Eliminating food deserts won't help poorer Americans eat healthier

[brooklynite]

The Conversation

In the U.S., rich people tend to eat a lot healthier than poor people.

Because poor diets cause obesity, Type II diabetes and other diseases, this nutritional inequality contributes to unequal health outcomes. The richest Americans can expect to live 10-15 years longer than the poorest.

Many think that a key cause of nutritional inequality is food deserts – or neighborhoods without supermarkets, mostly in low-income areas. The narrative is that folks who live in food deserts are forced to shop at local convenience stores, where it’s hard to find healthy groceries. If we could just get a supermarket to open in those neighborhoods, the thinking goes, then people would be able to eat healthy.

The data tell a strikingly different story.

[Bayard]

1. I read this initially,

Thinking--what's wrong with pie?

[Jose Garcia]

4. Nothing, as long as it is consumed in moderation

[Farmer-Rick]

2. Wow that is a very interesting site.

Do you know anything about it? Do they lean right or left? Of course they say they are fact based but sometimes that's based on GOP/Russian facts.

[TwilightZone]

7. Link:

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-conversation/

[Farmer-Rick]

18. Thanks, for the link.

[blogslut]

3. We should still eliminate food deserts

[jcmaine72]

5. I'm in favor of legalizing marijuana use.

Which would mean absolutely nothing if we simultaneously eliminated deserts. That would be like winning the Powerball one day before the government banned the use of money.

[pecosbob]

6. It's always been about money, not access

The bottom line is how many nickels they can squeeze out of your pockets.

Ninety-five percent of the world's problems are caused by rich f*cks sh*tting on the planet and everyone else on it. We need to come up with a new term for this crime...the rich committing suicide and taking everybody else on the planet with them.

[handmade34]

8. good read...

tax sugary drinks, make food stamps go further with vegetables and fruit and more importantly, get Republicans out of office that are rolling back regulations that help provide healthier choices at school... that and more can be done

[Doreen]

9. I agree that is part of it.

However, even the non food deserts are not one of the main problems. Processed food is cheaper and most of the time lacks needed nutritional value. It is between a rock and a hard place. You can buy healthier food and not have enough to budget through the month to eat enough to keep you going or yo can get enough processed food to budget through the month and have enough to get you through each day. I do the first option but I do not get enough. Yes, I do get food deserts occasionally but that is not the major contributor to my being over weight. Everything combines and needs to be addrat the same time or a better outcome will not be achieved.

[Blue_true]

16. You make excellent points.

Unfortunately people are stuck on food deserts being the one and only cause of the problem. If a person was going to eat an apple a day for 30 days, the cost is a minimum $12-$18, 30 days of cheap cookies or even higher quality ones run $8-$12. In addition to cost, healthy food doesn't keep as well, 2 quarts of strawberries for a week of snacks ends with some rotting berries having to be tossed, pureeing then and adding sugar cause them to last, but sugar has been added.

The issue that we must address, IMO, is how to make fruit and vegetables cheaper so that the price tag of buying enough for a few days or a week doesn't shock poor people. Also, kids need to be taught how to eat healthy from an early age, unfortunately that is a challenge given parent's busy lifestyles, when buying a McDonald's Happy Meal is often a substitute for a home prepared nutritious meal.

[Johnny2X2X]

10. Sugar is addictive

Our obesity epidemic in this country can only be understood through the lens of sugar addiction. People are literally eating themselves to death and knowing it, but they cannot stop.

One study showed that lab mice who are addicted to cocaine will choose sugar over cocaine once they also become addicted to sugar.

It's an issue that has a ton of big money stopping real study and progress.

[MineralMan]

11. Food preparation is a huge issue.

It takes time and skills. Ready-to-eat or microwavable meals are so much easier that people choose those, even if they have supermarkets in which to shop. Preparing healthy meals isn't instinctive. It requires learning how to turn raw ingredients into food that can be eaten.

These days, in supermarkets, the in-store deli and the frozen food aisles are where most people buy their food for daily meals. Already prepared or shortcut foods are almost always less expensive than buying the ingredients and cooking your own meals.

That's why simply putting supermarkets in a place that doesn't have them does little to improve the eating habits of people. Often, they'll just have a bigger selection of ready-to-eat stuff than the convenience stores. That's not the solution.

