One-sixth of Americans don’t have enough food to eat

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/foodfeatures/hunger/

by zvanness • 12 years ago

43 94 12 years ago

jehb• 12 years ago

The other five-sixths of us have too much.

AJ007• 12 years ago

Several of the people pictured in the story are overweight. The cruel irony is that if the price support for wheat/corn/soybean processed food was removed these people would get to feel what physical starvation was like.

stefan_kendall3• 12 years ago

Yeah, because corn, wheat, and soybean are inelastic goods, am I right?

I can't go 3 days without that sweet sweet soybean oil, or I will literally starve to death.

I'd actually draw the supply and demand curve and what would happen to the various suppliers and buyers if the subsidies were removed, but I'm afraid I would get labeled a dirty Randian and branded a heretic.

greyskull• 12 years ago

I'm not denying that there are relevant problems that should be addressed, but why are all these families having kids, multiple even, if they're not fit to raise them? I'm not saying they deserve it, but is it really all that surprising that one or two low-wage adults aren't able to provide for themselves on top of growing children? I'm sure there are families with no kids also facing difficulties, but damn, people!

Also, I'd like to see the breakdown of these families' budgets. Where is their money going? If they're like most Americans, they're likely pissing money away needlessly.

The cynic in me is showing again.

hueving• 12 years ago

They usually don't choose to conceive. Another factor is poor planning. Many people don't budget in the fact that one parent could be unemployed for months on end.

frio4• 12 years ago

I think this deserves extra attention. America has a weird cultural thing at play here; the religious right seem to be strongly anti-contraception (the recent Hobby Lobby decision being a good example). Yet, when the inevitable happens and a child is unexpectedly conceived, there doesn't appear to be much in way of a support structure.

I'd be happy to be wrong on the second part.

aianus4• 12 years ago

My politically incorrect opinion: the same factors that cause them to be poor influence how many children they have, poor decision making and low impulse control.

That and the fact that having children makes them poor by robbing them of the time to improve themselves and earn a higher salary.

throwaway75482• 12 years ago

And they are also likely to be happier than you are ;) Primarily because of the same factors that you've mentioned.

mercer3• 12 years ago

I'm not sure if that in itself is a politically incorrect opinion. The link between success and impulse control is, as far as I know, pretty well established and agreed upon.

It's the conclusion that you draw from this that matters. Is poor decision making and low impulse control also just a consequence of poverty, of being born in an environment that does not nurture these skills? Or does the buck stop there and do these poor people only have themselves to blame?

The same applies to addiction, whether to a particular substance or obesity-related. It was only when I spent some time in Texas that I realized how much harder it is to eat well and exercise compared to my life in Amsterdam!

Or religion. Having experienced both a very religious life, and a very 'secular' life, the one thing it taught me is how little, in the end, my behavior and beliefs were shaped by my 'individual' thoughts and decisions. Very humbling.

I tend to be on the no-blame side on these issues, as I strongly believe we're much less 'individuals' than we think, and much more a product of our upbringing and our path in life, which is to a large degree out of our hand. The ability to make choices is, in itself, largely not a choice.

I hold that position because I've seen and experienced how fragile and context-dependent people are, and because there are volumes of research that support this.

I also believe it is, regardless of the facts, a more optimistic, constructive, and humble approach to life. It reminds me am not the product of (just) my own willpower and craftiness; I am the product of nurturing parents, a good education, a relatively stable upbringing, and inspiring, like-minded friends and acquaintances.

rhizome4• 12 years ago

OK, so maybe you could be clearer. Are you saying that poor people shouldn't have sex?

iends3• 12 years ago

He's saying a responsible adult should not knowingly bring a child into the world without the means to provide for that child.

bluthru• 12 years ago

Because we don't take birth control seriously in this country. IUD's and hormonal birth control should be free. The morning after pill should be available for free in schools. Republicans should stop making it more difficult to operate a planned parenthood.

Doing these things would reduce poverty, crime, and quite importantly our environmental impact.

xherberta8• 12 years ago

Yeah. And especially, the FDA should get on it and fast-track the reversible, non-invasive male birth control (1 time injection) that has been safely used (in trials) in India for 20 years. Men need birth control too, am I right?

