摘要：Mobile food vending is a component of the food environment that has received little attention in the public health literature beyond concerns about food sanitation and hygiene issues. However, several features of mobile food vending make it an intriguing venue for food access. We present key components of mobile vending regulation and provide examples from 12 US cities to illustrate the variation that can exist surrounding these regulations. Using these regulatory features as a framework, we highlight existing examples of “healthy vending policies” to describe how mobile food vending can be used to increase access to nutritious food for vulnerable populations. THERE IS A GROWING FOCUS on the role of the food environment for the obesity epidemic. 1 In particular, there is a need for greater access to nutritious food and more limits on energy-dense food with low nutritional value. Greater relative availability of nutritious food in local food stores is associated with greater intake of those foods. 2 Although there are some existing strategies to increase purchase of fruits and vegetables within grocery stores, 3 access to stores with nutritious food remains an issue. Supermarkets are more likely to carry fresh produce, 4 but they are less likely to be found in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color. 5 , 6 There are a variety of factors that have historically been barriers to supermarket location in lower-income urban areas, 7 , 8 and the rural poor appear to have even less access to supermarkets than do their metropolitan counterparts. 9 Neighborhoods without supermarkets tend to have small corner stores or convenience markets that have limited inventories of nutritious food. 10 Although public health scholars have given some attention to corner store interventions, mobile food vending has received little attention in the public health literature beyond concerns about food sanitation and hygiene issues. 11 , 12 But several features of mobile food vending make it an intriguing venue for food access. Unlike a corner store, mobile food vendors sell a small range of merchandise. Specialized vendors (e.g., vendors selling only fruit) can more easily ensure fresh merchandise because of rapid turnover. Because these vendors are mobile, they have the capacity to reach places that otherwise lack access to food establishments or food stores. Mobile food vendors have been found to converge around schools to sell foods to students after school. 13 Mobile vendors appear to be a familiar phenomenon in urban as well as rural communities with large numbers of Latino immigrants, 13 – 15 and understanding how to encourage the sale of nutritious food rather than energy-dense food would be valuable to these communities and others that have disproportionately high rates of obesity. 16 The need for increased access to nutritious food and the unique features of mobile food vending lead to some compelling questions. Could mobile vendors contribute to the accessibility of nutritious food, particularly for underserved and vulnerable communities? Could a mobile cart or truck function like a supermarket produce aisle on wheels? We focused on how local government law and policy could support healthy mobile vending mainly because the law has the advantages of broader application and permanence. Here, we present key components of mobile vending regulation by using examples from the municipal codes of 10 US cities to illustrate the variation that can exist surrounding these regulations. Then, using this framework of regulatory features and highlighting noteworthy policy examples, we describe how mobile food vending can be used to increase access to nutritious food for vulnerable urban populations. We chose to limit our scope to mobile food vendors in urban settings because, even though the potential for mobile vending to increase nutritious food access in rural areas is also worth exploring, the unique characteristics of rural settings such as low population density and differences in local government authority warrant a separate examination that takes these features into account.
