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).
Entertaining article on the quality of Florida tomatoes.
Same problem with a lot of the produce we get from California: it has to ripen during the shipping process.
Better to buy local greenhouse production in the “off season” and local field production in the summer.
We are totally spoiled by year-round availability, even if they aren’t as good quality and shipped vast differences. Many people don’t have price flexibility either.
I’ve quit US strawberries because they’re so awful and have largely switched to greenhouse grown and Mexican grown grape/cherry tomatoes to try and find something with flavour.
It seems like we’re slowly moving to locally sourced lettuce leaves too.
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Where do you live again?
I might buy some from a guy with a truck today, picked this morning not 50 miles away.
Then again, when I was growing up in corn country, there were weeks at a time when we’d have corn on the cob nearly every day, and I’ve yet to find corn that good in SoCal. Oh, it’s grown, and I’ve gone to the farms. Maybe a week of good corn.
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Newfoundland, but the local grocery stores are full of U.S. strawberries and field tomatoes.
Local.strawberries are another 1-2 weeks away.
On the opposite end of the diagonal.
Few here buying US produce despite their deep discounts.
Local strawberries are available. And I gorged on fresh Ontario strawberries when there last week.
We buy Mexican berries in the off-season.
damn.
We have strawberries from February on. First batches aren’t so great, May is prime time, and we are nearing the end of the season.
I remember realizing after I moved to California that it wasn’t that I disliked tomatoes, it was that I had never truly tasted one.
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Local tomatoes are quite good here in season, but that’s not all that long. The rest of the year a lot of tomatoes available at the grocery stores are crap. Even the ones you get in restaurants are often bad. Good plum tomatoes seem to be around longer than the standard variety, but even those get crappy off season.
The out of season tomato we like the best that is widely available here comes from Canada, grown in hothouses. Campari/tomatoes on the vine are pretty good year round but pricey.
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Also agree that for most of the year here the strawberries you get in the grocery store are crap.
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Let them eat fish lol. You folks even get fresh produce?
About a month ago I cooked fish and chips for about 30 folks, with nfld cod. I might argue that I like that as much as I like perch.
On.my fishing with nerds discord the students are going on about service berries. They’re picking them and looking for more. And, asking me to take them out picking..except I dont even know what they are lol. Better wait til raspberry season.