5 ms·

"A mile or more from a grocery store" isn't that terribly far - plenty of suburbs, to say nothing of rural areas, meet that criteria.

• tonyarkles 11y ago
  Now imagine that you're living paycheque to paycheque, barely making ends meet, and your car breaks down and you can't afford to fix it until next month. How do you buy groceries? You walk over to the corner store talked about in the article and pay $5 for a gallon of milk. Speaking from my own (not super broad) experience, people who live in suburbs are often better off than the people that this article is talking about. Having to drive to get groceries, while necessary, isn't the same kind of hardship. And most of the rural folks I know have two things that help: a huge pantry down in the basement full of canned goods and a deep-freeze or two full of frozen food, and a good enough relationship with their neighbours that they could get a ride or tow into town to get their car fixed. It's weird in my city. There's a pile of apartment buildings right downtown, but there hasn't been a grocery store there for probably 10-15 years. I lived there when I was a student (it was a short-ish walk to the university), the only time I managed to actually buy groceries and cook was when my roommate and I happened to be home at the same time and we could use her car (when it was working). Otherwise, the easiest food to get was Subway which was less than a block away, or eat on Campus before I came home. Transit was a waste of time, it'd take over an hour each way to get to a grocery store. It was pretty much the definition of a Food Desert, and it sucked.