As apparently well-fed students meandered onto the USC campus for the fall semester, reporter Daina Beth Solomon sat with teaching professor LaVonna Lewis in her office in the Price School of Public Policy and grilled her about her study of food's role in communities and her work pushing liquor stores to sell vegetables and farmers markets to take food stamps. We later emailed her questions and crunched the conversation into this:
If a neighborhood has a bazillion Taco Bells, KFCs and McDonalds, why call it a food desert?
A food desert creates hostile living conditions.