[Submitted on 10 Sep 2026]
Title:Population-level measures of perceived food access reveal barriers beyond geographic proximity
View a PDF of the paper titled Population-level measures of perceived food access reveal barriers beyond geographic proximity, by Teresa Groton and Benjamin rachunok
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Abstract:Food access is multidimensional, but population-level measurement still relies heavily on geography because perceived dimensions of access are difficult to measure at scale. Here, we use 25,125 Google Maps reviews from 49 grocery stores in Raleigh, North Carolina, to measure five dimensions of food access: availability, accessibility, affordability, accommodation, and acceptability. We identify review topics with unsupervised topic modeling and assign them to access dimensions using zero-shot classification, with 85.4% agreement against manual coding. The resulting store-level measures capture distinct aspects of food access and reveal barriers that geographic proximity alone does not capture. Comparisons between nearby stores in the same chain further show that identical store policies can be perceived very differently across locations, consistent with food access reflecting the fit between residents and their food environment. Perceived food access also follows systematic socioeconomic and demographic patterns that broadly parallel, but do not replicate, those observed for geographic access. These results show that online grocery reviews can provide a scalable complement to geographic measures of food access.
Subjects:
Computation and Language (cs.CL)
Cite as: arXiv:2609.12132 [cs.CL]
(or arXiv:2609.12132v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.12132
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Benjamin Rachunok [view email] [v1] Thu, 10 Sep 2026 19:02:00 UTC (5,066 KB)
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