According to the Kroger website, there is no open Kroger in Detroit, MI. There are a couple in Dearborn, one in Ferndale, one in Warren etc. None in Detroit, MI.
Well, there really are such things as “baby carrots”, in that there are carrots which are naturally quite small when they mature, and there are carrots that are harvested before they reach their full size. You are correct that in the majority of the small carrots that are commercially sold are what are known as “cut and peel” carrots…large, mature carrots that have been peeled and cut down to size. I was gonna do a staff report on this subject, but lost all my notes when my old computer had a hissy fit.
Anyway, the poor don’t want to celebrate the end of a long day of work by peeling a bunch of carrots any more than you do. The difference is that when you don’t feel like peeling carrots, you can buy the pre-cut stuff. They can’t, so they choose other options.
Maybe not a great plan in the long run, but I’m sure they have perfectly good reasons to make the decisions they make.
We had a thread a while back about Newark,NJ and supermarkets. Basically it wasn’t until quite recently that they had any decent ones (like Shoprite) within the city proper. They had “markets” like C-Town, but those places specialize in foodstamp specials, not fresh produce.
Definitely one of the more blatant supermarket scams. It amazes me that people eagerly pay a 200% premium to avoid a trivial amount of work. In doing so, they also lose nutritional value (IIRC, the skin of carrots is a good source of Vitamin E).
In most cases they have piss-poor reasons for the decisions they make, which is why they are poor. Cry me a river if you don’t want to peel a freakin’ carrot. If something that trivial is a roadblock to you then you have issues dealing with reality.
Well, when I searched I found a Kroger at 2300 Michigan Ave, Detroit MI. I’m not that familiar with Detroit, and don’t know where the poorest neighborhoods are, nor do I know what constitutes Detroit City limits and what is the Detroit metro area, which is quite large, and has tons of markets.
I have to wonder: does everyone eat at KFC because there are no big-chain markets, or are there no big-chain markets because everyone eats at KFC?
I grew up poor, and was definitely poor in college, and have many times lived 5 or more miles from a grocery store. That means getting your ass on a couple buses, passing the fast food joints and only dreaming about them, and going to the store and coming home with a week’s worth of potatoes & carrots & Ramen and not blowing the week’s food budget on one meal’s worth of Bucket O’ Chicken Fat.
Word.
Damn, these kind of threads irritate me. “Gee, I’m so tired from working all day long that I can’t muster the energy to cook for my family. So let’s go to McDonalds and spend money we haven’t got on things we don’t need. And then complain about being hungry at the end of the month.”
I got a job with at least as many hours and a hell of a lot more responsibility than a greeter at Wal-Mart, and I manage to put a couple of pieces of chicken and some frozen veggies into a pan at night. Why the hell can’t they?
If you waste the money you’re given, you lose the right to complain that it isn’t enough. If you buy greasy shit on the first of the month, don’t come whining to me that you can’t afford to do it again on the twenty fifth.
Regards,
Shodan
Generally speaking you are right. People should do the best they can with what they are given, but I think there are several problems with this particular issue.
-
The poor tend to be the uneducated/undereducated who don’t have a great sense about how money works and proper cooking methods. I can see where someone who just can’t seem to make chicken without burning it or can’t figure out a way to make vegetables palatable might feel like it is a waste of time to spend an hour cooking food that comes out pretty inedible when they can get a burger for $1.50 on their way home instead.
-
Many of these poor people don’t have access to refrigerators, freezers, or stoves. Often times the poor live in hotel rooms or in their cars or other places where you can’t really do much in the way of cooking.
-
Being a greeter at Wal-Mart or working another job where you are on your feet 8 or 9 hours a day is hell on the body. When I worked retail most nights when I went to sleep my legs were sore and throbbing and they still hurt in the morning when I got up to go to work the next day. Someone who needs to spend their time after work keeping their weight off of their feet so that they can function at work the next day might not be able to spend 40 minutes standing in front of the stove. Now that I have a desk job I run errands, cook dinner, go shopping, work out, and do any other number of things after work because I am not in pain from my work day. When I was working retail I couldn’t do any of that.
Point taken, but “stupid” isn’t a problem that money can solve. If a person really can’t work the knobs on the stove, then nothing in their life is going to work.
