>The U.S. Congress, for one, should increase funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — food stamps — on which 50 million American families depend.
Yes, that is exactly what these people need.
Yes, that is exactly what these people need.
Go down the frozen meal aisle where I'm assuming most unhealthy people shop and it's far more expensive than buying the raw ingredients. Sure it requires more effort to cook from scratch, but you can't throw money at people not willing to put in the work and expect better results.
- Extra time required to cook
- A home with a functional refrigerator, oven, stove, etc.
- Time and transportation costs to and from a grocery store. Remember that poor people tend to live much further from a grocery store than you're used to.
- More money required up front. If you have literally $20 in your bank account, are you gonna spend some of it on bus fare to get to the grocery store an hour away, buy $10 of food, and come home, or are you gonna get a $1 hot dog from the 7/11 down the street?
[1]: https://patch.com/new-york/new-york-city/nyc-groceries-are-m...
Something that I think gets missed in this is time value. If you're poorer, you likely have less free time, and that cuts into things like shopping for groceries (doubly if you're one of the 23.5 million that live in a "food desert" [1]) and meal prep.
Anyone who owns a car can get out of their “food desert” anyway and the obesity crisis is hardly limited to those who don’t drive.
It's funny that cars are implicit in your comment. I have always felt that car culture itself contributes to obesity in a big way. I've never been low-income, but I myself was obese for much of the current decade, until I drastically reduced my car usage a few years ago.
So I think for some people you have a bunch of factors re-enforcing each other: low income / multiple jobs, stress, car culture, but importantly, if you have that last one as a hard requirement, you get additional stress and increased income requirements from needing that car. i.e. Imagine a situation where you need extra hours at work or another job to pay for the car to drive to get your food, and you need extra time and stress for all of this.
The parent post listed foods like rice, beans, and frozen veg all of which have long shelf life. If you swap canned veg for the frozen, you don’t even need refrigeration. That means you don’t need more than a weekly trip to the grocery store. If you do have a car, the extra 10 minutes of travel time isn’t that much.
Once you bring time and overworked parents into the picture things look different. It’s certainly a lot easier from a time perspective to grab food from McDonald’s or other unhealthy ultraprocessed foods that don’t need any cooking or prep work at all. But that has little to do with the “food desert” concept since it affects you no matter how close the grocery store is.
Sir I believe you are misinformed on typical public transportation travel times. The median wait time for a bus usually exceeds 10 minutes. Factor in the fact that a proper grocery store may not be on the bus line that gets you out of the neighborhood and you're easily looking at hours on a bus there and back to shop at a proper grocery store.
> The present study has limitations. First, as noted by Dunn, highways are an imperfect instrument. There were 1672 counties with no highway exits, so this IV approach did not provide information about counties where the food environment is not associated with the number of highway exits.
1672 counties is more than half the country. I recommend reading the rest of the Limitations section as well.
According to Blue Zones, who have a clear agenda around removing unhealthy choices versus adding healthy ones as well as a meal plan to sell.
Frozen veggies are fine, but "frozen veggies" as they are typically sold are highly processed, often adding carbs and subtracting nutrients.
Could you name at least one?
Food stamps for working people are nothing more than a massive subsidy for companies such as Wal-Mart. What's more, food stamps are psychologically degrading. Imagine working one or two jobs and not being able to provide proper food for your family!
Raising minimum wages at Walmart means we all pay through higher prices (except Walmart, who passes the costs on). The poor cannot be excluded from this, so although their wages increase, it’s not clear their buying power increases.
It's a federal program administered by the states, which means inconsistent qualification and delivery. Pumping more money into the program doesn't help when the states make up their own rules as to who qualifies and when.
Lack of education also doesn't help but was completely glossed over in Bloomberg's assessment of what must have been homeless hipsters inbetween semesters. If you live in the country or the ghetto, just look at what people on EBT actually buy-- unlike WIC there are no stipulations that incentivize people to actually buy healthy food, so you see carts full of Coke and Oreos. Not that I begrudge the poor their vices, but adding more money to this arrangement doesn't magically drive better outcomes.
Look at the other phenomenon that occurs with the same demographic groups-- winning the lottery isnt even enough to escape poverty and live happily ever after; they often end up stagnant or worse. You can't just give truckloads of money to the poor and expect it to be spent wisely.