Where is the Nearest Grocery Store?
Food Deserts and the Middle Class in Rural Indiana
Food insecurity is a persisting problem in rural Indiana, and lack of assistance programs makes the problem worse. Many rural areas do not have grocery stores, they might only have a gas station or convenience store that sells processed, high-fat foods. For this project, I spoke to four different middle-class people who have lived in or currently live in rural Indiana, one of whom is also the principal of a high school in a rural district. This project aims to use their experiences to share some of the realities of food access for middle-class families in rural areas, and present potential solutions to the challenges they face.
Introduction
For this ethnography, I wanted to explore the ideas of food insecurity and access to food assistance programs in rural Indiana. I was raised in Putnam County, a rural county that has several small towns and only two grocery stores, a Kroger and a Walmart. From my childhood home, driving to either of these grocery stores took 15–20 minutes. Other than these grocery stores, there were a few gas stations and convenience stores, but otherwise places to buy food were limited. This situation is a common one in Indiana, a state where 75 of the 92 counties are considered rural or mostly rural [1]. This means that there are thousands of Hoosiers living in a situation where buying food is a challenge, a problem made worse by a lack of food assistance programs in rural areas. This project aimed to understand the personal experiences of Hoosiers living in rural areas so that improvements can be made to food access and assistance programs.
Self-Reflection
This project gave me the opportunity to reconnect with rural Indiana, the place where I grew up and the place that will always be home to me. When conducting interviews, I expected to find that living in rural food deserts would significantly impact food availability for the people who participated in my project. However, I found that this was not completely true. But, everyone I interviewed were middle-class, college-educated people. My two friends in the project are both college graduates and grew up in middle class families, and my mother and former principal are both in the middle class as well. While my project was able to collect information about living in rural Indiana for a certain socioeconomic class, it can not be generalized for everyone living in these areas. Some of my high school classmates were from working-class families, but I was not friends with them. This may reflect who people choose to interact with, and how people often are friends with those of similar backgrounds. Therefore, the information presented in this project is a small part of a much larger story to tell.
Previous Literature
There has been a lot of research on rural food insecurity and access to assistance programs, but little change has been made in decades to solve these problems. In rural areas, the USDA defines a “food desert” as a low-income area where a grocery store is more than 10 miles away, meaning many rural areas are considered food deserts and many people in these areas suffer from food insecurity [2,3]. Studies have found that distance from a grocery store is the biggest obstacle for people living in rural areas to access healthy food, and combined with a lack of public transportation, people may rely on higher-fat foods that can be bought at a gas station or convenience store [4,5,6].While the majority of those in rural areas did not point to transportation as an obstacle to buy groceries, those who did have transportation challenges were significantly more likely to be food insecure [7]. Along with distance and transportation, the prices of healthy foods at local grocery stores can also be a problem, as many residents in rural areas expressed their frustrations with high prices of foods at the stores closest to them [5,7]. As the previous literature as shown, there are many obstacles that make it difficult for people living in rural areas to access to healthy, fresh foods. However, it is important to acknowledge there are significant social and cultural influences to this problem as well, as lower-class people are often shamed for their struggles as they may be considered “bad” and morally wrong for not eating “good” food [9].
According to a report by Purdue University, while rural counties in Indiana have lower rates of food insecurity than urban counties, people living in rural areas have the added difficulty of less access to programs designed to reduce food insecurity [8]. Previous research has shown that food assistance programs in rural areas are limited, and there are still several obstacles that lower access to the few programs that do exist [5]. This problem continues in Indiana, where one study conducted on many counties in Indiana found that rural counties were less likely to have assistance programs, and that food pantries and soup kitchens were farther away from where the majority of the population lives [2].
Analysis
After speaking with my mom, my childhood best friend Nikita, and my friend Andrew (who grew up in a different area of rural Indiana than Nikita and me), and after thinking about my own experiences, there was a common theme between them of the need to plan ahead when thinking of grocery shopping. As quoted by my mom, “there was no ‘last minute’ shopping available,” and grocery trips were often once a week when a parent had the opportunity to go into town to shop. Toward the end of the week, before the next grocery trip, Nikita and Andrew both spoke about how food would begin to run out, so they often had to eat whatever was still in the pantry. This was echoed by my mom who said she often had trouble figuring out what to cook for dinner on the nights before her weekly grocery trip. However, all three of these people talked about how this never caused them to be worried about the source of their next meal. Also, all three of these people spoke about how they knew of a few food pantries in the area, but none of these provided fresh, healthy food.
Through my conversation with my former principal, Jason Chew, I was able to gain a unique perspective from a rural school administrator. Over the last year, the COVID-19 pandemic has made it more difficult for schools to provide meals to students like they normally would when the students are at school in-person. The school would send meals to central hubs in the main communities in the district, like to community centers or churches. However, many students did not take advantage of this as there was no transportation to get the meals for many students. And as about 50% of the students in the district qualified for the free lunch program, meals from the school are a necessary part of their daily food intake. The district was mostly in-person for the majority of this school year, but Mr. Chew still worries about the students eating enough fresh fruits and vegetables. There are plans to build a community garden at the school, where students can learn about plants and food, but the lack of fresh food remains as a problem for many students in the district. Chew expressed his frustration with the whole situation, saying “we can tell people are struggling with hunger, but I don’t know how to make it better when I don’t even know what they’re going home to.” As a small rural school, there is not much state and federal funding to help the school to provide more food assistance, but the administrators try to do everything they can with what little funding they receive.
Conclusion
Growing up in rural Indiana, I never thought about how grocery stores were so far away. It was just the way it was, everyone I knew was experiencing the same thing. But, moving to Bloomington for college made me realize how convenient it is to have a grocery store so close. It also made me realize how challenging it must have been for some of the other kids from my school district to go to the grocery store. Through this project, I have learned that this is a shared experience for people living in rural Indiana, and how people have adapted by always planning for grocery trips. I have also seen how rural school administrators struggle to provide the necessary help to students struggling from hunger, as resources are limited. There are many more stories to tell of the rural experience with food in Indiana, but it is clear that changes need to be made to increase access to people living in these regions. Investment in grocery stores with fresh products, increased funding to rural schools to provide assistance, and expansion of food pantries to include fresh fruits and vegetables are all possible ways to solve these problems.
Bibliography
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[3] Dutko, P., Ver Ploeg, M., & Farrigan, T. (2012). (rep.). Characteristics and Influential Factors of Food Deserts (pp. 1–29). United States Department of Agriculture.
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[8] Carriere, D. (2013). (rep.). Food Insecurity in Rural Indiana (pp. 1–4). Purdue Extension.
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