Food Deserts in the Southwest: A Case Study of Oklahoma City
Keywords:
Food deserts, Socioeconomic inequalities, Cumulative Spatial Opportunity (CSO) index, Spatial autocorrelation, Oklahoma CityAbstract
This article evaluates access to supermarkets for residents of Oklahoma City with two main goals. The policy-oriented goal is to determine if Oklahoma City experiences a problem common to many metropolitan areas whereby disadvantaged segments of the population have limited access to healthy, affordable food. The methodological goal is to study access incorporating space more explicitly than occurs in most research, using spatial autocorrelation statistics and spatial correlation to identify food deserts. Food deserts are then spatially correlated to clusters of disadvantaged groups that have been found to be underserved by grocery stores. Unlike other cities in the United States, Oklahoma City's inner-city residents often have the best access to supermarkets, especially the Hispanic population and the poor. However, the African-American population experiences food deserts, a finding of many other studies in the United States.
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