"food desert" meaning in English

See food desert in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

IPA: /fuːd ˈdɛzə(ɹ)t/ [Received-Pronunciation], /fud ˈdɛzɚt/ [General-American] Audio: en-au-food desert.ogg Forms: food deserts [plural]
Etymology: A report by Cummins and Macintyre states that a resident of public housing in western Scotland supposedly coined the more specific phrase "food desert" in the early 1990s. The phrase was first officially used in a 1995 document from a policy working group on the Low Income Project Team of the UK's Nutrition Task Force. Head templates: {{en-noun}} food desert (plural food deserts)
  1. A populated region where food, especially healthy food, is difficult to obtain. Categories (topical): Food and drink Related terms: food bowl Translations (Translations): voedselwoestijn [feminine] (Dutch), ruoka-aavikko (Finnish), désert alimentaire [masculine] (French), pustynia żywieniowa [feminine] (Polish)

Inflected forms

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        {
          "kind": "topical",
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          "name": "Food and drink",
          "orig": "en:Food and drink",
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          "ref": "2009 May 26, Steven Gray, “Can America's urban food deserts bloom?”, in Time, archived from the original on 2016-01-28:",
          "text": "For years, major supermarket chains have been criticized for abandoning densely populated, largely black and Latino communities in cities like Detroit, Los Angeles, Memphis and Newark, N.J. — contributing to what many experts call food deserts.",
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          "ref": "2011 August 12, “America's ‘food deserts’”, in The Week, archived from the original on 2016-05-28:",
          "text": "More precisely, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) defines a food desert as any census district where at least 20 percent of the inhabitants are below the poverty line and 33 percent live over a mile from the nearest supermarket (or in rural areas, more than 10 miles).",
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        "A populated region where food, especially healthy food, is difficult to obtain."
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          "code": "nl",
          "lang": "Dutch",
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            "feminine"
          ],
          "word": "voedselwoestijn"
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        },
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            "feminine"
          ],
          "word": "pustynia żywieniowa"
        }
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          "text": "New Orleans' Ninth Ward is what the U.S. Department of Agriculture calls a \"food desert.\" Food deserts are communities with little or no access to healthy food.",
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        "A populated region where food, especially healthy food, is difficult to obtain."
      ],
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      "code": "nl",
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        "feminine"
      ],
      "word": "voedselwoestijn"
    },
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      "code": "fi",
      "lang": "Finnish",
      "sense": "Translations",
      "word": "ruoka-aavikko"
    },
    {
      "code": "fr",
      "lang": "French",
      "sense": "Translations",
      "tags": [
        "masculine"
      ],
      "word": "désert alimentaire"
    },
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      "code": "pl",
      "lang": "Polish",
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      "tags": [
        "feminine"
      ],
      "word": "pustynia żywieniowa"
    }
  ],
  "word": "food desert"
}

Download raw JSONL data for food desert meaning in English (3.4kB)


This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2025-04-24 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2025-04-20 using wiktextract (813e02a and ea19a0a). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.