Increasing Access to Healthy Foods in Baltimore City and Montgomery County

Most people are creatures of habit when it comes to what they eat, so what really determines our food choices? Probably our eating habits, cost, and convenience. However, for families with limited income, food availability and affordability determines where to shop and what to buy.

It was this dilemma that caught the attention of Assistant Professor Mary Zaki while working on her doctorate degree at Northwestern University.  She followed the USDA’s extensive research on the relationship of food and affordability in low-income families. She decided to do her graduate research focusing on how military families were managing paycheck to paycheck, their buying choices, and the effect of payday loans on their food shopping patterns.

“I was in grad school during the great recession, the issue of subprime lending was going on at the time. I wondered why low-income populations were inclined to take out this type of credit. I started researching payday loans and how the funds were being used. I wanted to connect this type of credit to some outcome and what I found most relevant was supermarket shopping,” she stated.

Zaki’s research was welcomed at the University of Maryland College Park’s Department of Agricultural Resources and Economics (AREC) were she is a research professor, teaching Elements of Agricultural and Resource Economics, doing extension work, and continuing her research on food buying and consumption.  Currently she is utilizing the new USDA Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey to explore the buying habits of households on food stamps to determine how travel costs affect their grocery shopping choices and healthy food availability. In another project, she is assisting the Baltimore City Heath Department’s Baltimarket program to analyze their Virtual Supermarket order data.  The Virtual Supermarket is a partnership between the Baltimore City Health Department and the grocery store ShopRite. The program enables food delivery to areas in Baltimore City that are considered food deserts. The food is ordered online and delivered to a convenient location where customers pick up their food. “I’m analyzing the actual orders from each household and comparing it to national dataset to determine if these types of orders differ from typical supermarket shopping trip. I’m looking at what is purchased, what food groups, and how much money is being spent,” she says.

The results from this research will provide data to analyze how these models can be developed in other underserved communities. “We are looking to see how these partnerships can be more sustainable. Instead of looking at outside funding, we are looking at how tax benefits and government subsidies could be generated for this to be a profitable endeavor for ShopRite and other supermarkets to operate in areas that are not in profitable demographic regions,” she concluded. 

Zaki is also a member of the Community Food Access Working Group within the Montgomery County Food Council, which focuses on promoting healthy food access to households with low access to healthy food choices, As part of the group, she was responsible for analyzing “healthy” food pricing data collected from food stores in Montgomery County. She found no difference in pricing between stores in high-income areas and those in “communities of low food access”. These results were presented in the 2015 Montgomery County Food Access Report which also highlighted affordability and transportation as big barriers to healthy eating for households in low access communities.

One of the most favorable factors that fuels Zaki’s work is the initiative Montgomery County has demonstrated. Although, the county is considered one of the richest regions in the U.S., there are pockets of underserved communities where access to healthy food choices are limited. Professor Zaki’s work with the Montgomery Food Council is just beginning, their goal is to improve healthy food access for individuals and continue to promote community partnerships to tackle this issue.

The Montgomery Food Council is a volunteer group of individuals working to better the lives of individuals in Maryland, for more information go to: http://mocofoodcouncil.org/