Andrea is 83 years old and spends half of the year in Iruecha, a village in the province of Soria that currently has 16 registered residents. Iruecha has just a teleclub, which is a small bar where the neighbors gather mainly in the summer and on holidays, when the village's population increases as it welcomes visiting family members, who are usually city residents. For grocery shopping, the closest town is Maranchón, in the province of Guadalajara, which is a 15-minute drive away and has grocery stores, as well as a bakery and some restaurants.
Andrea lives in what is known as a food desert. This term was coined in the 90s in the United Kingdom during Margaret Thatcher's era, and it refers to specific areas, whether rural or urban, where the population has limited access to fresh and healthy food. Guadalupe Ramos Truchero, a professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Valladolid specializing in Food Sociology, has extensively studied food deserts in Spain, an increasingly widespread phenomenon in predominantly rural communities with low population density, such as Castilla y León. “The disappearance of small food shops in villages should be addressed in the same way as schools or medical centers. If health and education are rights, so is food,” believes Ramos Truchero.
If health and education are rights, so is food”
However, on many occasions, the needs of the population are met by private initiatives. This is the case in Iruecha, where a van delivers fresh products to the inhabitants by the hand of a local merchant. “In the end,” points out Ramos Truchero, “we are leaving a fundamental right in private hands.” The question hovers in the air: what will happen when this person retires? “In economically marginalized areas, as is the case in many rural areas, having a business becomes unprofitable, so often there is no succession.”
Small retail stores in Nou Barris and Horta-Guinardó
In Spain, the province of Teruel is another paradigm of food desertification. The existence of scattered elderly populations without access to fresh products is comparable to places like Alto Alentejo in Portugal and Central Anatolia in Turkey. For this reason, a team of researchers from the three countries, led by scientists from the University of Zaragoza, have launched the Desert project, which aims to analyze the impact of this scenario on people's health. Isabel Antón, one of the project's researchers, insists on the need to “identify and map these areas in order to then go out into the field, in this case in Teruel, and work together with local people, services, and businesses.”
Ramos Truchero agrees with her, urging the Junta de Castilla y León in this case to repeat the study that has been carried out only once “which clearly shows which areas are desertified: it is the first step to remedy the situation.” According to the sociologist, “in the end, people manage, help each other, create groups, but this should not be the solution.”
Rural Spain versus metropolitan areas
Alberto lived for many years in the Raval neighborhood of Barcelona. When he could, he did his shopping at the Boqueria Market, although when he got back from work, later than 7 pm, many stalls were already closed. The lines, the crowds, and the exorbitant prices of some stalls mainly aimed at tourists gradually made him stop visiting the Boqueria and start buying at a franchised supermarket with a very limited fresh food offer. It is another form of food desertification, which occurs in areas where, although the number of establishments is high, it is difficult to eat healthily. “It happens that, in a way, the impact of unhealthy food offerings ends up overshadowing the healthy ones,” says Ramos Truchero.
The Raval is the neighborhood in Barcelona with the lowest per capita income, according to the latest data from the National Statistics Institute (INE). As explained by the Secretary of State for Health, Javier Padilla, it is precisely in neighborhoods with lower incomes that there is a higher obesogenic pressure. “We understand obesogenic pressure as the number of influences that encourage the consumption of foods that promote obesity, from advertising to the amount of establishments offering unhealthy food.”
Boqueria Market, Barcelona
According to a study conducted in Madrid, the density of fast food establishments near schools is double in low-income neighborhoods compared to higher social classes. Padilla suggests that the solution lies in what we call “healthy taxation,” meaning that tax policies should be tools to improve health. This entails not only taxing unhealthy foods but also implementing fiscal benefits for healthy foods to incentivize their consumption among the population.
In addition, in neighborhoods like El Raval but also in many others (from Lavapiés to La Barceloneta), there are other factors that, together, hinder the population's access to healthy food. “From the proliferation of stores that sell exclusively food products from other countries, which do not fit into a Spanish family's diet, to the gourmetization and touristification of the gastronomic offer,” explains Ramos Truchero. In this sense, the municipal groups of ERC, Junts, and Barcelona en Comú have just announced that they will approve a proposal to curb the expansion of 24-hour supermarkets, as they pose - they claim - a challenge to urban planning and neighborhood coexistence.
The food oases
Mar lives in the Les Corts neighborhood of Barcelona. Despite not having any municipal markets nearby, she has four large supermarkets within a 200 m radius of her home. All of them have a produce section, and some also have a butcher, deli, and fishmonger inside. Mar is familiar with the offerings and usually does her weekly shopping at one of the 4 supermarkets, based on promotions and her preference for certain products. Additionally, she has access to numerous small neighborhood stores (such as a fruit shop right below her apartment) that she frequents regularly.
A shop assistant works at a fruit store in Barcelona
He lives in a food oasis, which is defined as “any place where people have the best possible access to healthy food options and eating environments. Access includes the financial and physical ability to obtain high-quality, affordable, culturally acceptable, and nutritionally adequate food and beverages that meet the community's needs,” according to the Washington State Department of Health.
According to Miguel Ángel Lurueña, PhD in Food Science and Technology and author of the blog Gominolas de Petróleo, “eating well in the end is not a matter of desire, but of knowing what eating well means and what does not, and, not less importantly, being able to eat well. For this, it is essential to have access to a series of services that many people lack.” Ramos Truchero adds, on his part, that it is unacceptable that “something as random as the territory in which we live ends up influencing our health and, therefore, also equality of opportunities.”