AlisdairO3• 12 years ago

but is it really all that surprising that one or two low-wage adults aren't able to provide for themselves on top of growing children

In a wealthy society it ought to be.

Raising children is a pretty basic part of the human experience. It's easy to say "just don't have kids!", but rather harder to live that life if you're someone who wants a family.

cscurmudgeon5• 12 years ago

But 9 kids at 31?

iends3• 12 years ago

Nobody is suggesting "just don't have kids". People are saying plan and save appropriately. (Sure, accidents can happen.)

I know a couple who has had 3 kids by age 19 and both parents have dropped out of high school to support them. What's their endgame? They basically are going to live off the state for their rest of their lives and will always struggle with money and food. If they would have continued with their education and waited 5-10 years, their situation could have been drastically different...

dontmindifido• 12 years ago

I think the culture of blaming the poor for being that way shows a tremendous lack of understanding about the complex social issues around it. It's more than statistically likely you would not break the generational cycle of poverty if you started life in similar circumstances.

mercer3• 12 years ago

Furthermore, it's a pretty serious judgment to make, which I'd say requires a lot of supporting evidence.

pistle• 12 years ago

Look at maps showing availability and locality to family planning resources and abortion clinics - plus abortions stopped being fun a few years ago.

Who's to say that these people were in their present state since the choice to follow through with a pregnancy? The one kid looks like 6-8 y.o. That's pre-crash. A lot changes in 7 years. You can have bankruptcy discharged in 7 years.

ahelwer• 12 years ago

Are you asking questions to which you actually want answers, or are you just trying to whip HN toward a good ol' eugenics fervor? Your entire comment is nothing more than the expectorant of a right-wing radio host. I guess it's fine to rag on poor people though, since we're all Randian captains of the tech industry in here.

JackFr2• 12 years ago

I think greyskull's questions are rhetorical, but his tone is understandable given the tone of TFA, which relentlessly beats on the drum of victimhood at the hands of an unfair system. I think the article could have been could have made the same point with less appeal to sentimentality.

gonehome4• 12 years ago

It can be tempting to ask families receiving food assistance, If you’re really hungry, then how can you be—as many of them are—overweight? The answer is “this paradox that hunger and obesity are two sides of the same coin,” says Melissa Boteach, vice president of the Poverty and Prosperity Program of the Center for American Progress, “people making trade-offs between food that’s filling but not nutritious and may actually contribute to obesity.” For many of the hungry in America, the extra pounds that result from a poor diet are collateral damage—an unintended side effect of hunger itself.

This doesn't make sense to me. Doesn't calorie intake directly correlate with gaining weight?

From earlier in the article:

Chances are good that if you picture what hunger looks like, you don’t summon an image of someone like Christina Dreier: white, married, clothed, and housed, even a bit overweight. The image of hunger in America today differs markedly from Depression-era images of the gaunt-faced unemployed scavenging for food on urban streets. “This is not your grandmother’s hunger

Is this not because the people in the depression era were actually starving? I'm not intending to downplay the issues here, but I find it hard to follow the disconnect of people being overweight not having enough food to eat.

aianus4• 12 years ago

The mean number of calories they eat is too high, but the variance is also too high. Some days they don't eat at all and other days they gorge.

seivan• 12 years ago

YMMV

No. Have you ever noticed the "pot-bellies" of undernourished kids from all those poverty photos from Africa?

That's because they get the cheapest crap we can send/buy them - Rice.

It's not as simple as general thermodynamics. Kcal in and out is just half the equation.

We eat too much sugar today. Everything has so much damn sugar in it. All sorts of different varieties of carbs that eventually just become blood sugar and activating your insulin causing you to store it all as fat.

gonehome4• 12 years ago

I think the distended stomachs are caused by actual starvation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwashiorkor

Though it's possible you're referencing something else.

