The Prevention Research Center for Healthy Neighborhood (PRCHN) will host its monthly seminar series presentation Wednesday, Dec. 11, at noon in the BioEnterprise Building, Room B-03. This presentation will feature Elaine Borawski, director of the PRCHN, and Rachel Gardenhire, research and data analyst, who will discuss the state of Cleveland’s retail food environment and its changes over the past eight years. Their presentation is titled “From Dave’s Markets to Joe’s Corner Store: A Look at the Cleveland Retail Food Environment and Healthy Food Access.”
PRCHN seminars are free and open to the public. The PRCHN Research Seminar Series schedule is available online.
About the talk
Understanding the urban food environment has been a public health interest for over a decade, as it plays a critical role in understanding health disparities related to nutrition. In 2012, in an effort to better understand the state of food access in Cleveland, the PRCHN launched an effort to assess the food retail landscape across the city of Cleveland, as part of its Neighborhood Environment Assessment Project. Rather than relying on commercial datasets that mainly capture information from a business classification perspective, the group sought to capture the locations of food stores in the city of Cleveland along with data about the availability of certain healthy food items sold in stores to capture a real-time snapshot of the food environment.
Beginning in 2012, a small army of student interns fanned out across Cleveland, identifying each retail outlet that sold food to the public, from supermarkets to corner stores to gas stations. Teams completed a detailed inventory on each store, allowing PRCHN researchers to then classify the food outlets based on the availability of healthy foods among other things. This same process has now been conducted each summer for the past eight years and the data has been integrated into a single, trackable, place-based database. This presentation will review the history and methodology for the annual data collection and present both an in-depth look at what is available in Cleveland neighborhoods and how the landscape has changed over the past eight years.