Millions of Americans, including many in underserved San Diego communities, live in food deserts where ultra-processed foods are abundant and fresh food is scarce, giving rise to large health disparities.
An interdisciplinary team of researchers from UC San Francisco and UC San Diego are studying this problem in hopes of combating it via a conceptualized NOURISH AI platform. Now, armed with continued federal funding, a team of experts has moved into the platform-building phase of a food desert project.
NOURISH is meant to provide small-business owners in food desert communities with access to loans and grants, online maps that optimize the placement of fresh food outlets for foot traffic, help with navigating the convoluted business permitting process, and provide AI-enabled guidance on affordable ways to source fresh ingredients locally.
Under the leadership of Amarnath Gupta, a team of computer scientists, software developers and students at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego are combining government, private sector, and crowd-sourced information to create dynamic, interactive maps of local food systems.
Gupta said the UC San Diego’s research team has surveyed a broad range of 300-plus people, everyone from restaurant owners to farmers to residents, to shed light on the food desert nutritional problem and furnish insight on how to correct it.
Gupta added part of the problem is the lack of knowledge by many stakeholders on governmental assistance available to small-business owners. “We talked to a farmer and she did not know that the U.S. Department of Agriculture would give her loans so she could improve her farming by putting in a greenhouse,” cited Gupta as one example. “The information exists, but the information is not reachable in multiple ways for many people.”
NOURISH is emerging as a solution to leverage cutting-edge technology to bridge the gap between communities and an ecosystem of entrepreneurship, innovation, and cultural diversity. Accessible from a mobile phone in multiple languages, the NOURISH platform will include patented recommendation algorithms that customize business plans based on local consumer preferences for price, convenience, and flavor.
“Recent advances in scalable data systems and artificial intelligence give us an unprecedented opportunity to use NOURISH to democratize data access, creating a more level playing field between large food companies and small businesses,” Gupta said.
Given small businesses have relatively low start-up costs, are adaptive to local needs, and can help to keep economic resources circulating within low-income communities, Gupta and other researchers are encouraged that it will become possible to shrink or eliminate food deserts.
“A major asset of so-called ‘food deserts’ are immigrants who bring diverse cuisines featuring traditional dishes that are typically healthier than the standard American diet,” said Paul Watson, a California-based food equity advocate and director of community engagement for NOURISH. “This platform will help people ‘from’ the community make wholesome food ‘for’ the community.”
“We want to help people who are expanding a small business or launching a start-up who don’t know the ropes,” said Gupta. “We are not trying to influence people’s eating habits. Right now, we’re just figuring out how to promote fresh-food businesses. Ultimately, there should be more local food businesses available, say every two blocks, so that people can walk or bike to them. That’s what we’d like to see.”