EpicEng3• 12 years ago

Distended stomachs are caused by actual starvation and, no, those kids aren't fat in the slightest. The article is conflating hunger with poor nutrition. They're not three same thing.

mkr-hn• 12 years ago

It sounds like you're trying to fit the ideology of your diet to observations.

patio112• 12 years ago

It's quite possible if you understand the sense of the word "hunger" they're using, which does not comport to one's usual understanding of the term.

Pretend I routinely consume 3000 calories a day of pizza and sugary drinks. The last week of the month, I run out of sugary drinks, and substitute water with my 2000 calories a day of pizza. I am, according to every instrument ever used to measure it, "food insecure" due to the persistent circumstances causing me to consume less than I had planned to. I may or may not feel any physiological response to lacking Coke for a week (hunger as natural people understand the term). I'm quite likely obese, much like I would be if I consistently consumed 3000 calories a day of organic orange juice, free range steaks, and arugula.

The refocusing of anti-poverty programs and rhetoric on food insecurity as opposed to our now deprecated understanding of hunger is due to two causes. One is that food insecurity is more conveniently measurable in a (mostly) scientific fashion. The other is that the US has, for all intents and purposes, eliminated Depression-style hunger. (Though it has not eliminated dysfunctional parents who prefer drugs to feeding their children, which complicates the issue, but if you run into "Hasn't eaten in 3 days" your money should be on "child abuse" rather than "lamentable circumstances.")

patio112• 12 years ago

Incidentally, if you're wondering "How does one define 'food security'?", you administer surveys, score them, and compare the scores to threshholds.

For example, here is a 9 question survey for children: http://www.ers.usda.gov/media/476115/youth2006.pdf

Typical question: "[In the last 30 days, d]id your meals only include a few kinds of cheap foods because your family was running out of money to buy food?"

Choices are "A lot", "Sometimes", "Never." Score 1 point if the answer isn't Never. If you score 2+ points on this out of 9, you're food insecure.

This is how you get headlines like "1 in 6 Americans doesn't know where their next meal is coming from."

dobbsbob2• 12 years ago

Because junk food is cheaper. $1.75 pizza slices will fill you more than a $1.75 worth of Broccoli where I live. Fast food places are also closer to them than grocery stores because they are out in the suburban sprawl so they go to what is accessible, and often those places run promotions for 2 for 1 burgers or whatever. I guess the difference is during the Depression there weren't any food subsidies so everything was expensive.

mattmcknight• 12 years ago

Avg price for broccoli is $1.06 per pound[1], so you are getting around 1.75 pounds of broccoli. That's more filling than a 0.2 pound slice of pizza.

[1] http://www.ams.usda.gov/mnreports/fvwretail.pdf

dragonwriter2• 12 years ago

Doesn't calorie intake directly correlate with gaining weight?

No, calories surplus does. Poor nutritional balance can lead to low energy and make maintaining activity difficult (leading to a calorie surplus where with a more balanced diet the same person would act in a way which would produce calorie balance or deficit), and trigger a desire to eat driven by the body seeking to address deficits in particular nutrients even with a calorie surplus.

I'm not intending to downplay the issues here, but I find it hard to follow the disconnect of people being overweight not having enough food to eat.

Nutrition is multidimensional and more than just calorie intake -- that seems to be the thing that you are missing.

vixin• 12 years ago

True but people forget (or don't know) that calories from fat, protein and carbohydrate are not the same! The metabolic fate of these components explains why this is a fact and not, as stated on many links, a 'suggestion'.

cpwright5• 12 years ago

I agree wholeheartedly.

The anecdotes they cite don't encourage much sympathy from me either. Three declined credit cards and a loan from a relative for $8.11 in fried chicken. Or the home health-aide who buys ready made food from the grocery store, because "You can’t go all the way home and cook." I'm pretty sure you could have packed a PB&J or Ham and cheese sandwich; for less than the grocery store would have charged. Heck, you could eat a cold slice of pizza.

Or notice, "When the food stamps come in, she splurges on her monthly supply of produce, including a bag of organic grapes and a bag of apples." The organic fruits and vegetables are more expensive around here. Regular golden delicious apples are something like $1.49/lb, whereas the organic are $1.99/lb. If you were watching every penny, you would have not picked the bag of organic grapes; you would have gotten a regular bag of grapes.

