Our opinion: Fostering better nutrition is a key to reducing
public health costs. That makes the scarcity of large grocery
stores in some urban neighborhoods, especially poor ones, a
matter of public policy. It’s easy, and comforting, to assume
that in an modern, industrialized nation, everyone eats well.
Surely with programs like food stamps, even needy people are
doing OK, right? More than 40,000 people in Albany and
Schenectady live in what are known as food deserts — places
where a grocery store is at least a mile away. Many are poor.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that about 3,700 of
the more than 23,000 people in Albany who don’t live near a
large grocer are poor. In Schenectady, about 5,400 of the more
than 19,000 people for whom a supermarket trip is more like a
trek are low income. Moreover, those estimates were based
largely on information gathered before a recession that has made
even more people poor. That’s not just an inconvenience. It’s a
public health issue in a society where the