The Impact of Food Deserts on SNAP Participation and Food Insufficiency among the Elderly

Residents of some neighborhoods with limited access to sources of affordable and nutritious food may face greater barriers to obtaining enough food for a healthy diet.  Low-income elderly may be uniquely affected by these so-called "food deserts" due to limited transportation options, strong attachments to local neighborhoods, fixed incomes, physical limitations in food shopping. This paper examines the association between limited food access and food-related distress for elderly individuals. Restricted-use data from the 2006 and 2010 Health and Retirement Study (HRS) are used to match survey respondents with Census tract level measures of food deserts in the same years. The richness of the HRS data allows us to explore a number of outcomes that could be affected by food deserts, including food and material hardship, participation in food assistance programs, and food spending. We estimate cross-sectional and fixed effects regressions for households in urban counties. We find little evidence of food-related distress or differences in program participation among those in food deserts compared with those outside of food deserts.  However, we do find that households without a vehicle in food deserts are 13 percentage points more likely to report food insufficiency and 8 percentage points more likely to skip meals. These results suggest that seniors without vehicles in food deserts may be the most vulnerable to limited food store access.