You hear that, single-mother-of-three? Stop eating unsustainably and just go pay a 20 percent markup for whatever food is available down at the local farmer’s market. It’s not that hard! Just make more money.
What about those who find such markets price-prohibitive? Those who live in food deserts?
20% of the US population recieves wellfare payments - and a good proportion of those above this lowest quintile are precarious at best. I would go so far as to say that more than half of people absolubtely cannot afford a 50% price increase on food. Not to mention the additional labour and complexity involved in cooking food from raw & healthy ingredients. It cannot be overstated just how much "brain fog" one experiences growing up and living the life of those less fortuntate - it really is incredibly difficult for someone like this to just decide one day to not have their usual frozen pre-cooked microwave meal and instead learn how to make a vegetarian lentil curry, and a big part of that is the percieved difficulty of cooking and the psychological barrier of learning something new - it really is hard for a lot of people to feel the agency in their lives such that they can simply "decide" to learn something new like that.
Now I'm not saying this to simply be contrarian, or to say that we can't do anything about this at all, but rather we need to approach the issue with large quantities of empathy and human understanding. Government funded cooking programmes pointed towards those with little time and money and that helps teach basic skills without talking down to people would be a good start, but realistically something like that would only work if they became popular - it would require a very talented face/crew that have passion for their mission.
It's easy to armchair-philosophise those things away with "oh but poor people wont ever have the money, so screw it". With that attitude we'd never hav gotten electric cars. Or solar power.
GP posted a ridiculous, condescending, one-sentence solution to the issue of sustainable eating. I used hyperbole to try and highlight how out of touch they are.
The whole point is that the problem is, in fact, hard.
When you buy cheap shoes, they break quickly, forcing you to buy another pair, ultimately costing more over time than if you had just bought good shoes to begin with.
The same applies to food. When you buy cheap food, it will nourish you only a little bit, forcing you to buy more of it, ultimately costing more over time than if you had just bought good food to begin with.
Cheap, industrial food contains the minimum amount of actual food to pass for grub, and is laden with artificial flavorings to fool your brain into thinking you're actually eating something, when you're not.
This is only a "fallacy" if someone chooses to purchase the cheap shoes despite having the capability to buy good shoes.
Being poor is expensive. If you can't buy good shoes you're stuck in a feedback loop of making do with cheap shoes. The same goes for many items and services. There's not a good option for a lot of people close to their margins.
A lot of the things people don't even consider giving up are non-essential. There's a strange hoarder mentality where poor people are unwilling to sacrifice anything at all, even if it led to future improvement.
It's another fallacy, I think. When you're hungry it wouldn't occur to many to voluntarily fast. Sugars fool humans well. Artificial flavorings fool them even better.
Note the core of my argument: $1 of good food sustains you longer than $1 of bad food. What good food is so expensive per smallest unit sold that anyone couldn't switch to it?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PmM6SUn7Es
In my personal experience, I can taste the frigging poison in non-organic produce, and processed food just makes me more hungry.
Yes, it sucks for those people, but pointing out poverty doesn’t silence the conversation about nutrition for the rest of us who can afford some cheap vegetables.
But when someone posts a one-sentence solution to a difficult problem, and frames it in the most condescending manner possible (eg “It’s not hard.”), it’s difficult not to respond with a low-effort (and very real) counterexample.
I’m curious what the “unsilenced” (???) conversation would continue to look like in your opinion- seems to me like the “not hard” comment of the original response implied not much conversation was left to be had.
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