Have you heard of food deserts? You may even live in one. The USDA defines a food desert as parts of the country that lack fresh fruit, vegetables and other healthy foods. They’re usually found in impoverished urban areas. Shashi Buluswar, the executive director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Institute for Globally Transformative Technologies, explains why healthy foods are often not available in low-income neighborhoods.

"If you’re a large grocery store, you operate on the basis of what’s called economies of scale. The larger you are the more profitable you are and for a number of reasons, including the fact that there isn’t a whole lot of demand, these stores don’t find it profitable to be in lower-income neighborhoods."

The lab is interested in agronomy, the science and technology of growing crops, in the hopes of alleviating urban food deserts.

"We’ve just started a project to look at some of these really important technical barriers, try to get rid of those barriers, so that we can grow food in urban centers that is competitive with rural areas and is also much more sustainable than urban food is right now."