* Food deserts. Many low income neighborhoods don't have grocery stores, so residents would need to take public transport both ways with all of their groceries.
* Building on above, it takes time to cook your own food. Especially if you're riding the bus to the store, and to work, and to pick up the kids, etc.
* Education. Many low income people are taught mcdonalds is the cheapest food, and so thats what they buy. Can you blame someone for something they do not know?
* Financial planning and decision making. Same as above.
Its difficult for us to understand the low income situation. A family member of mine is a counselor at a high school for kids who get expelled. All these kids want to be lawyers, police officers, or government workers when they grow up because they've literally never seen a white collar worker in real life. They don't know that data science exists, much less step 1 in getting there.
> 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.
In the case of a food desert within a residential area, it's probably a lot easier to boost demand by artificially increasing supply, rather than the other way around.
> 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.
On the topic more generally
> Dr. Sturm found no relationship between what type of food students said they ate, what they weighed, and the type of food within a mile and a half of their homes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/health/research/pairing-o...
Original study
> School and Residential Neighborhood Food Environment and Diet Among California Youth
> No robust relationship between food environment and consumption is found. A few significant results are sensitive to small modeling changes and more likely to reflect chance than true relationships.
https://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797%2811%2900849-X...
Cost-optimization is a hard problem, which is why companies spend a lot of money for consultants to do it, and programmers spend a lot of time figuring out ways to optimize CPU/RAM, for example. So yes, it's actually very easy to end up in a situation where you would go hungry without food banks, even in America.
The problem is that people often don't have that $3.
I mean, it must be nice to believe this, but the lived experience of millions of Americans would beg to differ.
Per the data, the US is ranked #11 in the world for food security: https://foodsecurityindex.eiu.com/Index
Compared to where? Certainly not most industrialized western countries.
I can't help but feel confused how the US can spend so much per capita on social welfare, yet I hear all those horror stories about medical costs, people having to work multiple jobs etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...
The US also has a lower percentage of low-income people than almost any European country, despite having greater inequality:
https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1376074233642557442
Also, the US is ranked #11 in the world for food security, ranked higher than Canada, Germany, Denmark, New Zealand, France, Norway, and Australia (to name a handful): https://foodsecurityindex.eiu.com/Index
Spaghetti – $1.49 per 2,000 calories
Pinto beans – $1.39 per 2,000 calories
Whole milk – $1.37 per 2,000 calories
Peanut butter – $1.25 per 2,000 calories
White rice – $0.41 per 2,000 calories
Top ramen (beef & chicken) – $1.82 per 2,000 calories
Potatoes – $1.79 per 2,000 calories
And if you do more research, you'd see that a loaf of bread is about $2 for about 2000 calories.
And in fact, it is firmly established that it's the poorest people in America who tend to be the fattest. And what free school lunches often solve is not hunger but neglect. There are lots of shitty parents who don't care enough to deposit lunch money in the school account or pack lunch for their kid, or who make appalling dietary choices for their children.
I wish people would have a little more skepticism and apply some independent common sense when consuming statistics. People getting food from food banks or consuming free lunch doesn't mean that they are otherwise going hungry. It means they are accepting something offered for free. There are myriad, complicated reasons why those patterns would change. But it's a strong, unjustified conclusion to say it's because they would otherwise go hungry.