Why do low-income households eat so much garbage? | Hacker News Reader

Why do low-income households eat so much garbage?

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6 pointslopkeny12ko8 comments

Eating preferences and customs are cultural and learned. Healthy eating is a matter of acquired tastes (takes some effort to acquire them, often thanks to parents' pressure) and delayed gratification. Junk food, like all sort of mass products, gives immediate gratification to simple, innate preferences: fat, salty, sugary, high-calories and strongly flavoured. People with low impulse control and less strict education from their families are naturally drawn to junk food, and the effects compound through the generations.

Pardon me, but this is racist and victim-blaming. The whole concept of a food desert is that healthy and nutritious food isn't even available in poor neighborhoods, only fast food and convenience stores. It has little to do with impulse control or education. If you're struggling to survive on a daily basis, the idea of traveling a few miles to shop for groceries is just a pipe dream if you don't have a car or rent money.

> healthy and nutritious food isn't even available in poor neighborhoods, only fast food and convenience stores.

Don't you think you might be getting things backwards? The offer in poor neighborhoods is determined by the demand in those neighborhoods, not the other way around. The shops are selling what the people want to buy.

I've lived in mixed neighborhoods in Europe, where everything is available within walking distance. The poorer people still buy junk food while more wealthy or educated people buy healthier food.

Oh yes. Prime example instant noodles. Sometimes eaten raw right out of the bag. Often offered in big packs of 10 to 20 bags, for amounts of money which would easily get you a banana, an apple, some nuts, maybe tangerines and kiwis too. Not necessarily bio/organic, but still better than those 'ultraprocessed' noodles with their revolting spices and oils.

Indeed, raw healthy foods like chicken breast, rice, banana, are cheaper than junk food those people eat. They just feel too bland to them and won't satisfy their acquired unhealthy tastes. So healthy stuff isn't even sold where poor people dominate.

Link to the related blog post by the author: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/food-deserts-are-not-real

The paper referenced in the x-tweet is "Food Deserts and the Causes of Nutritional Inequality", which can be found eg here[1].

[1]: https://web.stanford.edu/~diamondr/FoodDeserts.pdf

How much of it is stress-induced eating when low-income households barely live paycheck-to-paycheck. That in itself can lead to learned eating preferences inherited from parent to children. I'd assume a healthy diet is the last thing on your mind when you worry tomorrow is eviction day.

One reason may be that proper grocery shops are too far from the places where they live, and they can't afford time driving there and then cooking, working two jobs?

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