North Dakota -- Food Desert Update -- July 9, 2022

Some may remember this story from 2011. 

Flashback: on October 14, 2011, I had a link to a Dickinson Press story in which it was reported that Michelle Obama stated that North Dakota was a food desert. The post is here, but the link to the Dickinson Post story no longer works. Insert sad face here. 

So, have things improved? 

Holy mackerel. Link here. 

From The National Library of Medicine, Summer, 2019, in a research article title "The Changing Landscapes of Food Deserts"

In the United States of America, national funds were allocated to address food-desert areas for the first time in 2011, following a series of city and state financing efforts, which began with the Pennsylvania Fresh Food Financing Initiative in 2004. 

To date, such public efforts have provided more than USD 220 million, which has leveraged more than USD 1 billion in private investment through public-private partnerships, to fund nearly 1,000 retailers serving areas of limited food access in 35 states. 

In its most recent 2017 report, the USDA’s Economic Research Service determined that the number of census tracts that met the classification of “low access” had declined measurably since 2010, indicating a general improvement in the proximity of supermarkets to residents across the country. 

Specifically, the US saw a 15 percent decline in the number of individuals living in a limited-supermarket-access area. 

From 2010 to 2016, the share of the population living in limited-supermarket-access areas declined gradually, from 6.8 percent of the population to 5.6 percent. 

State by state, the greatest improvement in increasing food access, as denoted by the percentage decrease in limited-supermarket-access-area populations, was witnessed in North Dakota (41 percent), Idaho (41 percent), Iowa (40 percent), Rhode Island (38 percent), Wisconsin (36 percent), Alabama (35 percent), Kansas (35 percent), New York (34 percent), Arkansas (32 percent) and Indiana (32 percent). 

In contrast, several states have experienced a substantial worsening of the problem, including Maine (with an increase of 27 percent) and Nevada (with a rise of 26 percent).

My hunch: this had nothing to do with national policy as affecting North Dakota but rather a demographic change in rural-to-urban migration and the Bakken revolution, but it makes for a good story.