Food Deserts in London?

Although London has probably never had such a rich and diverse food supply, there are still many Londoners who suffer from "food desert" conditions, at varying levels of intensity.

The term “food desert” was originally used to describe an urban environment lacking in certain facilities:

“The large suburban estates that are a recent feature of the townscape are epitomised by the regular rows of similarly styled houses that have earned for themselves the title of suburban deserts. They often lack the shops, churches, public houses, and social centres that allow a community life to develop”, J. Baines, The Environment (1973).

Food deserts were effectively identified by the Low Income Project Team in 1996, as “areas of relative exclusion where people experience physical and economic barriers to accessing healthy food”, though the phrase was not explicitly used [1].  A potential candidate for the attribution for first explicit use of “food desert” is referenced in the British Medical Journal, 2002, Vol.325, p.436, S.J. Cummins, as having been originally used in the 1990s by a resident of a public-sector housing scheme in the west of Scotland in the early 1990s. And whatever the debate on origins, by 2002, the concept had mainstreamed, as for example, reported in The Economist:

“The term "food desert" was coined to describe areas with limited access to healthy food. There are food deserts all over Britain, in rural as well as urban areas. "It's not just a matter of there being no shops," says Elizabeth Dowler, a sociologist at Warwick University. "Often there are shops. But these tend to be meagre, run-down shops which sell little or no fresh food." A recent study of Sandwell, West Bromwich, for instance, found that around 90% of the households in the area were within 500 metres of shops that sold junk food and fizzy drinks. Less than 20% of the houses were within 500 metres of a shop selling fresh fruit and vegetables. This can be attributed largely to the steady increase in the number of supermarkets in Britain since the 1970s and the commensurate decline in the number of independent grocers. Around 80% of food shopping is now done in supermarkets, compared with less than 50% 25 years ago”.
—"Getting stuffed," The Economist, July 27, 2002

A subtlety of the food desert paradigm that The Economist does not touch on, but which empirically Community Food Enterprises, based in Newham, East London, has detected and responded to, is that the conditions for a food desert may be as much information- or knowledge-based as economic or geographical. In this respect the classical “cost of information” theory applies as a key driver of desert conditions, which for the many groups in Newham with little or no command of English can be high in the extreme.

CFE very elegantly responded to this dilemma by focusing its Social Food Outlet development on schools and other community centres where a) learning is already seen to be the context for the purchasing event and therefore, more socially and cultural acceptable than other settings and b) where children at school can act as intermediaries and translators for parents or grandparents who are actually purchasing the fruit and vegetables. The learning process, and resultant behavioural modification, has many similarities with the way new technologies enter communities, especially the internet, where it is commonly the children who advocate and pioneer in-home use.