A recent analysis from the Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts examines how food deserts in the United States are defined and how well common metrics capture the realities of food access. Drawing on federal and nonprofit data, Escoffier finds that widely used measures like Low-Income, Low-Access (LILA) scores and the Retail Food Environment Index (RFEI) values offer an incomplete picture, overlooking key drivers of food insecurity and health outcomes.
Escoffier uses data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Feeding America to examine how geography, infrastructure, and income shape food access and health—and how accurately LILA scores and RFEI values reflect those outcomes. Their key finding: food deserts are not a strong predictor of poor health outcomes.
Although the term “food desert” remains widely used by media, researchers, academics, policymakers, advocates, and public health agencies, the USDA has moved away from the term. Since 2013, the agency’s Economic Research Service has instead used “low-income, low-access” to describe areas with limited access to healthy food.
According to Escoffier, 18.8 million Americans, or about 6.1 percent of the U.S. population, live in LILA tracts, where residents are both low-income and geographically distant from a grocery store. But the analysis found little national correlation between LILA scores and public health outcomes.
Meanwhile, food insecurity—which Escoffier defines as limited or uncertain access to enough food due to economic constraints—meaningfully correlates with diabetes and obesity, suggesting that the ability to afford food may matter more than physical proximity to it.
Geography, an incomplete lens according to Escoffier, also doesn’t reflect whether people have the means of reaching nutritious foods, even if stores are nearby. The study scrutinizes RFEI values, a measure that compares the density of fast food and convenience stores to that of supermarkets and grocery outlets.
While LILA scores highlight geographic isolation, RFEI values reflect abundance—specifically, an oversupply of poor-quality food. A widely cited measure of the quality of food options, according to Escoffier, RFEI values show little correlation with LILA scores, meaning they often describe different places entirely.
Escoffier points to the presence of independent restaurants and access to fresh produce as more reliable indicators of a robust food ecosystem. But even these factors show limited connection to health outcomes—highlighting the complexity of the issue.
“Ultimately, our findings suggest that the reality of food deserts is far more complex than a simple lack of grocery stores—and that meaningful solutions would require an equally layered understanding of food access, affordability, and community context,” the analysis concludes.
By unpacking the interplay between infrastructure, income, and food culture, Escoffier’s findings underscore the need to move beyond outdated metrics in favor more nuanced, context-specific responses to food insecurity.
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Photo courtesy of Marcela Laskoski, Unsplash