I also don't buy that the, (paraphrased) "Oh we can't eat cheaply and healthy, because all that are available are processed foods." You won't go hungry if you eat processed foods, and they are not actually expensive if you are living in a home with electricity. If you're homeless, there are greater logistical challenges like finding a way to refrigerate food or even heat it up; but those are not the people described in this article.

fred_durst4• 12 years ago

I exactly agree. But the reality of our free market laissez-faire policies mixed with increasingly effective, data driven marketing, results in a portion of the population who we are essentially leaving hung out to dry. They do not have your intellect and understanding of expenses as well as the prior knowledge to avoid and deal with addictive food additives and sophisticated merchandizing techniques. Just to name a few of the issues at play here. Its a shame that you cannot understand and have some sympathy for them.

When are the smart people of this country going to start taking some responsibility for the rest of the US?

xherberta8• 12 years ago

The organic grapes struck me as odd, too, until I remembered that organic grapes were actually cheaper than regular last time I was at the store.

oh_sigh3• 12 years ago

Is the "paradox" explainable by the fact that satiety is not a true signal about nutritional needs being met? If you are forced to eat foods which provide more than enough calories/nutrients, but don't tell your body "Hey, that's enough!", then you could theoretically be gaining weight while remaining hungry.

xherberta8• 12 years ago

It's a disconnect that's not unique to the families NG interviewed. Take the Pima native Americans in 1905, where the women, who were quite physically active, basically treated like beasts of burden, had a distressingly high obesity rate, though these families were given a limited ration from the government, mostly white flour and sugar, and not more than 2000 calories per person per day. You can find the same trend in 1928 with Sioux on a South Dakota Crow Creek Reservation--very high levels of obesity in coincidence with extreme poverty. In the early 1960s, MIT nutritionists calculated that Trinidadians were getting no more than 2000 calories per day, yet they were seeing an extreme obesity problem among the females.

Your (calories in = calories stored + calories used) basis for judging other human beings fails because these are not independent variables. Metabolic rate is not constant. If you feed your body few calories, your metabolism adjusts so as to use fewer calories and store more. If you skip some meals, your metabolism is receiving a signal that it had better use the absolute minimum and store the rest to be used in future food crises.

A high-carbohydrate meal causes insulin to be released, and insulin causes sugars in the bloodstream to be stored as fat. And then your blood sugar is low, and you're hungry again. Have you ever noticed the intense hunger that follows an hour or two after a carb binge?

Fat cells that are stimulated to grow (by insulin) scream loud for their share of the energy, just as a growing child's appetite is caused by hormonal messaging for growth and not the other way around. Fat cells scream loud, ensuring that they get their needs met even if the rest of you is weak, tired, and resorting to stealing energy from muscle, the brain, and other tissues. Also, preservatives, additives, and high-sodium foods can cause a person to retain water, which can add to weight independent of caloric intake.

In an older discussion on this issue, travisp shared this article: http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1199154 >Effects of Dietary Composition on Energy Expenditure During Weight-Loss Maintenance >The results of our study challenge the notion that a calorie is a calorie from a metabolic perspective. During isocaloric feeding following weight loss, REE was 67 kcal/d higher with the very low-carbohydrate diet compared with the low-fat diet. TEE differed by approximately 300 kcal/d between these 2 diets, an effect corresponding with the amount of energy typically expended in 1 hour of moderate-intensity physical activity >In conclusion, our study demonstrates that commonly consumed diets can affect metabolism and components of the metabolic syndrome in markedly different ways during weight-loss maintenance, independent of energy content. The low-fat diet produced changes in energy expenditure and serum leptin42- 44 that would predict weight regain. In addition, this conventionally recommended diet had unfavorable effects on most of the metabolic syndrome components studied herein. In contrast, the very low-carbohydrate diet had the most beneficial effects on energy expenditure and several metabolic syndrome components, but this restrictive regimen may increase cortisol excretion and CRP.

