you can do that in a Instapot with no fuss in the same amount of time it would take to make a store meal

There are plently of Quick and Easy ways to make your own healthy meals. For me I do Meal Prep Sundays, and make my own freezer meals. Far cheaper and better than the store bought.

Further I doubt many of them are "working multiple jobs" the vast majority of that junk food it likely coming from government assistance money, disability, etc because if as you said they are "hobbled to their mobility scooter" then chances are they found a doctor to put them on disability

Edit: I remember watching my mom ration her insulin. I sure wish we could have been “welfare leeches” because that would have been super neat.

but no, I dont know anything about being poor....

If you are working two jobs to make ends meet, I imagine it becomes much more difficult to squeeze in the time to make a nice fresh lasagne.

I think the “food desert” issue can sometimes be overblown, but equally this nonsense idea that anybody who isn’t cooking from scratch is just stupid or lazy needs to die. It’s an absolutely perennial pet argument from some quarters and it just skips over so many complexities.

I have worked with and spoken to people dealing with these challenges over in the UK. A constant problem is the challenges people face in getting access to time, equipment and resources aside from food itself. How do you cook a lasagne if you work 14 hours? If you don’t have an oven? If you don’t have a refrigerator?

It really saddens me to see such surface-level, knee-jerk dismissal of complex problems.

>> If you don’t have an oven? If you don’t have a refrigerator?

Is that really a problem for most people. Most of my family is on some kind of government assistance or in government housing, all of them have Ovens and Fridges.

Compare that to boiling water, throwing macaroni noodles in for 8 minutes, and stirring in a "cheese" packet. I can tell you which one I'm going with after a work day at two separate blue-collar jobs.

I have literally no doubt whatsoever that there are people out there with all the time, knowledge, energy and equipment to cook themselves nice food, but who survive on ready-made or other more expensive food sources.

The problem is that every single discussion about this topic ends up with responses ignoring that it’s way more complex than “people who don’t make lasagne are lazy”. It’s a particular kind of facile that seeks simplistic solutions of complex issues.

This comes up as a public conversation at least once a year in the UK, when some politician inevitably says “I can feed a family of 12 for two pounds a day on fresh produce I collect from the bargain bin!” Meanwhile there are two million people in the UK living without a cooker.