Food Access in Philly

Hi! My name is Simon and I am in SLA. I’m doing my You & The World project about the food access in Philadelphia. We saw in the first post that the food quality is directly related to a lot of criterias, like the place you live in. The price is probably the most important factor, that is why this issue is very controversial and not fair: it is way harder to get healthy and fresh food when you’re disfavored. For more information, click on this link.  

A lot of relevant information have been found since the last post, and I think that I have been very well surprised by the survey responses (even if they are some stain points). The first thing that surprised me is the number of people who are bringing their own lunch at school (26 people ought to 49 responded “yes”), which is a good sign because most of the people who do so bring healthy food. But let’s remember that, sadly, almost 60% of the people don’t!

This is the proportion Yes and No on the question, that's a pretty good result!

Secondly, another good point was what people eat at home, for dinner. Out of 49 answers, most of the poeple (like 90%) mentioned pastas or rice with chicken (that’s the most common dish I noticed!) and sometimes with vegetables, like broccoli. I am really nicely surprised on this point because I thought that most of the people use to go to a restaurant eating alone a such of non-healthy food (even if some people said they used to do). In the same register, I saw that people don’t often eat outside of the school, which is also a positive point.

Through all of the data given, many links can be drawn with my initial researches for the first post. First let’s see the relationship between the area where people live and the quality of the food they eat. In the survey, most of the people considered that they use to eat healthy, let’s analyze this!

One of the question of the survey, asking how healthy people think they eat…

As we can see, most of the people (43 out of 49) consider that, on a scale of 5, they give themselves a score between 3 and 4, which is actually pretty encouraging, even if we can reconsider the question of what people consider as healthy.  

While doing researches, I found new interesting facts about the food access in its globality. A very interesting one is the food desert. This is a phenomenon defined as large regions in the country where it gets very hard to get fresh food, mainly fruits and vegetables. In Philadelphia, this pattern is sadly increasing since a while. As says this article and a couple other sources, the issue makes the healthy food access harder for those who don’t live close to grocery stores and have to take public transportations for a long time, around an hour. This issue just complicates even more the organization of the city in term of proximity.

To get all this data, I made a quick survey that I sent by mail to people from my highschool, including few teachers. My questions were mainly answered by multiple choices question or via scales. Before starting, I had a lot of European stereotypes or common says, like that the American East Coast eats very bad food, that most of the people are overweight… This wasn’t very conscious but I was still concerned about it! Obviously, this is kinda true, but not totally. What I mean by this is that a lot of progress are being made, like associations, global realization, and that’s what I took conscious of while doing my researches! My personal opinion is really changing: I think that a lot of the people have the goal to eat healthier, they can just missing ways of doing it.

Though, everything is not totally clear and I am still wondering about few facts. For example, if people use to eat dinner in family, or other habits about food.

For more information, you can check my Annotated Bibliography.

Here is the link to my survey, where all my images are from.  

(sorry for the non-cropped images, slate didn't paste them correctly!)