Word.ws English Dictionary

food desert

Syllables: food de·sertUK/fuːd ˈdɛzə(ɹ)t/US/fud ˈdɛzɚt/

food desert noun: a populated region where food, especially healthy food, is difficult to obtain.

Noun

food desert (plural food deserts)

  1. (figuratively) A populated region where food, especially healthy food, is difficult to obtain.
    • 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.2009 May 26, Steven Gray, “Can America's urban food deserts bloom?”, in Time, archived from the original on 28 Jan 2016
    • 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).2011 August 12, “America's ‘food deserts’”, in The Week, archived from the original on 28 May 2016

Forms of food desert

pluralfood deserts

Origin of food desert

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 document in 1995 from a policy working group on the Low Income Project Team of the UK's Nutrition Task Force.

Questions about food desert

What does food desert mean?
Food desert means a populated region where food, especially healthy food, is difficult to obtain.
What part of speech is food desert?
Food desert is a noun.
How do you pronounce food desert?
Food desert is pronounced /fuːd ˈdɛzə(ɹ)t/ (UK).
What is the plural of food desert?
The plural of food desert is food deserts.

Words near food desert in the dictionary

  1. food court
  2. food courts
  3. food critic
  4. food crop
  5. food crops
  6. food desert
  7. food deserts
  8. food digger
  9. food drive
  10. food drives
  11. food fall

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: food desert (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-food desert.ogg.

Cite this entry: “food desert.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/food_desert. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.