Well, that's an easy fix. Ask your employer to cut your salary to ~$20k-$30k. Tell them that you're going to be in the office at 7 on-the-dot, and he can write you up if you're 5 minutes early or late; you're going to be there for 8-10 hours, w/ a 30-minute lunch and two 15-minute breaks (again, write-ups for taking even a minute longer than alotted). Sell your car, get a used one (financed, of course), model year before 2012, 80k miles minimum; give the profit away (give away any savings you have, too; you can't access any of your retirement or investment accounts, either). Insist that any credit you have access to be cut severely and the rates jacked up. Sell anything you own other than your car that's worth more than $2k, give the money away. You are also now limited to going 20-30 minutes out of your way to the "good" grocery store, since you are moving to a food desert. Your mattress now comes in a box from Wal-Mart; get rid of any sleep or wake-up aids other than your cell phone. Hard mode: separate from your spouse, if you have one, and adopt as many kids as you need to get to 2 or 3.
People are not making poor individual choices. They are, collectively, subject to perverse incentives that are imposed by a regulatory-industrial complex that profits from the ill health they develop when behaving as might be expected of any normal human being of the past two centuries. Thank you for being frustrated at the state of the world; it means that you recognize that there are improvements to be made. First step: stop blaming the wrong people.
And for the record, I cook, but I only have time to because I'm unemployed.
I believe many people hold on to that sentiment because it's easier to blame a boogieman than to educate themselves on affordable, healthy diets and execute on learning to shop and cook for yourself.
I am, however, interested in bringing better educational resources and time-saving instruments to consumers. Many people grow up in an environment where they don't know how to properly shop in a grocery store. For example, you give someone a $50 gift card to the supermarket and they walk out with a cart full of crap, because it's all they knew growing up.
Then once you teach someone how to shop, they may not have experience cooking for themselves. For those of us who grew up cooking with our parents and continued to do so for ourselves, it's hard to imagine how overwhelming the learning process can be. If you grew up in a lower income environment with busy parent(s), chances are you never helped out in the kitchen with your mom or dad. They probably brought home a kid's meal from McDonalds on their way back from their second job.
Some fruits may be not much better than candy in that the sugar can metabolize quickly, but apples aren't one of those despite their fructose content.
There is as much protein in broccoli as there is fiber in apples.
To get your daily suggested intake of fiber (30 grams), you'd need to eat almost three pounds of apples a day.
I fail to see the harm. If I did feel wild one day and decide to down a dozen apples (I'm not sure I physically even could), I'd meet my fiber RDA for that day, and still have only eaten 504 calories worth of carbs.
You may object that I'm not getting any micronutrients this way, but most sources of micronutrients are nearly irrelevant calorically, so they don't really matter when you talk about capacity planning for macronutrients and calories.
Seeing no harm in eating apples is like seeing no harm in eating candy. Sure, eating a piece of candy once is trivial -- but you're insisting on candy as a part of my diet, not as an incidental, rare snack. Eating candy only has downsides.
You may want to factor in that the 20 minutes they have to acquire and prep a meal is already coming out of the 6 hours they have allocated for sleep.
Having done a decade of hunger-level poverty, I found it surprising busy.
Driving to Taco Time every day takes time, gas, and costs $20 for a meal.
Ironically, I microwave meals and such not because I'm poor, but to save time. I dislike going to restaurants and even McBurger because it takes too much time.
Another meal I like takes less than a minute. Pour some oats in a bowl. Add raisins. Add milk. Ready to eat. I doubt it costs 50 cents. Or make a couple cheese sandwiches with butter and a pickle.
They do not sound like something that can be done consistently by someone without regular transportation or pay.
> They do not sound like something that can be done consistently by someone without regular transportation or pay.
If someone has transportation to go to a fast food restaurant, they have transportation to go to a corner store and buy a can of beans. If they have money for one, they have money for the other. It's actually usually cheaper not to eat the junk food.
Reality is that most poor people eat junk food because it's less effort, and because the high amounts of salt, fat, and sugar that make it so unhealthy are nearly addictive and act as a comfort.
There's a number of ways this wouldn't be true and they aren't difficult to come up with.
Beyond that, the discussion is encapsulating somewhat broader points - the resources it takes to eat consistently healthy vs eating cheaply. It wouldn't make sense to only include fast food in the poor diet options.
Your seem to be asserting this: That someone living in a healthy-food dessert and without reliable access to transportation has no excuse to not consistently eat a healthy diet.
I counter that 60 seconds of thinking it thru would produce any number of scenarios that clearly speak against that assertion.
> Reality is that most poor people eat junk food because it's less effort, and because the high amounts of salt, fat, and sugar that make it so unhealthy are nearly addictive and act as a comfort.
This is meaningfully related, though it's a bit over declared. Some with limited access to resources may be able to put a healthy meal together if they're playing their A Game. But A Games are hard to come by for folks condemned to survival mode - maybe the sort where 5 hours sleep is the norm along with caregiving multiple people while working multiple jobs.
What are the poor people supposed to live off of? Potatoes, beans, and rice 24/7?
I think the challenge here is looking at numbers without factoring in reality.
A common scenario in poverty is money isn't available when it's needed. If one has $4 today for food now and will have $4 more tomorrow, their choices are to forgo eating until they can save up the ingredients or buy whatever food can be had today.
I'm always amazed at how many people flat out get angry with me when I say fast food is simply not cheaper than cooking yourself, provided you have a kitchen. I'm consistently told that that level of thinking is necessarily classist (and therefore a racist), because it's more time, effort, and in the short-term, money, that needs to be involved.
I do not understand how making stir fry with chicken breast/thighs, frozen veggies, and rice is somehow the most expensive, time-consuming task in the world, but apparently that's a high-class dinner to many folks on the internet, and I'm 100% convinced it's because of the lie they are told (and then perpetuate) that the dollar amount you see in front of you is the dollar amount in totality.
Don't do Reddit, folks.