We can't place blame fully on consumers. "Food deserts" are spreading while quality, variety and abundance of fresh food is decreasing. Meanwhile fast food is cheap, heavily marketed, and engineered for its addictiveness. In many areas poor people don't actually have much choice.
The second point I want to make is that you have a mis-placed emphasis on "fresh food". Frozen or canned vegetables, fruits and legumes are actually more nutritious than fresh produce. And the cost, variety and quality of canned and frozen produce has been improving steadily for decades.
The food desert hypothesis sounds compelling, but simply doesn't jibe with the evidence. Obesity among the lower classes is almost certainly driven by cultural and/or genetic factors, not lack of access to healthy food.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/03/20/393943031/wh... [2] https://www.vox.com/2015/12/22/10644738/food-desert-evidence
Your own link does not support your point, and contains a detailed analysis of why that particular experiment failed (it was completely ineffectual at actually restricting fast food).
Focusing on physical locations of supermarkets is missing the forest for the trees. As your link points out, the problem is that healthy food costs more. A "food desert" is just as real if you can't afford it, as if the food weren't there.
>Obesity among the lower classes is almost certainly driven by cultural and/or genetic factors
Ouch. Lower classes genetically inferior? That's a real dangerous road you're on pal.
Decades of twin studies have consistently shown that IQ[1], obesity[2], educational attainment[3], and lifetime earnings[4] all have significant components of genetic heritability. These are among the most replicated results in all of psychology.
GWAS have also found that intelligence is highly polygenic, involving at least 500 SNPs[5]. GWAS has confirmed that obesity is also highly polygenic, involving at least 400 SNPs[6]. The majority of those SNPs occur on genetic loci relating to brain function[7].
Given the fact that intelligence (a major determinant of SES in modern industrial economies) and obesity both involve a huge number of genes specifically related to neurological development, it would be shocking if there wasn't at least some overlap between the respective genetic structure of the two traits.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ [2] https://academic.oup.com/epirev/article/29/1/49/437222#35942... [3] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01065905 [4] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2253264 [5] https://www.nature.com/articles/mp201185 [6] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6028139/ [7] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/274654v2
Now, let's say our philanthropic anti-baldness initiative notices that men go bald at significantly higher rates than women. So, we come to the conclusion that we have to figure out the sociological factors that make men bald. Maybe video games contributes to baldness, or maybe it's the stress of having looser ties to family, or maybe its the rate of military service?
As we both know, baldness, including the higher rate of male baldness, is driven by genetic-biological factors. If we refused to even consider this hypothesis it would lead to some pretty absurd conclusions and policies. But knowing that the problem has a biological basis lets us direct our humanitarian efforts at the root cause. We know that to treat baldness we need to target biology, with things like Rogaine and hair transplants, not sociology.
> 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.
https://web.stanford.edu/~diamondr/AllcottDiamondDube_FoodDe...
That's just not true. It's cheap to you. It's actually terribly expensive compared to a bag of rice and potatoes, which you can buy in bulk and cook easily with a hot plate and a pot.
This is a problem elites constantly have. They keep projecting their mindset onto everyone else.
>In many areas poor people don't actually have much choice.
They don't have a Whole Foods a mile away, so they can't get a bag of rice? Everyone is a victim these days.
Oh, wait...
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CO0COAI https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007S9ULGY
Free shipping anywhere in the US. If you keep telling people they're a victim soon they'll agree.
Again, YOU wouldn't. You're projecting.
The argument is that a poor person (in the US) can't buy unprocessed food because they don't have a grocery store nearby.
Apart from that, if people eat nothing but the foods that can be stored unrefrigerated for long periods, they're going to end up with health problems, even some of the same ones caused by processed foods.
What about the time cost?
To make food from fresh, you need significantly more time to prepare and cook the ingredients. You also need more frequent shopping trips to ensure fresh food is ready for cooking.
If you're working long hours or working shifts, or are living on your own, this becomes significant.
Also of course rice and potatoes on their own are not very nutritious. Brown rice is better than white rice, but that takes longer to prepare again.
Preparing a meal from fresh also takes more willpower and energy than selecting more immediately available calories. I'm pretty sure that's a lot easier after coming home from an office job rather than a 12-hour factory shift.
The cultures that have for thousands of years depended on rice for most of their calories have used mainly white rice.
Again, we're right back to where we started with elitist mentality.
You think poor people care about brown rice VS. white rice? What next, are you going to say, "yeah, but organic, free range, free trade, hand picked, carbon neutral rice costs 5x more, and what, no salad?". No one cares but you.
What I see here is a bunch of rich people projecting their difficulty making a simple meal on to poor people.
It takes rather more effort to make an appealing and nutritious meal than microwaving a potato.
[Edited to avoid pointless arguing]
True food deserts are very rare. I've been poor in many parts of the US. All food deserts per the conventional definition, while never lacking in plenty of healthy food options in reality. Asserting that the vegetables that poor people eat are not hipster enough to count as "vegetables" is a bizarre way to demonstrate that one cares about the welfare of poor people.