If you have middle class taste this is true. But the poor don’t have middle class taste. The market provides them with what they want. In areas where the poor are recent immigrant communities that’s cheap decent quality materials to cook at home including fresh produce. Where the poor have been in the US for multiple generations it’ll include a great deal more McDonald’s, KFC and highly processed convenience food.
> The Geography of Poverty and Nutrition: Food Deserts and Food Choices Across the United States
> We study the causes of “nutritional inequality”: why the wealthy tend to eat more healthfully than the poor in the U.S. Using two event study designs exploiting entry of new supermarkets and households’ moves to healthier neighborhoods, we reject that neighborhood environments have economically meaningful effects on healthy eating. Using a structural demand model, we find that exposing low-income households to the same food availability and prices experienced by high-income households would reduce nutritional inequality by only 9%, while the remaining 91% is driven by differences in demand. In turn, these income-related demand differences are partially explained by education, nutrition knowledge, and regional preferences. These findings contrast with discussions of nutritional inequality that emphasize supply-side issues such as food deserts.
https://web.stanford.edu/~diamondr/AllcottDiamondDube_FoodDe...
If you live in a neighborhood, you'll probably get to know all the local joints, but if you're not familiar and you have things to do, McDonalds is probably the safest bet.
Read Sowel’s Charter School and their enemies, it makes a very a strong argument about the situation https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50623786-charter-schools...
My own conclusion from reading it is that few things really make difference: 1. Charters have strict discipline, violence etc is not tolerated in any form. Public school in bad areas are chaos 2. Schools can easily fire teachers who do not perform well. In public school system you need to rape or murder someone to get fired. 3. Shitty charter schools lose their charter and go out of business
Basically all the same reasons that rent-a-cop type security places never have problems with hot headed jerks the way municipal police departments do.
Better social safety nets and support for everyone should be an real investment in the future for everyone.
It also seems like especially disruptive kids need to be moved into classes with increasingly smaller numbers of students. That way teachers can more fairly provide for the needs of everyone.
Of course this would all be more expensive. So as a society we'd have to agree such solutions are worth investing in at a scale that will make a significant difference.
This isn't really accurate, is it?
Food options for the poor in America are pretty notably terrible.
Nutrition-wise, it's not great for most of the middle class either.
If you have a lot of money, you can find people to help you in America, which is true for both food and school. But I'd much rather be poor in a public school - I went to one - than be poor and have to rely on the bottom of the barrel of the US restaurant and food system.
I haven't seen evidence that the private or public school system is particularly GOOD at overcoming a lot of the challenges that many kids face with poverty, but I also haven't seen the free market in the US be good at providing the poor with quality options in other areas.
(Note also that there are many many countries with much more socialized government programs that also have good restaurants too! Ones that might sneer at the chain-heavy state of American restaurants in most US cities!)