What we find, as we find it.

A food desert isn't a place with no food. It's a place where the food within reach is the wrong food, or too far away, or too expensive to get to without a car.

Nobody moved. The ruler did.

A food desert is a census tract that fails two tests at once: it's low income, and it's far from a grocery store. Both, or it doesn't count.

"Far" is a number somebody picks.

Same map. Same year. Two rulers.

The line at one mile in cities ten miles in the country

18.8 million One in sixteen Americans

The line moved in to half a mile a ten-minute walk

53.6 million One in six Americans

Bars are drawn to scale against each other. The rural threshold is ten miles in both counts. Source: USDA Economic Research Service, Food Access Research Atlas.

The rural line sits at ten miles in both counts. It never moves. The city line is the only thing that changed, and it changed by half a mile.

Nobody moved houses. No store opened or closed. Same map, same year, same families. The count nearly tripled because someone shortened the walk that counts as too far.

Two shapes

In cities they're pockets, sometimes a mile wide, where the grocery store left and never came back. There the real barrier isn't distance. It's not owning a car.

In rural America they're enormous: whole counties where the nearest supermarket is ten or twenty miles down the road. Most low-access tracts are urban. The rural ones cover far more ground.

Who lives in them

Who lives in them isn't random. In 2023, 23.3% of Black households and 21.9% of Hispanic households couldn't reliably afford enough food. For white households the figure was 9.9%. The national rate was 13.5%.

That's not a gap. That's more than double.

It isn't shrinking

The share of Americans in low-access neighborhoods has barely moved in over a decade. Poverty didn't fall. Stores kept closing.

One force shows up again and again: the dollar store. When a dollar store opens in a rural community, the local grocer becomes about 5% more likely to close, and its sales drop 9.2% (USDA Economic Research Service, 2024). In cities the same opening does roughly a third as much damage. Rural grocers take the hit.

Dollar stores rarely stock fresh produce or meat. They can hollow out the one full grocery store in town and leave the shelves that matter empty.

In 2026, Family Dollar moved to close more than 350 stores. The closures fell hardest on the same low-income, low-access places the federal government already flags.

The food dollars are shrinking too

SNAP, or food stamps, is the largest force against hunger in the country, and it does its heaviest work in exactly these places. In 2025, Congress cut SNAP by about $186 billion over ten years and tightened the work rules to qualify. The Congressional Budget Office projects the new work rules alone will mean roughly 2.4 million fewer people receiving benefits in an average month.

Fewer food dollars, in the places where food is already hardest to reach.

New Hampshire is not the exception people assume

The state is wealthier than most. Its poverty rate is 7.2%, against 10.6% nationally.

But food access isn't only about money. It's about distance, and New Hampshire is rural and spread out. By the USDA's distance measure, 27.5% of the state lives more than a mile from a supermarket in town, or more than ten in the country. That's about 362,000 people. It puts New Hampshire within a few points of the hardest-hit states in the country.

And it's worst exactly where we work. Rockingham County has the highest low-access share in the state at 43%. Hillsborough County, home to Nashua and Manchester, sits at 32.3%.

Rockingham's poverty rate is 4.8%. This isn't mostly about being poor. It's about being far.

Not a red problem, not a blue problem

A food desert doesn't sort by party. It hits the reddest rural county and the bluest city block the same way. It's a broken supply chain. A broken supply chain doesn't care how you voted.

Far means stuck

In New Hampshire, being far means being stuck, because there's almost no way to close the distance without a car. The state runs about a dozen local bus systems, and nearly all of them sit in the cities: Manchester, Nashua, Concord, the Seacoast, the Upper Valley.

Windham has none of that. The one service that reaches it, CART, is a ride you reserve in advance, not a bus you catch. It runs in only a handful of southern Rockingham towns.

Distance traps the old hardest

And New Hampshire is old. In 2010, 13.5% of the state was 65 or older. Today it's 23%. Nearly one in four, against 18.9% nationally, and among the highest of any state.

That's the baby boom aging in place, in a rural state built around the car. A generation that could always drive to the store is reaching the age when it can't.

For them, and for anyone who can't drive, that distance isn't an inconvenience. It's a wall.

Best isn't the same as fed.

Why we exist

The farm is fifteen minutes away. The food it grows leaves before the people nearby can buy it.

That gap is the whole reason we exist. The food is already here. Our job is to move it, from the farms that grow it to the people a broken supply chain keeps it from. Not with a study. With a truck, a buyer, and a standing order.

The map is frozen

Here's what should bother everyone: the government's own map of where the food deserts are hasn't been updated since 2019. The Food Access Research Atlas still runs on 2019 store locations laid over 2010 neighborhoods. No newer edition has come out.

Every dollar store that opened since then, every grocery store that closed, none of it shows up. The official picture of who can reach food in America is frozen years behind the country it describes.

Researchers found the same thing from the other direction. Tracking every licensed food store in the country from 2003 to 2023, they found barely a dent in the food deserts, and steady growth in the neighborhoods stocked mostly with fast food and dollar stores. Rural America was worst off the whole way (Wiese et al., American Journal of Public Health, 2026).

We don't wait years to show our work. Every dollar we spend goes on the public ledger, updated as it happens, where anyone can watch.