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One of the issues with poverty and obesity is that a lot of people seem to think and argue poor people can’t afford healthy food. While there are some poor gro

One of the issues with poverty and obesity is that a lot of people seem to think and argue poor people can’t afford healthy food. While there are some poor groups who cannot get any frozen vegetables or unprocessed of any sort without going into debt or becoming homeless or just not having access, I think they are the minority. Frozen vegetables, canned beans and meat, eggs, etc. are very healthy, very cheap, and ubiquitous even in mini-marts. Almost everyone can eat healthy if they really prioritize it. The main issue is that when you’re poor, you don’t prioritize healthy foods. You have stress and much bigger things to worry about, you’re more concerned with having food than having quality food. While its possible to buy healthy, it requires finding a way to get to the grocery store and save a few dollars somewhere else. And then, the payoff is that maybe it will make you healthier, but maybe not even, because the additional stress and undiagnosed health issues may cancel it out. To top it off, the foods I mentioned - canned and frozen vegetables - are boring and not particularly tasty. If you want to make healthy food which “tastes good”, you need to spend significantly more time money: you need to go to fancier stores, pay more, actually cook the food, and make sure it doesn’t go bad. So just giving poor people theoretical access to healthy food isn’t enough. You need to encourage healthy food with discounts, make it more accessible, teach people what is healthy, and why eating healthy food is important. And on top of that, eating healthy needs to actually be important vs. the other priorities people are dealing with.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
iratewizard 5y ago
I hear lines of thinking like this about poor people where it's never really their fault and it's just an unfortunate circumstance. It has always struck me as weird, because I grew up poor and grew up around poor people. I've never come across any of these poor people you describe anywhere besides television.
- colpabar 5y ago
  A lot of people who have never been poor refuse to acknowledge that a lot of poor people are poor in large part because they make bad choices. I think it makes them feel better.
  - grayfaced 5y ago
    And yet many critical positions are paid poverty wages. How can we say a job is a poor choice if it's necessary for a functioning society.
    - SubjectToChange 5y ago
      Is this any more of a conundrum as water costing less than gold?
    - dolni 5y ago
      If a job is critical to society and nobody does it, the wage will necessarily increase. That is the beauty of the free market. A job can be critical and also have WAY too many bodies versus jobs.
      - grayfaced 5y ago
        In an efficient free market. The efficient is the frictionless spherical cow of economics, useful to describe theories even if it's never been observed in real life. That's why we have critical jobs, that are understaffed and poverty wages. If we had a perfectly efficient market, it would never happen. We don't, so it does.
        Melting_Harps 5y ago
        > We don't, so it does. I still think that the greatest tragedy that happened after 2008 wasn't the obscene amounts of corruption and the mismanagement of assets and misallocation of resources, they were extremely bad, but it wasn't the worst thing. What i think was the worst thing to occur was the massive displacement of qualified STEM degreed workers who ended 'falling thrugh the cracks' over the yaers because the positions that were marketed them as 'waiting for you when you're done' vanished overnight. I have met so many aspiring biologists, chemists, and physicists/mathematicians who ended up in finance or some other aimless thing because debt and bills needed to paid who had pursued their degrees to try and take on climate change, mass hunger, food security etc... many of thier collective idealism turned to angst then morose and even bleak inevitable outcomes for the near future in such a short time. Many never really recovering from the depression, and feeling as how Society failed them despite 'doing the right thing.' I know I felt that way, but I was determined to not let it occur and I used it as fuel to push through it, but I have serious survivor bias and I still deal with PTSD from it all--it's a work in progress, but I think it was a phyrric victory most times. The real tragedy of the last decade will be one of the loss in Human Capital to the aforementioned issues, and this almost inescapable political climate in which we cannot distinguish real threats from trivial ones because we're so distracted by the vapid divisiveness that keeps people at each others throats wit perpetual tribalism.
- PeterWhittaker 5y ago
  I don't think the comment to which you respond is arguing it's never really their fault, or anything like that, so much as accepting the fact, backed by research (and yes, if you insist, I will find the citations) that there is an intense cognitive burden to managing one's resources when one is sufficiently poor. As we all - assuming we all here on HN do relatively intellectual work - can attest, thinking and deciding have energy and exhaustion costs and we have a finite capacity after which we must recharge and rest. And many of us are familiar with how stress (deadlines, conflicts at home, weather, etc.) tax us even further, reducing our ability to think well and decide well, and leading, sometimes, to poor decisions... ...that bring their own stress and workload. Imagine if everyday the bulk of your decision making was literally about every dollar: heat and lights or shoes? Shoes or food? Food or healthcare? Healthcare of rent? Rent or heat and light? You would do the same thing we do when we are coding something complex and need to make progress. You would pick a thing, do something simple that isn't really enough but is enough for now, slap hic sunt draconis in a comment, and move on. Hopefully you will get back to it. People choose the easy, convenient, less good for them food because that gives more time to consider their other trade offs, maybe even to breathe long enough to reduce some of their stress. And they may never get back to that choice, because the choices, the strains, never end. Poverty is a vicious circle of stress and decline. Yes, there are people who make it out, just like there are people who make the NBA or the NHL. Most people, though, suffer. Literally. It doesn't matter how people get poor. What matters is that poor is hard, harder than most anything most of us will ever face. What matters is that we respond with compassion and consideration and perhaps try to see beyond fault and responsibility and instead try to do something to amend those situations.
