Food Deserts Are Growing in Ohio and Other States

An interactive map of neighborhoods lacking easy access to fresh food was released late last month. Ohio — as well as every other state — is flecked with black census tracts that meet the group’s definition of food deserts.

It didn’t have to be this way, said the group that produced the map, the Institute for Local Self Reliance. If the federal government hadn’t stopped enforcing a Depression-era antitrust law in the early 1980s, independent grocery stores would still be thriving in small towns and in poor urban neighborhoods, it said.

“Since the early 1980s, independents’ market share has fallen from over 50 percent to about 25 percent,” the group said in a report accompanying the map.

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