If you consider yourself a scientifically-minded, follow-the-research type, it's time to re-evaluate your (calories in = calories stored + calories used) hypothesis.

colechristensen• 12 years ago

The disconnect is the difference between being hungry and actual starvation. We are so rich that most of our poorest can still get fat on the food they can acquire. The worst of our problems is no longer starvation, but bad nutrition. (to an extent, starvation still must exist somewhere but it is very much less common)

Starvation will always get more sympathy, and the dismissal of this is inappropriate.

cscurmudgeon5• 12 years ago

Problems like this make me feel we need two parallel governments and you could subscribe to either.

1. Govt 1: Nanny state. Will support you if you get poor, but you agree to controls on your life.

2. Govt 2: Do whatever. Don't come crying if you crash and burn.

viraptor• 12 years ago

I'd say this is false dichotomy. Version 1 does not have to control your life. They would have to use more reporting on peoples' lives, (so that it's known who is actually poor and whether people are paying into the pool) but that doesn't mean controlling them. At least not in the way this sentence seems to imply.

cscurmudgeon5• 12 years ago

Taxation is just fungible control. I largely meant paying more taxes. But some amount of control might be needed. E.g., more stricter drug laws, there should be some financial friction on reproduction based on number and age (9 kids at 31 is just amazing).

JackFr2• 12 years ago

I find it interesting, that the article seems to view the fact that the family has to supplement their SNAP assistance with visits to a food pantry as a problem, rather than something to be happy about.

Indeed, poverty, hunger and food insecurity are awful, but why is it more attractive for amelioration of these conditions to come from the Federal government, than from non-governmental actors?

arg01• 12 years ago

Seems to me a government mandated program might seem more limitless and be less personal and thus you don't feel like your taking advantage of the kindness of caring people or stopping resources going to those who are possibly even more needy.

On a related note: One of the things I somewhat like about taxes for welfare rather than "rely on the largess of charitable billionaires/private entities" argument is that it helps ensure expenses from charitable acts wouldn't be a drain on a business competing. Thus 'asshole' private entities wouldn't have a concrete market advantage over 'nice' private entities.

zkirill• 12 years ago

Of course it is possible to eat well cheaply in America, but it takes resources and know-how that many low-income Americans don’t have.

I think that more food education, especially at a young age, could play a big part in addressing this problem and I wish that the article expanded more on this. I don't know if schools currently have any curriculum revolving around cooking, nutrition and reducing food waste but it could go a long way to prepare these children for rising food prices and the abundance of cheap, low-quality food products.

Edit: grammar

antidamage• 12 years ago

Are the rest obese?

frio4• 12 years ago

As a visiting New Zealander, the one thing I've noticed about the American price structure is that food is reasonably expensive, while superfluous goods aren't. A decent-ish pair of shoes is $50USD; a board game off Amazon $35, (which I'll admit to blitzing while visiting!). Both would probably set you back a minimum of $120NZD back home. Comparatively, our food is cheaper, and generally healthier (Whole Foods feels the closest to a New Zealand supermarket; lots of fresh fruit, vegetables, bulk bins).

The other surprising thing is that debit cards are new-ish here; credit cards are prevalent. Couple the accompanying fees (?) with pricing structures that are less declarative (food advertised sans tax; tipping expected), and it's more difficult to budget. Further, having/using credit means it's always tempting to dip further into it. In comparison, we've had EFTPOS (debit) for decades, sales tax is included in the advertised price, and there isn't a tipping culture.

NZ has its own problems with growing inequality which need addressing, and this is anecdata at best, but I can see why avoiding temptation and sticking to a good budget might be more troublesome.

bpodgursky• 12 years ago

Where are you shopping? While the average american supermarket (Kroger, Gerbes, Safeway, Wal-Mart) has a lot of unhealthy food available, there are also a lot of fresh fruit and vegetables.

