Back when I was very poor, I ate fast food frequently -- definitely unhealthy. It had more to do with time and energy than cost. It is a common pattern among the poor people I knew.

Healthy food is unbelievably dirt cheap in the US and available almost everywhere but it takes a lot of time and effort to prepare it. When you are working 60+ hours per week, that isn't always an attractive option. Poor people can afford healthy food.

Tangentially, the common definition of "food desert" improperly and tacitly conflates expensive food with healthy food. You can eat a very healthy and more importantly very cheap diet while living in a nominal food desert. Poor people can't afford boutique organic heirloom tomatoes so they don't sell them where poor people live. Frozen and canned vegetables are perfectly nutritious and cheaper substitute -- and I can vouch that poor people eat these in abundance -- but for the purposes of labeling an area a "food desert" they don't count.

Frozen or canned is not always as good for you as fresh, depends on the produce. So access to fresh is still good.

There's also a bathtub curve I think. Bulk carrots, onion, potatoes, and celery are cheap. But as you move up the scale it starts to be not-cheap, with spices, shallots, olive oil, garlic, leafy greens, organic anything (which has been shown to be healthier long term). I cook from scratch and shop savvy but, perhaps partly due to cuisine and partly caloric needs, struggle to keep it in the $300/mo range I hear some couples and small families manage.

Vegetables and raw chicken is very cheap.

If you can find them.

http://americannutritionassociation.org/newsletter/usda-defi...

The definition of what constitutes a food desert is deceptively narrow and has little to do with actual nutrition. No, you can't find organic free-range avocados in many of these areas but you can find canned green beans and frozen broccoli, which for nutritional purposes are equivalent and much cheaper. We should be more concerned with adequate nutrition than the form of that nutrition.

Calling a place a "food desert" because people choose cheaper vegetables with less spoilage risk is condescending and easy to say from a position of economic privilege. I know an urban 1%-er that still eats canned green beans -- she loves the taste, having eaten them as poor child (I detest them, though for the same reason).