Sen. Claire McCaskill expressed frustration Wednesday that food deserts continue to exist in the urban core.

The Missouri Democrat, who is on an extensive agriculture tour around Missouri, said that on one day she can be out talking to hog farmers and chicken ranchers about their successes, yet the next day she is hearing about people’s inability to get healthy food.

“We have this amazing abundance of agricultural product, yet we still have problems making sure that every residence of Missouri can afford nutritious food and can access nutritious food,” said McCaskill, who brought her Missouri Agriculture Tour to Kansas City’s Nutter Ivanhoe Neighborhood Center to discuss food desert issues with area growers and representatives from several agencies.

“First off, I’m impressed with how much is going on in Kansas City dealing with the problem of access to healthy food within the urban core,” McCaskill told members of the media following the roundtable discussion. “We got a lot of people working on it here, but there’s still problems.”

Those include institutional barriers that prevent people from getting the federal government to directly invest in community gardening efforts, she said.