Comment by throwaway8581 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway8581 | Hacker News Reader

This idea that people are actually going hungry due to poverty in the US is absurd. A full day's worth of calories can be had for less than $3. And I'm not just talking about going to McDonalds and ordering off the dollar menu, which is certainly an option occasionally. I mean real food. https://www.upstart.com/blog/lowest-cost-per-calorie-foods

And in fact, it is firmly established that it's the poorest people in America who tend to be the fattest. And what free school lunches often solve is not hunger but neglect. There are lots of shitty parents who don't care enough to deposit lunch money in the school account or pack lunch for their kid, or who make appalling dietary choices for their children.

I wish people would have a little more skepticism and apply some independent common sense when consuming statistics. People getting food from food banks or consuming free lunch doesn't mean that they are otherwise going hungry. It means they are accepting something offered for free. There are myriad, complicated reasons why those patterns would change. But it's a strong, unjustified conclusion to say it's because they would otherwise go hungry.

I used to wonder this too, and it's a much more nuanced (like everything!) problem than just money/calories. But the point you make is more or less addressed in any literature or documentation on food issues in the US should you care to find it. I suppose here's the modern starting point for most people engaging with a topic they don't understand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_in_the_United_States

There are other factors besides money at play. I only know the basics so I'm sure someone can do a better job, but a few examples:

* Food deserts. Many low income neighborhoods don't have grocery stores, so residents would need to take public transport both ways with all of their groceries.

* Building on above, it takes time to cook your own food. Especially if you're riding the bus to the store, and to work, and to pick up the kids, etc.

* Education. Many low income people are taught mcdonalds is the cheapest food, and so thats what they buy. Can you blame someone for something they do not know?

* Financial planning and decision making. Same as above.

Its difficult for us to understand the low income situation. A family member of mine is a counselor at a high school for kids who get expelled. All these kids want to be lawyers, police officers, or government workers when they grow up because they've literally never seen a white collar worker in real life. They don't know that data science exists, much less step 1 in getting there.

Food deserts are a matter of lack of demand, not supply. Where poor people want fresh food the market is quite willing to sell it to them.

> THE GEOGRAPHY OF POVERTY AND NUTRITION: FOOD DESERTS AND FOOD CHOICES ACROSS THE UNITED STATES

> We study the causes of “nutritional inequality”: why the wealthy tend to eat more healthfully than the poor in the U.S. Using two event study designs exploiting entry of new supermarkets and households’ moves to healthier neighborhoods, we reject that neighborhood environments have economically meaningful effects on healthy eating. Using a structural demand model, we find that exposing low-income households to the same food availability and prices experienced by high-income households would reduce nutritional inequality by only 9%, while the remaining 91% is driven by differences in demand. In turn, these income-related demand differences are partially explained by education, nutrition knowledge, and regional preferences. These findings contrast with discussions of nutritional inequality that emphasize supply-side issues such as food deserts.

Supply/demand is a feedback system. Both are the cause. When trying to change a feedback system, you don't look for a root cause because it's literally an infinite loop. Instead you either look for a way to break the loop, or look for a variable you can change that has the best ROI.

In the case of a food desert within a residential area, it's probably a lot easier to boost demand by artificially increasing supply, rather than the other way around.

Thankfully the researchers considered that point. From the above abstract

> Using a structural demand model, we find that exposing low-income households to the same food availability and prices experienced by high-income households would reduce nutritional inequality by only 9%, while the remaining 91% is driven by differences in demand.

On the topic more generally

> Dr. Sturm found no relationship between what type of food students said they ate, what they weighed, and the type of food within a mile and a half of their homes.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/health/research/pairing-o...

Original study

> School and Residential Neighborhood Food Environment and Diet Among California Youth

> No robust relationship between food environment and consumption is found. A few significant results are sensitive to small modeling changes and more likely to reflect chance than true relationships.

https://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797%2811%2900849-X...

If all of your money is going to rent, health bills have bankrupted you, and you don't have the energy and clarity of mind that comes with healthy food and a stable home, you're expecting such a person to have the mental energy required to cost-optimize on $3/day?

Cost-optimization is a hard problem, which is why companies spend a lot of money for consultants to do it, and programmers spend a lot of time figuring out ways to optimize CPU/RAM, for example. So yes, it's actually very easy to end up in a situation where you would go hungry without food banks, even in America.

If you can't make the decision to spend your government food stamps card to buy food to eat, then I don't know what society can do for you. What do you want? Prepared food delivered to the home of everyone who lacks the "energy and clarity of mind" or the "mental energy" to make such a simple decision?

> A full day's worth of calories can be had for less than $3

The problem is that people often don't have that $3.

Believe it or not, America is a welfare state and while not as generous as Europe, no one is lacking for $3 to buy food unless they are blowing their government money on something they shouldn't be.

> no one is lacking for $3

I mean, it must be nice to believe this, but the lived experience of millions of Americans would beg to differ.

"Lived experience" is just a fancy word for "anecdote". I can also point to the lived experience of millions of Americans that enjoy dinner every day (myself included), and we'd be no better off in understanding what the truth is.

Per the data, the US is ranked #11 in the world for food security: https://foodsecurityindex.eiu.com/Index

“The lived experiences ...” is what sanctimonious rich liberals say to sound profound when they don’t have anything intelligent to say.

> Believe it or not, America is a welfare state [...]

Compared to where? Certainly not most industrialized western countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_social_we...

Thank you for the source.

I can't help but feel confused how the US can spend so much per capita on social welfare, yet I hear all those horror stories about medical costs, people having to work multiple jobs etc.

Believe it or not, the United States has a higher median income PPP adjusted after taxes and transfers than pretty much every European nation; it's ranked #3 in the world:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...

The US also has a lower percentage of low-income people than almost any European country, despite having greater inequality:

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1376074233642557442

Also, the US is ranked #11 in the world for food security, ranked higher than Canada, Germany, Denmark, New Zealand, France, Norway, and Australia (to name a handful): https://foodsecurityindex.eiu.com/Index

Because our medical (and other professional) cartels are powerful. A massive amount of that money is literally directly transferred to the world's least-efficient healthcare industry. The vast majority of that money is never given to people.

Eat cold lard for a month challenge.

Eggs – $1.61 per 2,000 calories

Spaghetti – $1.49 per 2,000 calories

Pinto beans – $1.39 per 2,000 calories

Whole milk – $1.37 per 2,000 calories

Peanut butter – $1.25 per 2,000 calories

White rice – $0.41 per 2,000 calories

Top ramen (beef & chicken) – $1.82 per 2,000 calories

Potatoes – $1.79 per 2,000 calories

And if you do more research, you'd see that a loaf of bread is about $2 for about 2000 calories.

Are you supposed to eat the spaghetti uncooked? What about the eggs? Where are homeless people getting the refrigerators to store their milk and eggs?

Only a small fraction of those experiencing food insecurity are homeless. Not every solution needs to cover every single person in order to be valuable. Solutions for feeding the homeless are different than the solutions for feeding a single parent with five children living in social housing.

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