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How to Eat Healthy in a Food Desert

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Sometimes, it’s hard to eat healthy. In urban neighborhoods and at travel pit-stops, our food choices are often limited. Restaurants often serve nothing but burgers and soda, and groceries often carry more potato chips than fruit. These food deserts—regions with limited fresh food—have spread all across America. It’s made healthy eating hard; and sometimes, near impossible. In fact, food deserts have contributed to our massive obesity crisis. How, then, can we eat healthy when we have no control over our food choices?

With a little resourcefulness, you can often find healthy food items when you’re trapped in a food desert. If you can find a nearby grocery, you can almost certainly build a balanced, healthy meal covering all five food groups. And even when you’re stuck eating at a convenience store, all may not be lost. Your food won’t be gourmet, but at least you won’t have to settle for a greasy burger.

Here are three key strategies:

  • Scout around. There might be a grocery store nearby. You’re much better off eating lunch at a supermarket than at a restaurant or at a gas station. Grocery stores are more likely to carry unprocessed food.
  • Eat whole, unprocessed foods. Processed foods are stripped of their nutrients, and are often bundled with extra fat, sugar, and chemicals. They’re also more expensive.
  • Follow the food pyramid. To eat a balanced diet, you’ll need grains, beans, vegetables, fruits, and dairy (1). If you can’t get all the groups, just do the best you can.

Here are the tactics for each food group:

  • Fruit: Buy fresh, not canned. Don’t get picky about the type of fruit; cheap, common fruits are fine. Oranges, bananas, and apples are packed with fiber and micronutrients like Vitamin C and phytochemicals.
  • Dairy: Get whole or low-fat milk. Stay away from chocolate milk/flavored yogurt products; they’re loaded with sugar and preservatives. It’s much better to drink organic, but conventional milk is acceptable in a pinch.
  • Meat: You don’t need any. Organic meat would be acceptable, but I doubt you’ll find pastured beef in a food desert. To get enough protein, eat some beans and nuts. It should be easy to find a package of peanuts with no additives besides salt. For beans, scavenge for a can with no extra additives like lard: refried beans are fine. Look for a can with a self-opening top, since you probably won’t want to buy a can opener. Beans aren’t glamorous, but they’re lean and jam-packed with protein. Avoid processed beans like baked beans or chili beans.
  • Grains: Stay away from pastries, donuts, and muffins. A loaf of 100% whole wheat bread will give you plenty of energy without excessive sugar or oil. Sometimes, I’ll carry a box of oatmeal with me. Secret tip: If you’re not picky, you don’t need to boil oats in water. I eat them all the time in their raw, dry form.
  • Vegetables: This food group is the hardest of all: I’ve never seen a convenience store carry veggies. However, if you have access to a grocery store, you’ll have plenty to choose from. Any common vegetable will do: carrots, tomatoes, and lettuce are all fine. Buy some bell peppers and cucumbers and wash them in a bathroom sink. Eat them raw. If you buy a salad, throw away the ranch dressing (better yet, return it to the clerk).

Be sure to avoid these common pitfalls:

  • Don’t eat out. By preparing your own meals, you can better control what goes in it.
  • Stay away from brand names. Commercially trademarked “food products,” such as Cheetos or Coca-Cola, are often loaded with harmful additives like corn syrup, sugar, hydrogenated oils, food dyes, and preservatives. They also lack vitamins and minerals.
  • Minimize packaging. Most things packaged in excessive plastic or aluminum aren’t good for you. Unflavored, canned beans or tuna are the only exceptions I can think of.
  • Stay away from conventional meat. In all likelihood, you already eat plenty of meat. Conventional meat products are extremely bad for the environment, and often contains added oils, fats, sugars, and chemicals.
  • Don’t drink sweetened beverages. This includes not only soda, but also fruit juice. Juice is only healthy when you prepare it yourself and don’t discard the fiber. Most commercial juices have tons of added sugar, and virtually all of them discard the natural fiber. Watch out for deceptive labeling–a juice-flavored drink isn’t really juice.
  • Avoid food that never spoils. Fresh food is more nutritious. Food products with a perpetual shelf life–ramen noodles, candy, microwave burritos–are highly processed.