Whole foods is a REALLY bad example of the average cost of food in the US--it's well known for being expensive and catering to the organic/locally grown/whatever crowd. You're not going to get an accurate idea of US food prices shopping there.

frio4• 12 years ago

Sure, I'm aware that costs are higher at Whole Foods :). Sorry, I shouldn't have left that unqualified. I've been elsewhere too; they just had a selection which reminded me the most of a supermarket at home (partly because this particular one wasn't massively oversized like the Wal-Mart I visited -- everything here is bigger!).

I'm also staying in an area (Downtown in an nice city) where food would be more expensive anyway, which may be influencing my perception. So, again -- it's just an anecdote, but the area I'm in back home is generally regarded as an expensive one too.

cpeterso• 12 years ago

Whole foods is a REALLY bad example of the average cost of food in the US--it's well known for being expensive ...

Thus the nickname "Whole Paycheck". :)

cpwright5• 12 years ago

Unprepared food like fruits, vegetables, meat, etc. is tax free in most states. Prepared food is usually taxed. Tipping is only expected at a sit-down restaurant, and those are generally expensive enough that if you are genuinely starving you should probably be allocating the money spent on that one meal on several cheaper meals.

Credit cards vs. debit cards typically have no difference in fees for the end consumer; the one notable exception in suburban NY being gas stations.

frio4• 12 years ago

Credit cards vs. debit cards typically have no difference in fees for the end consumer; the one notable exception in suburban NY being gas stations.

Thanks for clearing that up; I'd wondered if that was the case.

Tipping is only expected at a sit-down restaurant

It's interesting; that's what I was led to believe. However, even takeaway/fast food places have tip jars at the front, and I feel pretty rude not biffing a dollar or so in. Which is probably a perception thing; I'm in a position that I can do so freely, and I'm more than willing to accept that those who aren't may be less obliged.

aianus4• 12 years ago

Using a credit card in the US is cheaper and more convenient than using a debit card, especially for poor people who may not have enough cash until payday for what they need to buy today.

Of course, it requires the discipline not to spend more than you can pay back at the end of the month which some people seem to have difficulty with.

EpicEng3• 12 years ago

How is using a credit card "cheaper" exactly? Very, very few places charge a fee for using a debit card.

rdmcfee• 12 years ago

Mrs. Dreier looks to be at least 20kg overweight. She could quite healthily fast for at least 3 months living of of those reserves plus some magnesium supplements. It has been done before with great success:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2495396/pdf/post...

xherberta8• 12 years ago

Hmm. Do you want to pay for the medical supervision she'll need for that fast? Healthy food might be cheaper.

apsec112• 12 years ago

"In 2006 the U.S. government replaced “hunger” with the term “food insecure” to describe any household where, sometime during the previous year, people didn’t have enough food to eat. By whatever name, the number of people going hungry has grown dramatically in the U.S., increasing to 48 million by 2012... "

There are lots of people in the US in terrible situations, and we should try to help them, but that does not give reporters a license to make up facts. "Food insecurity" does not mean that people are going hungry. It means people who are "at risk of" going hungry, a much broader group. From the Texas Food Bank Network (http://tfbn.org/food-insecurity/):

"What does “food insecure” NOT mean?

Food insecurity is not “the government’s definition of hunger.” It is a broader term that captures outright hunger and the coping mechanisms that households use to avoid hunger.

Food insecurity is a household situation, not an individual situation. While food insecurity affects everyone in a household, it may affect them differently. Therefore it is not correct to state that specific individuals in a food insecure household (such as children) definitely experience outright hunger or specific coping mechanisms. Rather than describing these individuals as being “food insecure”, they should be referred to as “living in a food insecure home.”

Food insecurity is a year-long measure. Therefore, it is not correct to assert that every food insecure household is experiencing food insecurity “right now,” will experience hunger “tonight” or “does not know where their next meal is coming from.” Research shows that food insecurity tends to be episodic and often cyclical.

Food insecurity does not mean that a household lacks access to grocery stores, lives in a “food desert,” or does not have time to shop/cook. It only refers to lack of food access based on financial and other material resources."

