“I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because I had the only fat body in the building.”
I’m sorry, but no, being poor doesn’t make you fat. Your eating choices make you fat. Poor people have agency too. Agency is not something you buy. This is coming from someone who probably makes half of what you make in a year.
This is a great paper I suggest you read: https://academic.oup.com/epirev/article/29/1/29/433380 -- this is a good starting point, there are others spanning back the last three decades or so.
It is also worth noting that it's not necessarily how much money you have that is the contributing factor, it can be other factors. The lack of green areas or pathways to walk/exercise (especially prevalent in remote Australian communities), the number of hospitals or doctors close by. But, ultimately, lack of health services and fresh food are correlated to obesity both of which are determined by your location which, in turn, is determined by your financial status.
This simply isn't true. Most food deserts are in the poorer areas of the cities because nobody is bringing fresh produce in there to sell. If you live in the country or small town, many of these places have farm stands, farmers markets, and local farmers providing seasonal produce to the local stores.
Not to mention, lower density housing generally means that there is enough land to have a veggie garden, depending on the specific circumstances.
The farms in rural areas are generally focused on growing a single thing (either one type of livestock, or all corn, etc.), entirely for wholesale, farmers markets are a distraction for most of them, outside of smaller farms that are more of a lifestyle / hobby thing a lot of the time.
Farm stands sometimes exist, but they're an exception rather than the rule in most places, and unless you're in an area known for growing fruit or something like that (and primarily selling to tourists driving by) it'll be one-off things like sweet corn in season or eggs.
Do they not have a refrigerator? Once per week trips (maybe even less) were the norm for me growing up, and I had plenty of fresh fruits and veggies.
I've lived in multiple rural areas. Yes, many people do get food from Walmart. I can see some of the more remote people preferring some processed food. I can also see those remote people growing and processing their own (canning, like I do). Many people use frozen veggies, which I don't consider processed and are nearly as good as fresh. Most of the "fresh" stuff you see is actually months old due to the way the supply chain works. It arguably loses as much or more nutritional value than the frozen stuff. This situation is completely different from the actual food deserts you get in the city. The rural people have the option to buy fresh but may choose not to. These people living in food deserts in the city don't have the option of fresh produce in the stores they go to. They generally don't have space to grow their own either. This lack of choice is the big issue.
Every area I've lived in has had farm stands and farmers markets. It has also had local stores that contract with local farmers for seasonal produce. Individual vendors/farmers do tend to have limited selection by focusing on one or two crops. But there are usually multiple farmers focusing on different things (and coordinating through the local grange). Yes, the majority of farms are monoculture soy or corn. These other farms are usually 90% that but maybe 10% other crops, like pumpkin, corn, watermelon, tomato, cantaloupe, onion, potato, honey, hops, etc. There are also CSAs that you can join for a variety of produce, including meat and dairy. My parents live in an area where the local dairy still has delivery service - that's right a good old fashioned milk man.
Yeah, I think we're agreeing - I'm saying that going to the grocery store once a week or less is probably going to result in purchasing a smaller percentage of fresh produce (certainly not none, but for meats in particular any less than once a week is starting to get sketchy in terms of keeping things fresh when refridgerated.)
CSAs for sure exist, but I see way more usage of them in urban areas. You're certainly not prevented from using them in rural areas (although delivery might not be available and pickup might be far less convienent than it would be in an urban environment).
This might be a function of where we're from, but in the countryside here hobby side farms by actual farmers are relatively rare and usually aren't producing enough to be considered much more than an in-season treat. I've never heard of milk delivery still being a thing (despite knowing a bunch of people living on farms), so I suspect you just have a different regional experience.
In the rural areas the weekly/biweekly shopping routine involves everyone (rich and poor alike) dragging their butts to the one strip mall in a 1-2hr radius and that strip mall will have at the bare minimum a super-walmart with a good fresh produce section or a Walmart with a grocery store beside it because that's the place where rich middle and poor from the entire area shop and it needs to cater to them all in order to get them to drag their butts there and do business. The poor will buy less and fill in the gaps with Dollar General food (which is bad food at a bad price).
The poor urban areas which can't economically support supermarkets and who's residents can't economically justify traveling the range they'd need to travel to get to those supermarkets (because the run down not always running cars that underpin the transportation of the rural poor are not as economically viable in cities) so they're stuck buying food at CVS, the bodega or whatever convenience store is accessible.
If you draw the food desert line at "no Whole Foods and no farmers market" then they both suck. But if you zoom in on the area below that the rural areas have a slight edge.
"If you draw the food desert line at "no Whole Foods and no farmers market""
I don't think anyone is claiming that.
Just because farms exist in an area doesn't generally mean the people in that area are getting their food from those farmers (at least directly). That's mostly a relic of an old vision of farms that grew every type of produce and had a variety of livestock instead of the corporate monoculture farms that dominate today.
There are still farms that produce a variety of produce. Many of them only produce them as a small percentage of their operation. For example, the dairy farm down the road plants sweet corn, tomatoes, peppers, watermelon, cantaloupe, and (not food, but) manure. I know of several other farms that do similar things.
