Prices and Availability of Healthy Foods Across St. Louis

A number of recent policy interventions have focused on “food deserts,” areas where inhabitants have limited access to nutritious foods, as causal factors in the United States’ obesity epidemic. Yet in the city of St. Louis, many areas with high concentrations of high-risk, low-income households do not qualify as food deserts. I survey grocery and convenience stores in areas with differing levels of median household income to examine the state of food access in these regions. Although I do not find evidence of a correlation between the prices of healthy foods and median household income, availability of healthy items is significantly more limited in areas with low median household incomes. This result suggests that reliance on the “food desert” measure will not adequately address the problem of variable food access in St. Louis.