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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

> Food is a basic human need, paying someone to make a burrito for you and then hand deliver it to your house is not. There is no shortage of food in america.

Do some googling about what is a "food desert", plenty of lower income people in the USA live somewhere that the grocery store options and fresh, nutritious ingredient shopping options are VERY poor. Or a costly distance away to drive on a regular basis.

I am not saying this excuses ordering $25 burritos on doordash or uber eats but it is an influencing factor.

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The lack of food can be explained either by a shortage of demand or a shortage of supply. Many people assume that the demand is there and the supply is the problem - people are desperate for healthy food but no one wants to sell it to them for some reason (the reason is always left unsaid). Instead, they have no choice but to shop at 7/11. So presumably, as soon as a store selling fresh, nutritious ingredients opens up, it would be swarmed with people buying broccoli and chicken breasts. However there is some evidence that the reason no healthy food is being sold is because people's demand for heathy food is being provided by a supermarket a few miles away, or that they just have little demand for healthy food in the first place. Here is an article with more information: https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2019/decemb...

To support your point, I live in the complete opposite of a food desert but I know a lot of people who don’t know how to cook… like not really. “Cooking” to them going to Trader’s Joes and buying one of those frozen packs. If I gave them a bunch of chicken breasts and broccoli, they would struggle to make it tasty, even if I told them it load it up with fats and sugars.

Cooking — as in being able to make any set of common ingredients tasty, quickly, with few dishes to wash, and without looking up recipes each time — is the skill you need before you can “unlock” supermarkets. If I was still 19 and a new supermarket showed up, I would know f— all to do except browse the frozen section.

This is way more an issue than some realize. A repairman I used to know would always have great deals on amazing kitchen gear. It was always 5-10 years out of date but barely used (Viking oven where the burners had been used a bit, but the oven still had all the plastic bags and manuals in it).

Super valuable houses where nobody ever cooked. He said the only thing he’d ever be called to service was the microwave and the fridge.

But 10 years in, gotta refresh the house!

It does sound strange to me. I wouldn't consider myself as someone knowing how to cook, but I mean, there's stuff like eggs, pasta, or sausages that you literally just stick into a pot of water and boil it for N minutes (where N is right there on the packaging even). And you wouldn't do that in a microwave oven.

Time is extremely scarce for poor people. Cooking healthy and cheap meals means research, planning and batch meal prep. This also requires being a forward-looking state of mind.

Personally, I think the government should be investigating ways to raise income levels for the poorest. I don’t know what form this should take - UBI? negative income tax? - but fix that and the rest would follow for many people.

I generally support measures like increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit but I'm skeptical that would really solve this particular problem. Poor people in other countries manage to cook healthy and cheap meals from a few staple ingredients. There's no research or planning involved, they just get on with it.

Lack of calories is not an issue in the USA. There are redundant pathways to get the staples people need, food banks, stamps, ect.

The few percent of the population that suffer insecurity do so as a symptom of other complex causes. Children of addicts and mentally unstable will struggle to get dinner, even if there is a food pantry down the block. A homeless schizophrenic living out of a backpack wont always have food with them.

For reasons like this, there is a floor to the practical floor to the elimination of hunger.

Also, if you havent, I would recommend reading through a food insecurity survey if you haven't. The definition is broader than most realize.

If you look at malnutrition rates in the US, I think you get a much clearer picture.

And what would increasing the income do for changing the state of mind, or for better time management ?

Are you suggesting people are poor because they don't have good time management?

There are certainly “innocent” poor if you want to use the term - those who are disadvantaged through no fault of their own and are working hard to get out of it.

And just as certainly being poor can be a result of bad choices and other things. Denying that either is possible is a recipe for disaster.

What we should do is work on the things that will work for those who need help and help them improve their skills or provide them a structured environment where are those skills are not necessary.

Many of them, yes. And a plethora of other complex problems. Severe trauma, drug and alcohol addiction, low executive function are all in the mix.

This isn't an attempt at blaming, just a statement that there are significant hurdles.

FWIW when you look at other countries, there are many out there where the word "poor" implies much less wealth than it does in US, yet poor people in those countries routinely cook their own meals. Indeed, historically it is the norm for basically everybody but the topmost layer of society.

Speaking as an immigrant, from what I've seen in US, it is mostly a cultural issue, not lack of time or ingredient availability.

UBI is a good idea but orthogonal to all this.

It can also be explained by corrupt markets and societal coercion that perpetuate cycles bolstering cooperate profits.

There was a short discussion here[1] recently on this topic, where I added[2] some extra context. Turns out it's probably not so cut and dry.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43524570

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43524836

Even in most "food deserts" it's possible to get cheap and healthy food like beans, rice, potatoes, apples, peanut butter, frozen chicken, cheese, canned vegetables, etc. Most of that stuff can be stored for a long time and doesn't require frequent trips to the grocery store.

These food deserts are exclusively caused by completely unjustifiable crimes committed by those lower income people. They aren't stealing bread, rice, beans, vegetables. They are stealing flat screen TVs and destroying their local Walmart.

Food deserts only exist where the negative cost of being burglarized has managed to exceed the large income of fulfilling humanity's third most basic need besides air and water.

If you live in a "food desert" you can get a frozen burrito at Walgreens or a corner store for $1

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