Supermarket Redlining and Food Deserts: Potential Policies and Alternative Food Market Solutions with Applications to the Hartford Food System

Food deserts are neighborhoods that are typically socioeconomically disadvantaged and have high levels of low-income populations who face barriers to accessing healthy, nutritious food. These barriers which include, but are not limited to, the increased distance these food insecure populations are located from large food retailers that supply fresh produce. Many of these inequalities stem from institutionalized racism which allowed for practices such as supermarket redlining and, in part, led to the creation of food deserts in places like Hartford, Connecticut. In using the historical context that shaped the Hartford food system and comparing the identified alternative food market solutions used to remediate food deserts to which of these strategies are being applied to in Hartford, this paper seeks to analyze some of the potential policies that have been proposed to address food insecurity in the Hartford food desert and the negative public health impacts they have had on its residents