By following my own guidelines, I’ve managed to scrape by in food deserts while traveling. Even when most restaurants were selling junk food, I was able to maintain a healthy weight eating whole-wheat bread and bananas while drinking milk.

Hopefully we’ll have some real alternatives soon. But until then, we need to be resourceful scavengers of the food desert.

How difficult is it for you to get fresh fruits and veggies? How about organic food?

  1. The USDA updated the pyramid; the meat section has been replaced with protein. Protein from beans/nuts, the USDA says, is plenty. Dry beans and peas may be counted as part of the “meat, poultry, fish, dry beans, eggs, and nuts group.”

  2. A group of volunteers from the Brooklyn Food Coalition went around and mapped all the local food sites and what types of fresh food they served. The data is available at their site, Food Census. Let me know if any of you have seen similar done on a national scale; the rest of us could sure use it.

Minimize Food Additives

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We get our milk from these happy cows.

Potassium azodicarboxylate? I was puzzled: why was this food additive in my raisin bagel? While invisible to the naked eye, there were indeed microscopic traces embedded in the dough. I read the nutrition label again: a mystery ingredient was lurking in my Old-World style bread, hidden inside swirls of cinnamon-raisiny goodness. Perhaps it’s a preservative, I thought, or maybe a dough softener.

Whatever the purpose, potassium azodicarboxylate was a compound I was familiar with. Back when I was a chemist, I handled hundreds of chemicals. They ranged from thiols (the putrid) to aromatics (the carcinogenic) to acids (the explosive). I wore thick gloves at work, sometimes doubling the layers, while shielding myself behind safety goggles, a lab coat, and a thick protective fume hood. Since I had once prepared potassium azodicarboxylate at work, I was surprised to find it in my bread. My test tube had weaseled its way onto my dinner plate.

Yet I had faith in chemistry. I had been trained to believe that scientists knew precisely which additives were safe and which weren’t. Eating natural was Luddism–a superstitious, backward way of thinking about food. I believed that there was no distinction between organic and synthetic food, since both of them consisted of chemicals. Vitamin C, beta-carotene, and lycopene were chemicals, too. So if chemists could inject certain harmless additives into my food, I had no objection. I didn’t mind if they loaded up my bread with corn syrup, dyed it with food coloring, then mixed in some preservatives. In fact, chemicals were a sign of progress. I was eagerly awaiting the day when chemists would introduce the world’s first no-calorie bagel. It would be made with imitation carbohydrates, artificial sweeteners, and synthetic oils. I could eat all I wanted without getting fat. What more could you ask for?

But the more I learned about nutrition, the more I realized how dangerous our food experiments are. Our knowledge of the biochemistry of the human body is still primitive. Yet today, additives permeate our food far more than ever before; they are now nearly impossible to escape. A single breakfast cereal may contain dozens of them, including aspartame (a low-calorie sweetener), BHT (a preservative that prevents staleness), and Yellow No. 6 (a dye). These very same cereals are then marketed as health products because they are also loaded with synthetic vitamins.

It’s difficult to prove whether a food additive is truly safe or not. Most additives haven’t been documented for more than a few years. Yet lengthy studies are essential: in large doses, even relatively benign chemicals might cause illnesses. Sugar is a relatively harmless food, yet when eaten in excess, it can cause diabetes. So if even organic compounds might be toxic after excessive exposure, surely we ought to scrutinize additives even more closely.

The problem is that screening food additives is both expensive and time-consuming. Many additives are therefore quickly accepted, and only later proven to be toxic. Sodium nitrite (preservative for cured meats), hydrogenated vegetable oil (margarine), and high fructose corn syrup (sugar substitute) appear safe at first, but can cause serious health problems in a few decades.

So I eventually switched to eating whole foods. These are foods in their pure, unadulterated state: carrots, broccoli, eggs, and milk. I worry less about food safety with natural foods, since they have the backing of tradition. In a sense, humanity has been experimenting with whole foods for thousands of years, across billions of dinner tables throughout the world. This makes it unlikely that the humble potato might cause cancer or heart disease. It gives me a little peace of mind at meal time.

Eating natural does, however, have its challenges. That calorie-free bagel has still eluded my grasp.