During the late 1990s, significant government-led policy debate in the UK on the tackling of social exclusion and the reduction of health inequalities produced a focus on the linkages which might exist between compound social exclusion, poor food retail access, compromised diets, and poor health in deprived urban neighbourhoods. Areas of poor access to the provision of healthy affordable food where the population is characterized by deprivation and compound social exclusion became known as food deserts (Beaumont et al, 1995; Dept of Health, 1996). It was a metaphor which caught the imagination of those involved in policy development, not least because it encouraged a shift in focus in health promotion activity (Lang and Caraher, 1998).
It soon became clear, however, that it was a metaphor which urgently needed ‘unpacking’ and subjecting to critical evidence-based assessment. In response, a number of major cross disciplinary investigations of food access and food poverty in British cities were funded by the research councils and government departments and are currently in progress. In this paper we report findings from one part of one of those studies specifically the first ‘before/after’ study of food consumption in a highly deprived area of a British city experiencing a sudden and significant change in its food retail access.
Adopting the terminology of the Department of Health (1999a), the study has been viewed as offering the first opportunity in the UK to assess the impact of a non-healthcare intervention (specifically a retail provision intervention) on food consumption patterns (and by extension diet-related health) in such a deprived, previously poor retail access community. The findings reported in the paper are novel and potentially significant in the context of public policy debate. As such, the paper attempts both to contextualize those finding within on-going debates on social exclusion, health inequalities and food poverty, and to provide sufficient technical information on the nature of the study to allow researchers working on these issues to judge the quality of the results reported.
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