There once was a time when being a little round in the face, a little robust in the belly, was a sign of financial well-being: It showed that you had enough food to eat and enough money to buy it, while, on the other hand, the poor were always thin and starving. In today’s America, however, the faces of the rich and the poor have changed. Obesity in America is now more common among those with lower income and education levels, and there are studies that link diet quality to social and economic class.
If you sit back and mull that over for a bit, it starts to make sense. Think of how much fresh produce and veggies you can buy at the grocery store with $20, and compare that to how much you can get with the same budget at KFC. If your kids are hungry and all you’ve got is 20 bucks to spend on dinner, which would you choose? Even if you do buy the produce, if you're constantly working (sometimes multiple jobs), there wouldn't be time to prepare it.
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Yet, the bad eating habits associated with low-income Americans can’t be explained away with just fast food (seeing as it might actually be the middle-class who consume fast food the most). It's about what's cheaper at the grocery store, too.
Millions of Americans live in households that lack “food security”, a term that refers to a household’s ability to secure adequate food and nutritional resources. When you (an individual or a family) are food insecure, food isn't always easy to come by. So you take what you can get, which is typically foods that are packed with chemicals, fats, and, most importantly, calories; foods that are cheaper and can provide you with the energy you need, but are not always nutritious. New York Times columnist Michael Pollan points out that a dollar can buy 1200 calories worth of processed food in the snacks aisle, but only 250 calories of carrots. You need energy from calories, but your dollars are few and precious. From this perspective, not only is bad eating the easier choice, it’s the most practical one.
This is not to mention other ways that being poor contributes to bad health and obesity, such as chronic stress, the amount of time spent working that could be spent exercising or cooking, lack of health insurance, and the scarcity of supermarkets in low-income areas. While it’s true that chips and McNuggets are incredibly cheaper and more accessible than healthy food, the real concern is what isn’t accessible.
As one Newsweek article says, “As the distance between rich and poor continues to grow, the freshest, most nutritious foods have become luxury goods that only some can afford.” (All one has to do is spend ten minutes inside a Whole Foods or New Leaf to see how the cost of organic tomatoes can add up.) According to Pollan, government policy is the reason high-calorie, energy-dense foods are cheaper. It’s the way we incentivize farmers to produce more of the crops that end up as ingredients in processed food, thus bringing down the prices of those foods: "In effect, we’re subsidizing high-fructose corn syrup. And we’re not subsidizing the growing of carrots and broccoli."
Sometimes we who are more a little more well-off than others forget the real difficulties of maintaining a healthy lifestyle on a low income. So the solution doesn’t lie in preaching to poor people about their food choices, or in banning the use of food stamps for junk food (which, come to think of it, is kind of the same thing). The solution lies in recognizing that what we see as choices are not choices for everyone, in being conscious about the ways in which our lifestyle is supported by our economic privilege, and changing the rules of "the game by which we eat" by working towards making healthy habits accessible to everyone.
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