Food Deserts in America
moveforhunger.org
moveforhunger.org
> Between 2004 and 2016, more than a thousand supermarkets opened nationwide in neighborhoods around the country that had previously been food deserts. We studied the grocery purchases of about 10,000 households in those neighborhoods. While it’s true that these households buy less healthy groceries than people in wealthier neighborhoods, they do not start buying healthier groceries after a new supermarket opened. Instead, we find that people shop at the new supermarket, but they buy the same kinds of groceries they had been buying before.
> The food desert story is that the lack of supply of healthy foods in food deserts causes lower demand for healthy foods. But the modern economy is more sophisticated than this explanation allows for—grocers have become amazingly good at selling us exactly the kinds of foods we want to buy. As a result, our data support the opposite story: lower demand for healthy food is what causes the lack of supply.
[0] https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2019/decemb...
I throw fresh veggies into the blender, grind them up, and drink them.
I'm a very lazy man, and spend very little time preparing healthy meals.
A very quick combo I make fairly often is rice in the rice cooker with dumplings (out of the freezer) steamed on top. Sprinkle with various sauces, deep fried shallots, etc and done. Then refrigerate the extra rice and use it to make fried rice the next day with frozen vegetables, etc. The rice cooker is hands-off. The fried rice is quick and leaves leftovers. I incorporate fresh ingredients from my garden but it's easy to make something decent without those.
Automation allows provisioning to reduced aggregate demand levels while maintaining profitability.
The profit motive is quite the shiznit!
Communist stores, on the other hand, tend to be very good at being out of stock of whatever you want to buy. Ask anyone who grew up the USSR.
If you're above a certain age (I am) you'll also remember how good Nixon's DOE was at getting gas to your local gas station. You'd get to wait in line for hours, and you weren't allowed to buy gas at all if the last digit on your license plate was wrong for that day.
...and what people want to buy is in no small part determined by advertising.
Peer pressure and tradition figure in to this too.
But I'll insist Sugar and sweetners, do not need any advertising whatsoever!
Sugar sells itself. And these guys and gals know it and they pump it into everything, including most "healthy" things.
While there are some poor groups who cannot get any frozen vegetables or unprocessed of any sort without going into debt or becoming homeless or just not having access, I think they are the minority. Frozen vegetables, canned beans and meat, eggs, etc. are very healthy, very cheap, and ubiquitous even in mini-marts. Almost everyone can eat healthy if they really prioritize it.
The main issue is that when you’re poor, you don’t prioritize healthy foods. You have stress and much bigger things to worry about, you’re more concerned with having food than having quality food. While its possible to buy healthy, it requires finding a way to get to the grocery store and save a few dollars somewhere else. And then, the payoff is that maybe it will make you healthier, but maybe not even, because the additional stress and undiagnosed health issues may cancel it out. To top it off, the foods I mentioned - canned and frozen vegetables - are boring and not particularly tasty. If you want to make healthy food which “tastes good”, you need to spend significantly more time money: you need to go to fancier stores, pay more, actually cook the food, and make sure it doesn’t go bad.
So just giving poor people theoretical access to healthy food isn’t enough. You need to encourage healthy food with discounts, make it more accessible, teach people what is healthy, and why eating healthy food is important. And on top of that, eating healthy needs to actually be important vs. the other priorities people are dealing with.
A job can be critical and also have WAY too many bodies versus jobs.
I still think that the greatest tragedy that happened after 2008 wasn't the obscene amounts of corruption and the mismanagement of assets and misallocation of resources, they were extremely bad, but it wasn't the worst thing. What i think was the worst thing to occur was the massive displacement of qualified STEM degreed workers who ended 'falling thrugh the cracks' over the yaers because the positions that were marketed them as 'waiting for you when you're done' vanished overnight. I have met so many aspiring biologists, chemists, and physicists/mathematicians who ended up in finance or some other aimless thing because debt and bills needed to paid who had pursued their degrees to try and take on climate change, mass hunger, food security etc... many of thier collective idealism turned to angst then morose and even bleak inevitable outcomes for the near future in such a short time. Many never really recovering from the depression, and feeling as how Society failed them despite 'doing the right thing.' I know I felt that way, but I was determined to not let it occur and I used it as fuel to push through it, but I have serious survivor bias and I still deal with PTSD from it all--it's a work in progress, but I think it was a phyrric victory most times.
The real tragedy of the last decade will be one of the loss in Human Capital to the aforementioned issues, and this almost inescapable political climate in which we cannot distinguish real threats from trivial ones because we're so distracted by the vapid divisiveness that keeps people at each others throats wit perpetual tribalism.
My point was that if you are poor, and you don't choose to live frugally and save what you can, then you are implicitly choosing to remain poor. This is not to say that everyone can escape poverty, because I don't think that's true, but there are people who don't do themselves any favors and it isn't helpful to blame the consequences of their bad choices on everything else.
