Just look at the overall physical fitness of, say, an average 18 year old in 1950 vs today in the US. By loads of measures (obesity, muscle strength, cardiovascular fitness, diabetes, etc.) there is an enormous degradation in the physical fitness of America's youth. I'm certainly not blaming this all on TV and videogames, but at the same time I think it's a huge mistake to pretend our technological advances haven't had other, large negative side effects.
A poor person today by contrast has junk food as the cheapest option.
Some "superfoods," exotic fruits, nice cuts of meat and fish, and certain vegetables are expensive, and that's a problem, but its a problem at the margins. The basic building blocks of a healthy diet are all widely available and affordable.
Some quick googling says the avg price for a dozen eggs in the US is $1.48. A can of tuna is $0.77. A pound of bananas is $0.57. A pound of potatoes $0.75. Dried beans/lentils/rice are even cheaper.
I understand there are complicating factors. You need a place to cook, and a big mac probably generally looks more enticing than canned fish, especially if you've spent all day on your feet at a job you hate. But these are separate problems, unrelated to the food supply chain.
Related:
"How to escape The Pleasure Trap!" By Douglas Lisle and Alan Goldhamer https://web.archive.org/web/20150430050047/http://drfuhrman....
"Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose" by Deirdre Barrett https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_Stimuli
"The Acceleration of Addictiveness" by Paul Graham http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
"The Lifestyle Cure" https://tlc.ku.edu/
From the last: "We were never designed for the sedentary, indoor, sleep-deprived, socially-isolated, fast-food-laden, frenetic pace of modern life. (Stephen Ilardi, PhD)"
When I was younger even though I lived on a major street downtown in a city, there were no grocery stores around. Plenty of fast food restaurants with $1 menus though. Cheap, quick, and easy, but not all that healthy. Actual grocery shopping was a once or twice a month thing - bus ride out to the store in the strip mall, cab ride back, 2+ hours total and a lot of money.
One of the things I love about my house now is that there's a full grocery store right at the end of the street (along with other stores and a restaurant a block over). But most people don't have that.
You're a little quick to correlate screens and health metrics. I don't think that explanation holds up at all if you consider data in other countries.
In France ("the land of delicate and healthy food", as it is sold to you), obesity rate was multiplied by 3 since the 80s. Overweight rate raised by 50%.
Diabetes has also been on the raise: double or tripled since the 90s.
You know, in general all the crap that develops in the USA reaches other countries after a while. Depending on which specific 'crap', it is just a matter of variables delays and variable intensity, but it surely comes one day.
Is it? I would associate that description more with Italy. With France I associate butter, cream, cheese, fatty cuts of meat ...
"Gourmet", "Chef", "Cuisine" and dozens of other terms: even in the English culinary vocabulary, the French words have a predominant role. It ruled the world of 'proper' cooking at some point. But I was more thinking about how, from the USA, the French are presented as having a balanced diet, eating a bit of everything but not eating too much of anything, cooking by themselves and not resorting to mostly ready, industrial, over-processed meals, how they would be a sort model in those matters related to food.
What was very fashionable at some point in the discourse on healthy food (10-15 years ago, maybe), was the Greek/Cretan diet; which was often extended to the whole Mediterranean, including Italy indeed, and south of France. Traditionally the butter & cream you mentioned are associated with northern France: the South was supposed to be a land of oil (olive oil in the most Mediterranean part, other oils in other parts) and the North a land of butter.
Said that, obesity is largely a problem of the Anglo-sphere, it has many causes, including a severe lack of food culture (eg adults who think it’s proper to eat candy bars or to eat at McDonald’s). It is not inevitable that the horrid American food habits will become the norm everywhere, the US is not the teleos history is moving towards.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235282731...
In Japan the same trend appears but it's delayed by two decades:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1728869X1...
Obesity and diabetes have also trended upwards outside North America but this has been mitigated by better regulation of the food industry.
There is soviet sci-fi novel that features a distopian society where people a killed before they become frail and become a burdain, and its considered an honour. They can't imagine the world otherwise.
(It should be noted that this particular feature is not the central premise of the book, but merely one of the facets of said dystopian society.)
Society can survive with bad tendencies. Think about 50 years ago when American restaurants were full of cigarette smoke, and rivers would get so polluted they'd catch on fire. People still survived, even thrived. If we had ignored those problems, probably someone today would be saying "Opiates? Global warming? Just more moral panics, the way a few decades ago everyone was worried about the environment and smoking."
The dangerous thing is that once these trends become part of your society, it's hard to imagine the world without them, and hard to see why people make such a fuss about them because they can become an immutable part of your reality. You become blind to them. I'm sure, given enough time, we'll become blind to new negative trends in society just as we've become blind to previous negative trends. But that's not a good thing.