“If you build it, they will come” isn’t a cure-all for the problem of healthy options in urban food deserts. Study after study has found that even when fruits and vegetables are easier to come by, residents aren’t necessarily more likely to buy them.
Take Philadelphia and Detroit, where healthy eating campaigns raised awareness, but didn’t spur behavioral change. In 2014, summarizing the disappointing findings from the study in Philadelphia, the Los Angeles Times’ Melissa Hardy posited that future interventions might do well to adopt a more holistic approach and deepen their engagement with the community. She wrote:
Community groups and supermarkets may need to teach shopping and cooking skills to consumers who might not know how to choose a ripe tomato and may never have learned to cook at home. The retailers that open those stores may need to develop pricing and credit policies that make sense in the neighborhoods they serve. And the store shelves themselves may need to help educate new customers about what a healthy diet looks like.
If plunking down a new store doesn’t seem to do the trick, it does seem logical to wonder if a multi-pronged approach that considers a community’s habits and needs would do more to promote long-term, large-scale change. That’s the perspective researchers adopted when designing a studyabout the impact of corner-store makeovers on shoppers’ perceptions and behaviors, recently published in the journalBMC Public Health.
[For more of this story, written by Jessica Leigh Hester, go to http://www.citylab.com/navigat...orner-stores/484370/]
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