As we all - assuming we all here on HN do relatively intellectual work - can attest, thinking and deciding have energy and exhaustion costs and we have a finite capacity after which we must recharge and rest.
And many of us are familiar with how stress (deadlines, conflicts at home, weather, etc.) tax us even further, reducing our ability to think well and decide well, and leading, sometimes, to poor decisions...
...that bring their own stress and workload.
Imagine if everyday the bulk of your decision making was literally about every dollar: heat and lights or shoes? Shoes or food? Food or healthcare? Healthcare of rent? Rent or heat and light?
You would do the same thing we do when we are coding something complex and need to make progress. You would pick a thing, do something simple that isn't really enough but is enough for now, slap hic sunt draconis in a comment, and move on. Hopefully you will get back to it.
People choose the easy, convenient, less good for them food because that gives more time to consider their other trade offs, maybe even to breathe long enough to reduce some of their stress.
And they may never get back to that choice, because the choices, the strains, never end.
Poverty is a vicious circle of stress and decline. Yes, there are people who make it out, just like there are people who make the NBA or the NHL. Most people, though, suffer. Literally.
It doesn't matter how people get poor. What matters is that poor is hard, harder than most anything most of us will ever face. What matters is that we respond with compassion and consideration and perhaps try to see beyond fault and responsibility and instead try to do something to amend those situations.
Again, I haven't met these people you talk about among any of poor people I grew up around. I think the "research" you center your worldview on is a fiction. Propaganda of some sort? Maybe meant to make you slave away for more money than you need and to fear being destitute?
The poors I grew up would do things like buy a TV they couldn't afford, then trade it to someone for several ounces of weed that they planned to sell. Then smoke too much of the weed themselves and have no TV for a month or two.
Maybe the amount of sugar in products needs to be very prominently called out in all packaging. My kids love tomato/BBQ sauce/ketchup. Tomato ketchup is 25% sugars. For BBQ sauce, it's 45% sugars. They might as well be sprinkling sugar on dinner.
"Back in the ’80s, the Reagan administration proposed counting ketchup as a vegetable in school lunches."
I've seen poverty measured by toilet paper. A person who is working but poor may have money but their funds are so limited they can't even buy a 4 pack of toilet paper, or to buy in bulk, or to buy more when it's on sale. They simply don't have the disposable income every since dime is needed and already spent by the time they get paid.
With food it's the same way since poverty means that you buy what you can right now. Having worked shift work for 12 and sometimes 18 hours I know you don't want to do anything but eat something, anything just so you can get it over with and go to bed at a decent hour. I've actually had run around my house after a long shift because the end of my day was so limited. I ran around getting pizza pockets ready and getting my clothes ready for the next day. I was trying to get it done and not be up too late. I'd run to bed to jump in and go to sleep because I had no time to waste. It sounds silly but my time was limited and I wasn't really what I'd call poor I made just above minimum wage at the time but worked long hours to get overtime.
Also poverty means most times the person doesn't have cookware to cook food. Frying pans, a pot or more than one pot. Even chef knives or any large knife to cut vegetables. Cutting boards to cut on. It's all a big cost to get such items assembled.
Nobody thinks McDonald's, Hungry Man XXL frozen meals, or Doritos are good for you. People know the benefits of healthy eating. And you toss out this "stress" boogeyman as though eating unhealthy is the default.
People are lazy and lack self-control. That's most of the issue. Eating healthy takes effort that lots of people can't be bothered to expend. As you mentioned, it takes ten times more effort to make a healthy meal taste good than an unhealthy one.
Where you are wrong is cost. It doesn't cost a lot to make healthy food taste good, but it does require knowledge of flavors and a decent set spices.
Poor people these days have to work numerous jobs concurrently (partly because they need the cashflow, but even if they don't their jobs often aren't stable so they need to build up reserves for the "dry" times).
When you have adequate time to cook, and have built-up the capacity to actually cook, you can take advantage of that benefit.
The most egregious examples is the way that Native communities across the U.S., whose foodways are healthy and sustainable, who were responsible for the cultivation of corn, squash (i.e. the “healthy” organic foods that now available in the Whole Foods isles) have and continue to be persistently forced into areas that are food deserts by design [1]. It’s not that people don’t know what food is important, the core of their cultural practices have been clear for millennia on this point. The construction of a society that demands that some people be herded into pockets of deprivation is the problem.
1. https://www.davispoliticalreview.com/article/the-prevalence-...
TIL I live in a 'food desert'. I guess this is only a problem if you don't have access to a car or bus.
Most people in the US live in urban areas, and most urban areas in the US have awful public transportation.
Even when they have some means of getting to richer areas, the poor (who are most likely to live in food deserts) rarely if ever go shopping in rich areas, where the most nutritious food tends to be. They tend to shop where they live.