Reagan?
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Baseball strike
Lower income individuals are addicted to crap food, unfortunately.
I wonder if that study gets far enough into actual diversity of healthy options in the stores they are studying to really make that conclusion. Also, a conservative bias at the U of Chicago is worth noting.
“In addition, our analyses revealed that the grocery stores and supermarkets in food deserts do not carry more healthy foods than the convenience stores. As major suppliers for healthy foods in the neighborhoods of food oases and food swamps, these grocery stores and supermarkets have the potential to do the same in impoverished neighborhood.”
Maybe it is that boxed mac & cheese is just so much cheaper than buying noodles and something with protein plus actual vegetables.
I wonder if local grocers closing opened up the door for dollar stores to take off. I don’t think it’s a complete theory, but maybe part of the picture.
There is certainly a price factor.
Ability to even cook a meal is another. I think of myself as a decent cook - self taught where a big part of the learning process is understanding what ingredients are available at the local store, trial and error, and building off a base of knowledge over time. That process all becomes harder the further away your nearest grocery store is, or if they only carry 8 of the 10 ingredients in your recipe and you are clueless what to do about those last 2 so you end up buying frozen pizzas for dinner.
I think we take too much of a transactional view on diet and choice. Its a price, or a number on a label that drives individual decisions. We study those things to prove its true. We make changes to them and observe small changes in behavior, yet each year America gains weight (well, we seem to have drugs to fix that now).