While I can take a bunch of vegetables, some pasta, a little olive oil and some seasonings and quickly turn those into a nutritious and delicious meal, my wife, who doesn't cook regularly, would be at a complete loss about preparation and cooking of the same dish. I can also whip up mac and cheese from some noodles, a couple of cheeses and other stuff I have on hand. It really takes no longer than making the Kraft Mac and Cheese in the blue box. But it takes some practice and knowledge to do it.

Without education and experience in cooking from scratch, most people will resort to packaged, prepared foods for their daily meals. I'd rather cook for myself, because the food tastes better and I can make more nutritious food, but I'm a good cook, trained by my mother decades ago when most people did prepare their own meals.

Not everyone has that background. Cooking is not instinctive. Not in any way. I had a running joke with my mother-in-law, who was an excellent cook, like my own mother. When we moved out here to help them out, I made a lot of meals in her kitchen, since she was in her late 70s and 80s and didn't have the energy she once had. She was very complimentary about my food. i would always say, jokingly, "Cooking is just heating up stuff, one way or another." She would laugh, because she knew that wasn't really true. It's not that simple.

[Backseat Driver]

14. Out of the food deserts and prison

Last edited Tue Dec 3, 2019, 10:20 PM - Edit history (1)

and into hope(?), also found in Pandora's box: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/nov/26/edwins-restaurant-cleveland-second-chances-ex-prisoners

[MineralMan]

15. Clicking that link takes me nowhere but a 404 page.

You need to remove the period at the end of the link. It works, then.

[Blue_true]

17. You likely remember them well.

My older siblings used to talk about Home Ed classes taught in school. There was even a staff Home Ed teacher. Kids were taught how to do things like select ingredients and prepare meals. Of the youngest of my parents' children, only me and my youngest sister can cook about anything, I learned because I developed a lifelong fascination with food preparation starting about age 13 (I was so deep into it that I would write recipes from the newspaper onto index cards, I had stacks and stacks of index card recipes by the time that I finished college). I prepared my own meals in my last years of college because to get the same quality, I would pay big bucks in restaurants.

[MineralMan]

19. Yes, I remember the Home Economics classes. Girls only.

Boys took shop classes. I was in the band, so I didn't have to take any of those. The girls in the band didn't have to take Home Ec classes, either.

Our family of 5 lived in a small house. About the only place to do homework was the kitchen table, so that's where I was most afternoons. I got to watch my mother preparing meals on a daily basis, and I took an interest in the process. I started asking questions about cooking, which my mother patiently answered.

About the time I became a teenager, I started helping in the kitchen, too. My mother paid no attention to the fact that I was a boy, and started teaching me about cooking. That began one day when I said, "I'm bored." My Mom jokingly said, "Well, why don't you make an apple pie this afternoon, while I'm gone?"

So, I got the Betty Crocker cookbook out and did just that, following the directions carefully, and looking up things I didn't understand, like "cutting butter into the flour."

When Mom came home, there was an apple pie cooling on a rack on the kitchen counter, complete with a lattice top crust. It looked exactly like the picture in the cookbook. That was sort of the start of my kitchen adventures. I've been cooking ever since.

[Blue_true]

20. I think every child that a parent has should be taught how to cook.

I know that if I had kids, I would teach every single one of them about proper food preparation.

I got my start with a package of the Chef Boy a Dee make you own spaghetti. Surprisingly my mom feed us spaghetti from a can. That spaghetti kit, as crummy as it was launched my cooking journey. One of my oldest brothers was a self trained Chef, so when he came home to Florida from New York City, I would ask him all types of questions about meals that I wanted to prepare.

Why don't you launch a YouTube channel on simple home cooking for everyday people? It seems like you would have the video equipment needed to record and the knowledge of downloading whatever you wanted to download. I have toyed with that idea as a way to promote my company, but I am beyond that point now. You can use it to promote other things that you do, like rocks and minerals. I believe that most online cooking demos skip over too much of the simple "how to" and "why" items that when properly presented gives people who can't boil water working tools that allows them to start selecting ingredients and cooking their own meals.

[msongs]

12. article is remarkably short on useful data nt

[womanofthehills]

13. Agreed - Article is too general

When our grocery store closed, the only place to get food was a very small dollar store or travel 90 miles round trip Our town had a go fund me to open the grocery. Grocery made a big difference and even carries grass fed beef and some organic vegetables. I ‘m in NM and most of the poorer people I know out here eat lots of eggs, beans, and chili - all very healthy.