods. We then measure the spatial variation in the average nutritional quality of available food products across local markets, revealing that healthy foods are less likely to be available in low-income neighborhoods. Though significant, spatial differences in access are small relative to the spatial differences in store sales and explain only a fraction of the variation that we observe in the nutritional content of household purchases. Systematic socioeconomic disparities in household purchases persist after access is equated: even in the same store, wealthier and more educated households purchase more healthful foods. Consistent with this result, we further find that the nutritional quality of household purchases responds very little to changes in their retail environment, especially among households with low levels of income and education. Together, our results indicate that even if spatial disparities in access are entirely resolved, over two-thirds of the existing socioeconomic disparities in consumption would remain. ∗Prottoy Aman Akbar and Yue Cao provided us with outstanding research assistance. David Cuberes, Amanda Chuan, Janet Currie, Gilles Duranton, Ephriam Liebtag, Ilyana Kuziemko, Todd Sinai, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, Tom Vogl, and David Weinstein provided helpful comments. We thank participants in seminars at the 2014 Urban Economics Association Meeting, the 2015 American Economic Association Meeting, the 2015 NBER Summer Institute, NYU, Princeton, the Federal Trade Commission, Wharton, and the Economic Research Service at the USDA. Jessie Handbury would like to thank the Wharton Social Impact Initiative, the Research Sponsors’ Program of the Wharton Zell-Lurie Real Estate Center, and the Economic Research Service at the USDA for generous financial support. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Economic Research Service, the USDA, Nielsen, Gladson, or IRI. This paper was previously circulated under the title "What drives nutritional disparities? Retail access and food purchases across the socioeconomic spectrum," NBER Working Paper No. 21126, April 2015.