  - Red_Leaves_Flyy 5y ago
    Being poor is agonizing. Having an overdrawn bank account or no bank account and more bills past due then I’ll be able to pay with my next two checks while worrying about my empty fridge, my gas tank on e, my lapsed car insurance, the donut that’s been on the car for 500 miles, the pile of dirty clothes, and on and on and on. Just listing everything is exhausting and physically painful. It hurts to know so viscerally that there’s nothing I can legally do in a sane timespan to fix these problems. Trying to think even two weeks out is impossible because something else is going to happen that destroys any progress I made. So I’ll tackle the most pressing first. Scrounge couches, the car, and spend a sleepless night wandering the city collecting cans so I can wash my nasty clothes so I won’t get fired. Hopefully I won’t have an accident at work that’ll cost way more than I got for a nights work.
- kansface 5y ago
  Yeah, I don’t get it. The poor have always been with us - much more so in the past. Obesity is something modern. A ton of cuisine comes from poor people food the world over…
prawn 5y ago
Besides meat and eggs, the things you described are cheap and easy to store. I don't think they're boring, and certainly not without a tiny amount of creative seasoning. Maybe the amount of sugar in products needs to be very prominently called out in all packaging. My kids love tomato/BBQ sauce/ketchup. Tomato ketchup is 25% sugars. For BBQ sauce, it's 45% sugars. They might as well be sprinkling sugar on dinner. "Back in the ’80s, the Reagan administration proposed counting ketchup as a vegetable in school lunches."
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 5y ago
  Items with added sugar should have black box labels and be illegal to advertise.
dghughes 5y ago
> One of the issues with poverty and obesity is that a lot of people seem to think and argue poor people can’t afford healthy food. I've seen poverty measured by toilet paper. A person who is working but poor may have money but their funds are so limited they can't even buy a 4 pack of toilet paper, or to buy in bulk, or to buy more when it's on sale. They simply don't have the disposable income every since dime is needed and already spent by the time they get paid. With food it's the same way since poverty means that you buy what you can right now. Having worked shift work for 12 and sometimes 18 hours I know you don't want to do anything but eat something, anything just so you can get it over with and go to bed at a decent hour. I've actually had run around my house after a long shift because the end of my day was so limited. I ran around getting pizza pockets ready and getting my clothes ready for the next day. I was trying to get it done and not be up too late. I'd run to bed to jump in and go to sleep because I had no time to waste. It sounds silly but my time was limited and I wasn't really what I'd call poor I made just above minimum wage at the time but worked long hours to get overtime. Also poverty means most times the person doesn't have cookware to cook food. Frying pans, a pot or more than one pot. Even chef knives or any large knife to cut vegetables. Cutting boards to cut on. It's all a big cost to get such items assembled.
dolni 5y ago
It really sounds like you are assuming people are stupider than they are. Nobody thinks McDonald's, Hungry Man XXL frozen meals, or Doritos are good for you. People know the benefits of healthy eating. And you toss out this "stress" boogeyman as though eating unhealthy is the default. People are lazy and lack self-control. That's most of the issue. Eating healthy takes effort that lots of people can't be bothered to expend. As you mentioned, it takes ten times more effort to make a healthy meal taste good than an unhealthy one. Where you are wrong is cost. It doesn't cost a lot to make healthy food taste good, but it does require knowledge of flavors and a decent set spices.
- mc32 5y ago
  Also, if these people have children, getting the children to eat the healthy version of things, is more demanding that getting that burger, hotdog, taco or greasy take-out, than getting them to eat brussels sprouts and lentils. Only truly impoverished people eat food that are made from scratch because there is no job to juggle and you're just juggling food budgets.
r00fus 5y ago
It goes so much further than this, but mainly I think it's a matter of disposable time, or lack thereof. Poor people these days have to work numerous jobs concurrently (partly because they need the cashflow, but even if they don't their jobs often aren't stable so they need to build up reserves for the "dry" times). When you have adequate time to cook, and have built-up the capacity to actually cook, you can take advantage of that benefit.
charlescearl 5y ago
No. Having lived in places that are now called “food deserts”, having relatives in places called food deserts, they are called that because healthy food — fresh veggies are NOT AVAIALABLE and you have to schlep to get alternatives. The most egregious examples is the way that Native communities across the U.S., whose foodways are healthy and sustainable, who were responsible for the cultivation of corn, squash (i.e. the “healthy” organic foods that now available in the Whole Foods isles) have and continue to be persistently forced into areas that are food deserts by design [1]. It’s not that people don’t know what food is important, the core of their cultural practices have been clear for millennia on this point. The construction of a society that demands that some people be herded into pockets of deprivation is the problem. 1. https://www.davispoliticalreview.com/article/the-prevalence-of-food-insecurity-and-food-deserts-in-native-american-communities https://www.davispoliticalreview.com/article/the-prevalence-...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