And most of the farms are not only going to be growing just one thing, but the same one thing as other nearby farms (of which there won't be very many, since farms have been consolidating into ever larger operations for many decades).
No shortage of healthy food at the local grocery stores of course.
I expect that people who wave their arms about 'food deserts' could probably stand to visit either small towns or urban areas and form an opinion based on actual experience.
[1] https://cdn2.vox-cdn.com/assets/4565435/food_deserts_map.jpg
Talking about things that simply aren't true.... Every major city in the US has a large farmer's market present and typically more than one happening in neighborhoods all over the city. These cities also have free/cheap public transportation to get people to the farmer's market. Additionally, you don't need a farmer's market to obtain healthy food, supermarkets are just fine.
The is just trope along the same lines of black people can't get their own ID's or figure out the internet. It's an incredibly racist way of thinking. They're not stupid or incapable people. If they want to they can certainly obtain healthy food.
I never said black people. That's your own bias talking.
I agree that people can travel to a supermarket (and that supermarkets have healthy food). It's much more difficult to take a weekly trip for a family's needs in public transportation as opposed to loading up a car. More frequent trips tend to incur higher opportunity cost due to the commute times.
IDs are a completely different matter. The need for those trips are about once every 4-6 years and generally lower expense too.
I made a comparison to it being similar, I did not say it exclusively affected black people and this is why I used the terms "along the same lines". Reading comprehension please.
>It's much more difficult to take a weekly trip for a family's needs in public transportation as opposed to loading up a car. More frequent trips tend to incur higher opportunity cost due to the commute times.
I disagree. All the elites and hipsters in big cities live this way on purpose so it can't be that hard. I find it ironic that the same people who push for more public affordable transportation will turn around and say it's too hard to use and personal transportation is better when it comes to minorities. Additionally, if we follow your logic then rural people are vastly more affected by this than anyone living in the inner-city since they have to travel much longer distances and don't even have public transportation available.
Do you really think this? I know the sticks. You apparently don't. You can live off potatoes, eggs, and oatmeal and not be fat. Those are available anywhere.
There is a "poor" culture, there is an "elite" culture, and then there is a "responsibility" culture. I grew up financially poor in a manufactured home in the sticks, but my culture of my parents was that of "responsibility". Know the difference.
The basis of their diet, therefore, is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea and potatoes—an appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let's have three pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the kettle on and we'll all have a nice cup of tea! That is how your mind works when you are at the PAC level. White bread-and-marg. and sugared tea don't nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than brown bread-and-dripping and cold water. Unemployment is an endless misery that has got to be constantly palliated, and especially with tea, the Englishman's opium. A cup of tea or even an aspirin is much better as a temporary stimulant than a crust of brown bread.
So yeah quite irrational, but it is comforting.
The only people who think that have a very privileged upbringing. My SO worked in an archaeological site in central Asia, and the vast majority of the hosts meals were just raw onions and stale flatbread.
Yet another data point on why the poor are playing the lottery, eating crisps and not virtuously buying and cooking rice and lentil, there's a game-theory-ish idea that the poor understands that as much hard work and lentil they could shovel, they stand little chance of getting out. So with the money they have they buy the best value thing possible, discounted for future possibilities; and those best value things are junk food, lottery tickets, sometimes expensive (relative to their circumstance) and flashy things like clothes or phones.
The statistics make it quite clear that it is hard, maybe your assumptions are wrong.
If there was demand for food in those areas people would sell it, but there isn't.
Edit: A strong piece of evidence is that people aren't getting poorer, but they sure are getting fatter.
Or are you talking about statistics that asked if poor people tried to not be overweight but couldn't do it? If so, could you please send link to that - as I'm not aware of any such large-scale study and quick search didn't reveal anything significant?
If we put poor people in the same conditions they had 40 years ago they would be slimmer than rich people today.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2015/july/growth-in-inf...
I asked if you see the conclusion of this view, and if you endorse it.
To be very very clear it goes like this: if poor are fat because they make bad choices and for no other reasons, then you can reasonably conclude that that is also why they are poor. That they deserve to be poor for that reason.
Is that a fair summary of your view?
Where are they saying that? This entire conversation has no relevance to what one deserves. Causality is not changed by one deserving something.
Opportunity: if your area cannot give you produce (raw materials to cook with) that's pretty direct. Time: I'm fortunate enough that I can blow at least an hour a day just cutting up meat for stir-fry or preparing my omelet and oatmeal, and a lot of this is really time-optimized but it's still way more than the microwave-box lifestyle. That hour (at least, and distributed among all my meals for the day) is also an attention sink that I can't skip, even though I make the same stuff over and over. If I couldn't do that, I'd have to not only be getting different foodstuffs, but also figuring out different recipes every time I got bored.
You can let corporate America do that stuff for you and just pick different enticing boxes of microwaveable stuff, but you will get bombed with combinations of sugar and salt because competing in the supermarket aisle is serious business and those who fail are lost. They'd be putting fentanyl in the Hot Pockets if they dared. Anything to make the sale, it's that or perish.
