The Role of Food Access in Meeting Some Dietary Guidelines: A Natural Experiment

We investigate how the supply of retail food outlets affects the household purchase of fruits and vegetables. We are particularly interested in the specific effects of the increased supply on household of fruit and vegetable purchases in underserved areas. Difference-in-difference type fixed-effect OLS regressions are used to estimate these effects for the pooled sample and for the subsamples by income level, in two settings – pooled cross-section and panel data settings. The findings indicate that the increased availability is not associated with an increase in fruit and vegetables quantity purchased. No discernible effects are detected for underserved areas and for income-differentiated subsamples. The results indicate that the policy intervention to increase the number of local food outlets not increase fruit and vegetable consumption in general, and the target underserved communities will likely not be affected.