iratewizard 5y ago

I hear lines of thinking like this about poor people where it's never really their fault and it's just an unfortunate circumstance. It has always struck me as weird, because I grew up poor and grew up around poor people. I've never come across any of these poor people you describe anywhere besides television.

colpabar 5y ago
A lot of people who have never been poor refuse to acknowledge that a lot of poor people are poor in large part because they make bad choices. I think it makes them feel better.
- grayfaced 5y ago
  And yet many critical positions are paid poverty wages. How can we say a job is a poor choice if it's necessary for a functioning society.
  - SubjectToChange 5y ago
    Is this any more of a conundrum as water costing less than gold?
  - dolni 5y ago
    If a job is critical to society and nobody does it, the wage will necessarily increase. That is the beauty of the free market. A job can be critical and also have WAY too many bodies versus jobs.
    - grayfaced 5y ago
      In an efficient free market. The efficient is the frictionless spherical cow of economics, useful to describe theories even if it's never been observed in real life. That's why we have critical jobs, that are understaffed and poverty wages. If we had a perfectly efficient market, it would never happen. We don't, so it does.
      - Melting_Harps 5y ago
        > We don't, so it does. I still think that the greatest tragedy that happened after 2008 wasn't the obscene amounts of corruption and the mismanagement of assets and misallocation of resources, they were extremely bad, but it wasn't the worst thing. What i think was the worst thing to occur was the massive displacement of qualified STEM degreed workers who ended 'falling thrugh the cracks' over the yaers because the positions that were marketed them as 'waiting for you when you're done' vanished overnight. I have met so many aspiring biologists, chemists, and physicists/mathematicians who ended up in finance or some other aimless thing because debt and bills needed to paid who had pursued their degrees to try and take on climate change, mass hunger, food security etc... many of thier collective idealism turned to angst then morose and even bleak inevitable outcomes for the near future in such a short time. Many never really recovering from the depression, and feeling as how Society failed them despite 'doing the right thing.' I know I felt that way, but I was determined to not let it occur and I used it as fuel to push through it, but I have serious survivor bias and I still deal with PTSD from it all--it's a work in progress, but I think it was a phyrric victory most times. The real tragedy of the last decade will be one of the loss in Human Capital to the aforementioned issues, and this almost inescapable political climate in which we cannot distinguish real threats from trivial ones because we're so distracted by the vapid divisiveness that keeps people at each others throats wit perpetual tribalism.
PeterWhittaker 5y ago
I don't think the comment to which you respond is arguing it's never really their fault, or anything like that, so much as accepting the fact, backed by research (and yes, if you insist, I will find the citations) that there is an intense cognitive burden to managing one's resources when one is sufficiently poor. As we all - assuming we all here on HN do relatively intellectual work - can attest, thinking and deciding have energy and exhaustion costs and we have a finite capacity after which we must recharge and rest. And many of us are familiar with how stress (deadlines, conflicts at home, weather, etc.) tax us even further, reducing our ability to think well and decide well, and leading, sometimes, to poor decisions... ...that bring their own stress and workload. Imagine if everyday the bulk of your decision making was literally about every dollar: heat and lights or shoes? Shoes or food? Food or healthcare? Healthcare of rent? Rent or heat and light? You would do the same thing we do when we are coding something complex and need to make progress. You would pick a thing, do something simple that isn't really enough but is enough for now, slap hic sunt draconis in a comment, and move on. Hopefully you will get back to it. People choose the easy, convenient, less good for them food because that gives more time to consider their other trade offs, maybe even to breathe long enough to reduce some of their stress. And they may never get back to that choice, because the choices, the strains, never end. Poverty is a vicious circle of stress and decline. Yes, there are people who make it out, just like there are people who make the NBA or the NHL. Most people, though, suffer. Literally. It doesn't matter how people get poor. What matters is that poor is hard, harder than most anything most of us will ever face. What matters is that we respond with compassion and consideration and perhaps try to see beyond fault and responsibility and instead try to do something to amend those situations.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 5y ago
  Being poor is agonizing. Having an overdrawn bank account or no bank account and more bills past due then I’ll be able to pay with my next two checks while worrying about my empty fridge, my gas tank on e, my lapsed car insurance, the donut that’s been on the car for 500 miles, the pile of dirty clothes, and on and on and on. Just listing everything is exhausting and physically painful. It hurts to know so viscerally that there’s nothing I can legally do in a sane timespan to fix these problems. Trying to think even two weeks out is impossible because something else is going to happen that destroys any progress I made. So I’ll tackle the most pressing first. Scrounge couches, the car, and spend a sleepless night wandering the city collecting cans so I can wash my nasty clothes so I won’t get fired. Hopefully I won’t have an accident at work that’ll cost way more than I got for a nights work.
kansface 5y ago
Yeah, I don’t get it. The poor have always been with us - much more so in the past. Obesity is something modern. A ton of cuisine comes from poor people food the world over…