Then, that's what you eat, if you're poor and can't spend hours doing it yourself and doing it right. And if you're poor enough… the selection at Cumberland Farms is going to be strictly kept to whatever the other poor people in your neighborhood are addicted to, because that's what will sell.
That's it. There's a huge difference between US and many other countries
It also compounds with the social/cultural context of a living in a city full of very wealthy people.
The conception that most of the bad things that happen to an individual is because of poor choices makes perpetuating inequalities easier. Notably thoses that stem from free market capitalism.
In France we have a strong cultural awareness of our low/inexsitent free-will. This translates readily into state welfare.
If you have have access to $1 frozen veggie bags, $2/lb chicken thighs, and assortment of different legumes, you have it better food options than the majority of the world. You can certainly achieve a healthy diet if you really want to.
New food deserts now exist in Minneapolis (and likely other cities as well) after the recent rioting and burning there:
https://www.startribune.com/minneapolis-longfellow-neighborh...
https://www.marketplace.org/2020/06/04/neighborhoods-where-s...
Ironically, in the most recent riots, many - perhaps most - of the destructive rioters were middle-class "activist" kids who don't have to live with the results of their actions.
This is a myth that's easily refuted. There's an argument to be made that poorer people aren't educated on healthy food choices but the idea that they don't have access to anything but processed food is just silly.
Edit: also you seem to present the author's formulation as meaning that they believe poverty caused them to be fat. As far as I can tell she is merely pointing out a series of correlations to both prove that she, in fact, stood out as poor, and to show how this distinction affected her furthermore. Btw I'd say the only actively harmful behaviour from the company she pointed out was making her suggest a salary rather than them making an offering.
I'm also coming from a poor family and area, and I also had a few revelations, but nothing like this. My very first of these experiences was at a company paid dinner, where the waiters rolled out a trolley of beverages next to our a table and went away for a couple of minutes. I joked to my colleagues at the table that we could just steal that trolley and nobody would notice it. Nobody laughed, of course and I realised that at that point in my life I could buy a truck of those beverages on my hourly wage. That was nearly 3 months into my career and I just moved on right away.
As a matter of fact, not having a lot of money only emphasizes the fact that your health is one of the things you can influence.
I know this will upset people, but if poor people are fat, food is not scarce. The quality of food may be low, but low food quality does not make one fat, a surplus of calories does.
To be absolutely clear, I know there is a strong correlation between socioeconomic status and obesity. It's much more complicated than "just eat less", many factors play into this. Including food IQ. It's much more easy to overeat on Cheetos than it is on potatoes and green beans. A persons social environment will have a big influence on how and what they eat, how much they will move, etc.
That low quality food is food with a surplus of calories. That's a large part of what makes it low quality.
I did, poorer in fact. I only stopped being thin when I got a good salary.
She's full of it[1].
[1] 'It' being 'victim complex'.
Yes I did and I'm still not obese.
"Your eating choices" as a poor person might be to eat what and when and where you can afford to.
From Wikipedia: "The rate of increase in the incidence of obesity began to slow in the 2000s".
But, to attempt to answer your question: e.g., the expectation that both adults in a household will work means that people/parents are more likely to be time-poor and not able to cook. Cooking skills have been lost.
I think there is a self-deprecating humor to the article, and I enjoyed it. Life in tech world is strange sometimes.
They might be right about the bad food options but what these people don't get is that if you're poor you have a lot of bigger more time pressing, more tractable problems to solve than being fat. Most of these people would still be fat if they had more ready access to "good" food because good food wouldn't magically make being fat jump to the top of their priority list.
When you have little money you can very easily justify skipping lunch everyday or something like that. Skipping breakfast or lunch, having a very minimal meal for the one you don't skip (think PB&J, maybe with a fruit cup if you're feeling like a high roller) and then having your big meal at dinner so that your hunger is focused on the parts of the day when you're working and distracted and you go to sleep full is a very, very, tractable form of dieting and cost cutting rolled into one.
But if you have enough money to indulge in food/beer then why not do it, it's about the only luxury you can afford.
Sure, there is no law of physics that makes poor people overweight, but it is much easier to have a thin waistline when you have a fat bank account. And indeed we observe that in the US, poor people are heavier than wealthier people.
(If you found this point incorrect, dumb, or worthless, consider that is how many people feel about the point I am replying to.)
There are lots of factors why that's the case,but to say it's not happening like this wouldn't be right either.
I do encourage anyone who hasn't already to read the whole chapter http://www.george-orwell.org/The_Road_to_Wigan_Pier/5.html : it's not really very long though I felt that the relevant parts were a bit too long, all together, to fit in a comment.
I'm glad I didn't read that book when I was still "poor", it's so relatable and hits hard. I recommend it for anyone kind of wondering (he's not exactly kind to the working class, but he does try hard to understand it all and does have insight).
First, I dont think this accurately describes the list at all. Second, it is ok for people to express negative feelings or observations. Forced positivity is toxic.
I gained it back.