Gas-groceries fill service gaps at a hefty price

PITTSBURG, N.H. – William Laste thinks nothing of driving more than 400 miles roundtrip to buy groceries, or of supplementing his shopping with fiddlehead ferns and dandelion greens gathered in fields near his home.

In this mountainous outpost of 870 people along the Canadian border, good food at fair prices is hard to find. There are no supermarkets, and the community’s two convenience stores offer little fresh produce and plenty of high prices.

Laste’s fixed income can’t accommodate $2.99 for his favorite cheesy crackers. He gets around it by combining shopping with monthly visits to friends in cities to the south, where the same crackers cost half the price.

Such is life in “food deserts” – increasingly common rural and sometimes urban areas where supermarkets with healthy and affordable food are many miles away.

For people like Laste, who have the vehicles, time and patience to go the distance, it’s an inconvenience. For the poor and elderly, it can mean stocking the refrigerator with the pricey, fatty fare of gas station convenience stores.

“It’s going to be more chips and canned and processed foods, which just play into high rates of obesity, diabetes and other fat-related diseases,” said Andy Fisher, executive director of the Community Food Security Coalition in Venice, Calif.

The term food desert was coined more than a decade ago in Great Britain, where it was used to describe the phenomenon of supermarkets withdrawing from cities to build larger stores on the outskirts.

Few formal studies have been done in the United States, but sociologists and social service workers believe research eventually will show that life in food deserts is financially, mentally and physically costly.

The majority of U.S. food deserts are rural areas, but researchers say a large number of people also are affected by a relatively small number of urban areas with poor grocery access.

But isn’t it a bit unreasonable for people who choose to live in the boondocks to complain that they don’t have a supercenter around the corner?

Experts say the grocery landscape hasn’t always been this way. Not so long ago, most communities had mom-and-pop grocers.