prawn 5y ago

Besides meat and eggs, the things you described are cheap and easy to store. I don't think they're boring, and certainly not without a tiny amount of creative seasoning. Maybe the amount of sugar in products needs to be very prominently called out in all packaging. My kids love tomato/BBQ sauce/ketchup. Tomato ketchup is 25% sugars. For BBQ sauce, it's 45% sugars. They might as well be sprinkling sugar on dinner. "Back in the ’80s, the Reagan administration proposed counting ketchup as a vegetable in school lunches."

Red_Leaves_Flyy 5y ago
Items with added sugar should have black box labels and be illegal to advertise.

dghughes 5y ago

> One of the issues with poverty and obesity is that a lot of people seem to think and argue poor people can’t afford healthy food. I've seen poverty measured by toilet paper. A person who is working but poor may have money but their funds are so limited they can't even buy a 4 pack of toilet paper, or to buy in bulk, or to buy more when it's on sale. They simply don't have the disposable income every since dime is needed and already spent by the time they get paid. With food it's the same way since poverty means that you buy what you can right now. Having worked shift work for 12 and sometimes 18 hours I know you don't want to do anything but eat something, anything just so you can get it over with and go to bed at a decent hour. I've actually had run around my house after a long shift because the end of my day was so limited. I ran around getting pizza pockets ready and getting my clothes ready for the next day. I was trying to get it done and not be up too late. I'd run to bed to jump in and go to sleep because I had no time to waste. It sounds silly but my time was limited and I wasn't really what I'd call poor I made just above minimum wage at the time but worked long hours to get overtime. Also poverty means most times the person doesn't have cookware to cook food. Frying pans, a pot or more than one pot. Even chef knives or any large knife to cut vegetables. Cutting boards to cut on. It's all a big cost to get such items assembled.

dolni 5y ago

It really sounds like you are assuming people are stupider than they are. Nobody thinks McDonald's, Hungry Man XXL frozen meals, or Doritos are good for you. People know the benefits of healthy eating. And you toss out this "stress" boogeyman as though eating unhealthy is the default. People are lazy and lack self-control. That's most of the issue. Eating healthy takes effort that lots of people can't be bothered to expend. As you mentioned, it takes ten times more effort to make a healthy meal taste good than an unhealthy one. Where you are wrong is cost. It doesn't cost a lot to make healthy food taste good, but it does require knowledge of flavors and a decent set spices.

mc32 5y ago
Also, if these people have children, getting the children to eat the healthy version of things, is more demanding that getting that burger, hotdog, taco or greasy take-out, than getting them to eat brussels sprouts and lentils. Only truly impoverished people eat food that are made from scratch because there is no job to juggle and you're just juggling food budgets.

r00fus 5y ago

It goes so much further than this, but mainly I think it's a matter of disposable time, or lack thereof. Poor people these days have to work numerous jobs concurrently (partly because they need the cashflow, but even if they don't their jobs often aren't stable so they need to build up reserves for the "dry" times). When you have adequate time to cook, and have built-up the capacity to actually cook, you can take advantage of that benefit.

charlescearl 5y ago

No. Having lived in places that are now called “food deserts”, having relatives in places called food deserts, they are called that because healthy food — fresh veggies are NOT AVAIALABLE and you have to schlep to get alternatives. The most egregious examples is the way that Native communities across the U.S., whose foodways are healthy and sustainable, who were responsible for the cultivation of corn, squash (i.e. the “healthy” organic foods that now available in the Whole Foods isles) have and continue to be persistently forced into areas that are food deserts by design [1]. It’s not that people don’t know what food is important, the core of their cultural practices have been clear for millennia on this point. The construction of a society that demands that some people be herded into pockets of deprivation is the problem. 1. https://www.davispoliticalreview.com/article/the-prevalence-of-food-insecurity-and-food-deserts-in-native-american-communities https://www.davispoliticalreview.com/article/the-prevalence-...