单选题
A New website from the U.S. Department of
Agriculture (USDA) shows that 10 percent of the country is now a "food desert."
The Food Desert Locator is an online map highlighting thousands of areas where,
the USDA says, low-income families have little or no access to healthy fresh
food. First identified in Scotland in the 1990s, food deserts have come to
symbolize urban decay. They suggest images of endless fast-food restaurants and
convenience stores serving fatty, sugary junk food to overweight customers who
have never tasted a Brussels sprout. Accordingly, Michelle
Obama announced a ＄400m Healthy Food Financing Initiative last year with the aim
of eliminating food deserts nationwide by 2017. Official figures for the number
of people living in food deserts already show a decline, from 23.5m in 2009 to
13.5m at the launch of the website. Although this might on the face of it
suggest that the initiative is off to a superb start, sadly it does not in fact
represent a single additional banana bought or soda escaped. This is because in
America, the definition of a food desert is any census area where at least 20
percent of inhabitants are below the poverty line and 33 percent live more than
a mile from a supermarket. By simply extending the cut- off in rural areas to
ten miles, the USDA managed to rescue 10m people from desert life.
Some academics would go further, calling the appearance of many food
deserts nothing but a {{U}}mirage{{/U}}. Research by the Centre for Public Health
Nutrition at the University of Washington found that only 15 percent of people
shopped for food within their own census area. Critics also note that focusing
on supermarkets means that the USDA ignores tens of thousands of larger and
smaller retailers, farmers' markets and roadside greengrocers, many of which are
excellent sources of fresh food. Together, they account for more than half of
the country's trillion-dollar retail food market. A visit to
Renton, a depressed suburb of Seattle, demonstrates the problem, The town sits
directly in the middle of a USDA food desert stretching miles in every
direction. Yet it is home to a roadside stand serving organic fruit and
vegetables, a health-food shop packed with nutritious grains and a superstore
that researchers found attracts flocks of shoppers from well outside the
desert.