A much better, but less pageview-generating, term for the problem a large number of Americans face is "malnutrition". If you are malnourished, you may not be going hungry (and may actually be overweight), but still don't get the nutrients you need to be healthy.

tokenadult• 12 years ago

I saw the chart of "more than half a mile from a supermarket," and I recalled that for as long as I have lived in my current neighborhood (since mid-2001), all my children have known how to walk along with me a mile out and a mile back to shop for groceries and carry them home. I have been doing something more or less like this most of my adult life. Sometimes I would walk for a while before catching a bus home from my grocery shopping, or sometimes share rides with friends who had cars and go on shopping trips together at especially inexpensive discount grocery stores, but whether traveling farther or nearer, I always preferred buying food in grocery stores and preparing it at home to buying fast food. Always. My children have grown up into slim and athletic adults, perhaps because for them eating is something they do after engaging in exercise. Yeah, some places in the United States (and some of those are featured in the article kindly submitted here) are a lot lousier even than the Near North Side of Minneapolis for taking walks outside or for finding any access at all to a grocery store, but for the most part the first thing to change here is the trade-off of how far to travel by what means for what kind of food. That will promote better health, even with very low incomes.

skittles• 12 years ago

The U.S. is full of people that can barely make it to the next paycheck, but they'll have an iPhone, a car, cable tv, cigarettes, etc. Unless you are taking public transportation to your 2 jobs without all the consumer goods I've mentioned, then you aren't poor.

drewcon2• 12 years ago

We spend less on food than ever before.

http://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/1009/50-years-of-...

We spend less on food than any other nation.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2013/03/daily-c...

It's debatable that food deserts are a thing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/health/research/pairing-of...

oh_sigh3• 12 years ago

Isn't that last article saying that food deserts aren't necessarily correlated with obesity?

drewcon2• 12 years ago

Correct.

The questionable correlation in the original article is:

Good food is simply not available in low income neighborhoods >people are forced to make make cheaper choices >they become obese and malnourished.

The times article cites studies that call that into question, citing apparent actual availability in those areas and focusing more on people just making poor choices.

I'm no expert, but sheer economics does not seem to be primary influencer causing current outcomes.

naturalethic• 12 years ago

bullshit

xherberta8• 12 years ago

Here's a visual approach to cost per calorie: http://www.mymoneyblog.com/what-does-200-calories-cost-the-e...

When I made my own cost-per-calorie calculations, I found that the much maligned non-synthetic FATS are a wonderfully cheap source of calories. They're nutritious, satisfying, and make veggies taste great.

There's a lot of bias against fat, and most Americans believe that eating fat makes you fat, but what does the evidence say? Look to the research, and you'll see that the opposite is true, provided you're staying away from vegetable oils and trans-fats.

Here's a sample from my calculations, for comparison with the link above (where foods were chosen to make the point that low-cost foods are bad for you). I live where food is pretty cheap. The most economical picks are very unpopular, I suppose because of the popular non-evidence-based, government-touted slander of eating a high-fat diet. Yes, it's bad for rodents. I'll give you that. But when you look at humans who are eating high-fat AND low carb, the research looks pretty awesome. And we could use more of it.

All prices are per 200 calories. (Grass fed items and etc. included to show the level of health and principle that can be achieved while keeping it cheap):

Trader Joe's PEANUT BUTTER (non-hydrogenated, no sugar added) $.10

OLIVE OIL $.14

Roasted SUNFLOWER SEEDS, $.14,

MAYO (fancy, safflower oil with no canola or soy) $.22

DRY LENTILS $.24

BACON ENDS $.26

ALMOND MEAL $.38

CANNED COCONUT CREAM $.32

Grass fed BUTTER $.36

CREAM $.38

REFRIED BEANS(canned)$.40

SOUR CREAM $.44

SWEET POTATO $.50

WHOLE CHICKEN $.56

COTTAGE CHEESE $.60

EGGS (local) $.70

YOGURT (plain,full fat)$.88

GROUND BEEF grass fed $1.38

Apples $1.40

GREEN BEANS (frozen) $2.00

Chicken Breasts ($5/lb)$2.00

One-sixth of Americans don’t have enough food to eat

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