If people were legally allowed to live near grocery stores, they wouldn't feel the need to carry four to six bags of groceries along with them.
As European it's hard to imagine a place where you cannot walk to a grocery store.
I used to live in a 1920s era "streetcar suburb" neighbourhood. I lived on the third floor, and the ground level was a full (but small) grocery store. I never spent more than ~$50 at a time on groceries because I only bought for a couple days at a time.
The same decisions and laws that created the current system can be changed to take us back to the "norm" in the rest of the world.
My rural grocery store is 1.9 mi away. I tend to shop a few times a week, and only for what I need.
Generally one bag, mostly produce. Maybe a meat I’ll cook that day.
House size ranges from one to five. The only time I wind up with a full fridge is around holidays or when I have houseguests with food anxiety.
What are you talking about? What backwaters country is this? In many places in the world, people live literally on top of grocery stores, such law would be ridiculed until the law makers have to socially isolate themselves if they tried to come up with something so stupid.
And yeah, walkable cities includes infrastructure that does not magnify the sun at pedestrians (see: shade, plants)
https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2019/june/u-s-shoppers-...
The downtown/center of older cities may still have mixed use, and there have been changes happening in recent years to allow/build more apartments and mixed use areas, but, generally outside of the densest parts of the largest cities commercial and residential areas are required to be separate, with personal cars as the primary/only way to get between them.
This has been a bit of a self-reinforcing phenomenon, IMO, as car-first infrastructure puts people at the mercy of traffic congestion, and means that any apartment building or business in their vicinity will result in more cars passing through, more congestion, more competition for parking, as well as the presence of the large parking lots that cities mandate for any new construction, which themselves make it unpleasant to get around in any other way.
It's somewhat misleading to talk about distance-to-X in a lot of American places. I live less than a mile from the nearest grocery as the crow flies, but if I wanted to walk there I have to traverse my entire street to get to an exit road (as opposed to walking out my back gate; the whole back is fenced because the exit road is directly behind my house). Then I have to walk down a fairly busy one-lane-each-way road with no sidewalks or shoulders present (i.e., you're going to be walking in a shallow drainage ditch - hope it's not raining!) for a few hundred meters, cross two busy multilane roads, and walk across an unshaded parking lot.
Obviously no. But where I lived ~20 years ago the nearest grocery was a 20 minute walk there and then 20 minute walk back with two or four shopping bags with stuff, and I wasn't the only one walking there when needing to do shopping.
I think it's more common than not out in the world that things are far away so you need to spend awful amount of time on just getting places. Unless you live in a city of course.
I've been to the US many times and I'm still shocked when I need to drive from this parking lot to that parking lot across the street because it would be dangerous and possibly illegal to just walk there.