Assessing racial differences in the nutrition environment: A descriptive study of individual perceptions of the grocery store shopping experience

Studies in Los Angeles and Detroit suggest that majority-African American neighborhoods have fewer supermarkets, and consequently, less access to healthy food than do surrounding neighborhoods. In Pittsburgh, we analyzed people's perceived access to healthy food in relation to their neighborhood of residence and proximity to supermarkets. Grocery store addresses, obtained from the Allegheny County Health Department, were geocoded using ArcGIS. Population size data was obtained from the US Census Bureau. A survey that operationalizes concepts of the neighborhood-level nutrition environment was self-administered to a convenience sample of participants (n=207) at the Healthy Black Family Project at the Kingsley Association in East Liberty; responses were analyzed in SPSS. Geocoding results show that East Liberty (African American population = 75%) has the lowest population-to-supermarket ratio among Pittsburgh's neighborhoods. Yet, only three of 67 survey respondents from East Liberty and Larimer reported that their primary grocery store was either of two high quality national supermarkets in the neighborhood. Significantly more respondents from these neighborhoods reported spending more than 10 minutes travelling to their primary store than from neighboring majority white neighborhoods (African American population range from 3.4% to 7.2%) (Fisher's exact test; p=0.001). We conclude that Pittsburgh differs from other US cities with regard to some majority-African American neighborhoods being proximal to high-quality supermarkets. Yet, our study demonstrates that there are perceived barriers to accessing some supermarkets in these neighborhoods. These barriers represent targets for interventions designed to eliminate racial and ethnic health disparities.