Dive Brief:

• The Centers for Disease Control has issued its State Indicator Report on Fruit and Vegetables, showing a wide disparity in produce consumption among the states.
• California residents eat the most fruit and veggies, the CDC says. Folks in Mississippi eat the least.
• The report, the first of its kind from the CDC since 2009, suggests that food deserts are part of the problem. Only about 70% of census tracts in the U.S. have at least one store that sells a variety of affordable fruit and vegetables.

Dive Insight:

There's not much in the study that will surprise anyone who travels extensively in the U.S. If you've been to California, Connecticut or New York, you know there are loads of stores serving a population with a high percentage of health-conscious shoppers. On the other hand, if you've been to Mississippi, Iowa or the Dakotas, you know that America has an extraordinary number of obese people making poor food choices.

We're not sure how much good the CDC report can do. Our sense is that produce consumption, like so much of American food life, is divided along those Blue state/Red state sorts of lines. And those lines seem impassable. Still, given the ill health of so much of America, we applaud CDC each time it urges consumers, and the food industry, to look in the mirror.