In a busy shopping center in a once blighted neighborhood in North Philadelphia, The Fresh Grocer supermarket attracts an eclectic crowd of customers. On a recent snowy Friday afternoon, some were cruising the grocery store’s upscale sushi bar while others clutched coupons and scoured the store for deals.
Just three years ago, the spot where the gleaming supermarket now sits had been empty for a decade, leaving neighborhood residents without a local grocery store. A Pennsylvania state program aimed at eradicating “food deserts”—poor neighborhoods where residents have to journey more than a mile to find produce—doled out millions in tax breaks and grants to The Fresh Grocer supermarket chain and dozens of other stores to help them open in underserved areas.
Subsidizing supermarkets is one of many aggressive taxpayer-funded experiments policy makers have embraced as a way to battle the country’s high obesity rates. And while it may seem obvious that providing healthier food in neighborhoods helps residents eat better, research so far has been mixed, and no one has found a causal link between the availability of fresh food in neighborhoods and obesity.
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