Do you live in aRegina food desert?
Enter your address to find out. We'll show you the data behind food access in your neighborhood, and what you can do about it.
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Enter your address to find out. We'll show you the data behind food access in your neighborhood, and what you can do about it.
LENTIL is a citizen-led Regina, Saskatchewan based initiative dedicated to understanding and addressing food access challenges within our community.
A food desert is a residential area that meets two criteria: it is beyond a 15-minute walk from a grocery store, and falls within the most socioeconomically deprived quintile by at least one of the three indicators below.
Distance alone doesn't create a food desert. It's the intersection of geographic isolation with low income, material deprivation, or economic dependency that compounds the barriers to healthy food. LENTIL maps where these factors overlap.
A note on language: While “food desert” is widely used in research, some scholars and food justice advocates point out that this term can be misleading. It suggests a natural, passive absence of food (like a desert that simply exists) rather than the reality: these are areas shaped by decades of deliberate disinvestment, discriminatory housing policies, and corporate decisions. Some prefer the term “food apartheid” to better capture this systemic, human-made inequality. We use “food desert” here because it's the established term in spatial research, but we want to be clear: these landscapes were created by policy and profit, not nature.
Are you in the lowest 20% of household income? Lower income means fewer transportation options and tighter food budgets.
The MSDI measures education, employment, and social isolation: factors that compound food access challenges.
The CIMD captures reliance on fixed incomes, seniors without support, and households vulnerable to any disruption.
When housing costs exceed 30% of income, nearby grocery stores become “food mirages”—physically accessible but economically out of reach. Rent eats first.
A Simple Explanation
Why Supermarkets Left
Beginning in the mid-20th century, white flight and suburban migration pulled wealth (and grocery stores) out of urban neighborhoods. Discriminatory housing policies concentrated poverty in specific areas, and supermarket chains followed the money. This practice became known as “supermarket redlining”: the systematic disinvestment from communities deemed unprofitable.
How Supermarkets Kept Others Out
When chains did leave, they often embedded “scorched-earth covenants” in property deeds: legal clauses lasting 15 to 50 years that prohibit any future grocery use. Others simply “went dark,” keeping ownership of empty buildings to prevent competitors from moving in. These anticompetitive tactics ensure that even when a community wants a grocery store, one cannot legally open.
A Trap by Design
Racial discrimination and anticompetitive business practices combined to create permanent food deserts, not accidents of geography, but deliberate outcomes of policy and profit. Residents in these areas pay 10-60% more for groceries at convenience stores, face impossible choices between nutrition and transportation costs, and suffer higher rates of diet-related disease.
Learn how restrictive covenants create food deserts, and what you can do to demand transparency and change.
Whether you're running REACH's Good Food Box program, Heritage Community Association's pantry, or planning where a new community freezer should go, we provide the address-level data to show where the need is greatest.