Dessert Foods versus Food Deserts

By Chris Mittelstaedt
August 22, 2023
Reading Time: 2 mins.

I wasn’t really a very good student. Luckily in elementary school, I had a great teacher who helped me after school with my spelling. Her name was Mrs. Unruh. She used to devise little tricks to help me remember how words were spelled. Besides learning my months of the year in song (“January, February, March, and soon comes April, May, and Juuune”), I still check how many Ss are in “desert” versus “dessert,” by saying: “You always want two desserts but only one desert.”

The image of the desert that I had in my mind back then was of the typical Lawrence of Arabia–type landscape, where rolling dunes of yellow-tan sand stretched off to a horizon so dry it made me thirsty just thinking about it.

What’s a Food Desert?

There is, however, another kind of desert that exists, and it’s more common in the United States than we’d like to admit. It’s called a “food desert.” A food desert is an area where healthful and affordable food is difficult to find.

Imagine that you don’t have a car. Perhaps you aren’t able to afford public transportation or might have a condition that makes it difficult for you to move around easily. Now imagine that you don’t have a grocery store with fresh produce or a farmer’s market anywhere close to where you live. Imagine that you don’t have restaurants nearby that serve healthy food.

Food deserts are just one reason that each week The FruitGuys donates all its excess and visually-imperfect fruit, produce, and snacks to food banks and hunger relief partners. Fighting hunger and thinking about how to give more people, regardless of their income or where they live, the access to healthy food is part of our mission. We choose to donate to those in need and reduce healthy food going to waste.

Hunger Relief 2023

Since January, we have donated 132,213 pounds of produce to our hunger relief partners nationwide. This translates into 264,427 people fed and 123 tons of CO2 emissions diverted.