3 ms·
When you're talking about poor people, you can't assume that people have a car. Some of the worst food deserts are in cities where you can get by without a car.
by qntty 7y ago
When you're talking about poor people, you can't assume that people have a car. Some of the worst food deserts are in cities where you can get by without a car. Plus when you work 3 jobs and have kids, driving an extra 10 minutes both ways to get to a better grocery store can be too much.
- javagram 7y agoI know I can’t assume that which is why I said there are people without cars. The parent post listed foods like rice, beans, and frozen veg all of which have long shelf life. If you swap canned veg for the frozen, you don’t even need refrigeration. That means you don’t need more than a weekly trip to the grocery store. If you do have a car, the extra 10 minutes of travel time isn’t that much. Once you bring time and overworked parents into the picture things look different. It’s certainly a lot easier from a time perspective to grab food from McDonald’s or other unhealthy ultraprocessed foods that don’t need any cooking or prep work at all. But that has little to do with the “food desert” concept since it affects you no matter how close the grocery store is.
- technofiend 7y ago"Extra 10 minutes of travel time"? Sir I believe you are misinformed on typical public transportation travel times. The median wait time for a bus usually exceeds 10 minutes. Factor in the fact that a proper grocery store may not be on the bus line that gets you out of the neighborhood and you're easily looking at hours on a bus there and back to shop at a proper grocery store.