Improving Access to Food in Low-Income Communities: An Investigation of Three Bay Area Neighborhoods

This report seeks to describe and analyze that dysfunction as it manifests itself in three low-income neighborhoods in San Francisco and Oakland. It does not examine the causes nor scope of poverty in those communities nor does it intend to estimate or describe the prevalence of hunger. These measures are amply documented in a 1995 report on hunger and the problem of food insecurity commissioned by the California Senate Office of Research and, in 1993 and 1994, reports on hunger from the Alameda County Community Food Bank and San Francisco Food Bank, respectively. Rather, this report treats poverty, hunger and a lack of nutritious, affordable food in low-income neighborhoods as givens and seeks to answer the following three questions: what and how people in low-income communities eat; what obstacles they experience in accessing nutritious food at reasonable prices; and what potential solutions there are to overcome these barriers