If You Build It . . .

The USDA has declared Hudson a "food desert," which it defines as "a low-income census tract where a substantial number or share of residents has low access to a supermarket or large grocery store." The assumption of the USDA study that identified food deserts throughout the United States was that people in low-income communities don't have healthy diets because they don't have ready access to healthy and affordable food, and the objective was to make healthy and affordable available to everyone. 

A recent study, however, suggests that just having healthy food available and affordable to people in low-income neighborhoods is not enough to improve their diets. Conducted by the Nutrition Transition Program at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, the study tracked thousands of people in several large cities for fifteen years and discovered that people who had supermarkets available in their neighborhoods didn't eat more fruits and vegetables. Read more about the study in this article from the Los Angeles Times: "Access to grocers doesn't improve diets, study finds."