By: Sara M. Albert, Assistant Director of Food Policy
To bring awareness to the need for better access to healthy food in our community, CHILDREN AT RISK convened the Dallas Healthy Food Retail Summit on Thursday, February 19 at the Nasher Sculpture Center.
Almost 700,000 residents of Dallas County, including over 245,000 children, live in lower income communities with limited supermarket access – and with no convenient source of fresh vegetables, fruits, whole grains and lean protein – the building blocks of a healthy diet.
In Dallas County, a staggering 36% of ZIP codes contain areas of limited access to affordable and nutritious food. In parts of South Dallas, West Dallas and the Southern Sector, supermarkets are sparse, and grocery shopping and accessing healthy, affordable food is harder that it needs to be, particularly for families without a reliable source of transportation. Besides there being too few supermarkets in some neighborhoods, the existing supermarkets are unevenly distributed across the Dallas area. What is more, nearly twice the percentage of African-American and Latino residents and nearly twice the number of residents who live below the poverty line reside in areas that lack access to healthy food. People who live in neighborhoods without access to grocery stores suffer from diet-related deaths at a rate higher than experienced by the population as a whole. The consequences are particularly stark for people in low income neighborhoods, where research shows a clear link between obesity rates and access to fresh, wholesome food.
To address this critical issue, the Dallas Healthy Food Retail Summit, co-chaired by United Way of Metropolitan Dallas, engaged community partners in a conversation to explore public policy solutions to improve access to healthy food. Participants heard presentations by Dr. Donna Persaud, Chief of Pediatrics at Parkland; Brian Lang and Risa Waldoks of The Food Trust’s National Campaign for Healthy Food Access; Cheryl Boswell, Vice President and Executive Director of the Health and Wellness Alliance for Children; and Keilah Jacques, Program Director of Charting the Course. CHILDREN AT RISK will incorporate the policy recommendations developed during the Summit in our local policy initiative to develop new fresh food resources for underserved communities.
At the Summit, CHILDREN AT RISK released a new Report entitled Food for Every Child: The Need for Healthy Food Retail in the Greater Dallas Area, co-authored by The Food Trust, a Philadelphia non-profit and national leader in the work to improve fresh food resources in communities. The Report identifies the gaps in fresh food availability and the relationship among healthy food access, diet-related diseases and neighborhood income levels.