Food Deserts in the Prairies? Supermarket Accessibility and Neighborhood Need in Edmonton, Canada*
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The U.S. and U.K. literatures have discussed “food deserts,” reflecting populated, typically urban, low-income areas with limited access to full-service supermarkets. Less is known about supermarket accessibility within Canadian cities. This article uses the minimum distance and coverage methods to determine supermarket accessibility within the city of Edmonton, Canada, with a focus on high-need and inner-city neighborhoods. The results show that for 1999 both of these areas generally had higher accessibility than the remainder of the city, but six high-need neighborhoods had poor supermarket accessibility. We conclude by examining potential reasons for differences in supermarket accessibility between Canadian, U.S., and U.K. cities. Key Words: accessibilityEdmontonfood desertssupermarkets Notes a25th and 75th percentiles (given in italics) are provided for all residential neighborhoods only. Notes: Lower values of minimum distance and higher values of number of stores indicate higher access. p-values are given in italics. aFor each accessibility indicator, low accessibility neighborhoods are defined as those neighborhoods with accessibility scores in the lowest quartile. bFor each accessibility indicator, high accessibility neighborhoods are defined as those neighborhoods with accessibility scores in the highest quartile. Note: Z and p-values computed using Wilcoxon rank-sum test of means. Notes: Neighborhoods are identified by number rather than name for anonymity. aAll neighborhoods had zero stores within 1 km and fell within the top distance quartile. bAbove city-wide median for that variable. cWithin the top quartile for that variable. 1Low-income levels were based on CitationStatistics Canada's (1999) before-tax low-income cut-offs for urban areas with 500,000 people, along with 1999 Edmonton Civic Census cross tabulations of household size by household income. 2We selected the combination of methods used here, and used local knowledge and ground-truthing in uncertain cases to ensure as complete an enumeration as possible of all full-range food stores (i.e., supermarkets) in Edmonton as of 1999. However, we acknowledge that we may have inadvertedly missed some independent supermarkets. *Research funding was provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and GEOIDE. The authors thank postdoctoral fellow Dr. Nairne Cameron, and student research assistants Vladimir Yasenovskiy, Julia Healy, Nicoleta Cutumisu, Jared Hewko, Mark Pickersgill, Sherry Diehlman, and Kris Ridell for their assistance in the research. We wish to note that the term “unsupportive local food environments,” which we use in this paper, was kindly suggested by one of the referees. We also thank the five anonymous referees for their insightful comments on this paper.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it