I am sorry, but I really don’t believe that this is a significant limiting factor in anything like a majority of cases. Chronic homelessness is too rare to be a general explanation for obesity among the poor, and homelessness is nearly always caused by substance abuse, mental illness, or both (or being a dependent on someone who is mentally ill and/or a substance abuser).
YMMV. When I was working three jobs, as a janitor, a busboy, and a furniture mover, I managed to cook my meals.
I’ve been poor. This makes it a lot harder for me to buy the excuses at face value.
Regards,
Shodan
This, like the lack of big-chain markets in Detroit, seems an excruciatingly small sample to explain the overall epidemic of obesity among the poor, most of whom do have access to stoves and refrigerators and grocery stores.
I’m going to bite 
on this. It very much depends upon how you define ‘moderately’. I know from personal experience that ever since I was overweight (by BMI), I’ve actually been much healthier as measured by general feeling and days off work. Now, I know I’ve gone too far and need to lose weight, and am doing so - I’ve gone from 110 Kg to 99 Kg and need to lose 5-10 Kg more - but the point remains.
Here’s the thing, Shodan, Cisco…the OP asked why. Not if they’re good answers, not if they’re logical, not if they should remain reality. But why. *Why *is it that in modern countries, poverty is correlated with obesity when historically, it hasn’t? And there have been a lot of good answers here. Regardless of whether or not you “accept” these “excuses”, they are the reasons why people act the way they act.
Sure, you could deconstruct the answers and conclude that at the root of it, poor people are just lazy assholes. And you might even be right. But that’s not the rationalization poor people give themselves, and it’s not terribly useful when formulating public policy or understanding why people act the way they do. After all, lots of rich people are lazy assholes, too.
Well then, I can’t speak for the millions, but of the sample group of poor, obese people I know (rather large, having grown up in a semi-rural, southern county), it’s because they eat pop-tarts, doritos, and fast food all the time, and drink too much mountain dew. I have great aunts who have probably been under the poverty line their entire lives - well below, I’m sure, though they’d never complain about it they don’t think of themselves as poor - and they grow their own fruits and vegetables, make everything from scratch, drink only water, milk, and tea, don’t smoke or drink alcohol, never eat out, etc. You can’t tell me that being poor and fat in America is anything but a clusterfuck of one bad choice after another. Maybe in a percentage of hard luck cases that is so infinitesimally small that it is statistically insignificant but that’s about it. If you don’t know junk food and fast food is making you fat, and costing you at least as much or more than healthy groceries in the long run, it’s not because you haven’t been told - it’s because you don’t want to hear it.
And on second thought, WhyNot, here’s the thing: I was only responding to the ridiculous notion that poor people are obese because double-cheeseburgers cost less than baby carrots. Should that have been left out there as a valid reason?
America is a beautiful in its freedom; if you don’t want to be obese, step out your front door and go for a run. That’s free. If you don’t want to be poor, go down to the community college and get an education. That’s very cheap and can be free if you’re creative and determined enough. And no matter how great you think your excuse is for not doing those things, people have overcome greater obstacles to do them. If I had a nickel for every runner I’ve met who had a doctor tell them they could never run again, and a dime for every parent of multiple children, struggling to pay the bills, who went back to school and bettered their situation, I would be posting from a mansion on an island somewhere.
But, as Cisco points out, some of the “reasons” given are bogus, among them the idea that carrots cost more than McDonalds, or that most poor people live in cars and don’t know how to work the oven anyway.
I suppose the distinction is between whether you want to know the reasons that so many poor people are obese, or the excuses that they give for being obese. The excuses I already know, and they don’t matter any more than excuses usually do.
It is just when it is asserted, as has been done in a currently active thread in GD about food banks, that there is a real problem of hunger among the poor, and that it is caused by a downturn in donations to food banks, that the reasons become important.
Thus if poor people are obese because they cannot afford fresh vegetables, and one points out that, in fact, carrots are much cheaper, and the response is “no, it is too much trouble to peel a carrot”, then it is clear that this is not a reason, but an excuse.
I strongly disagree, for reasons posted above.
I’m sure they are. The difference is that they are not being lazy assholes on my dime.
Regards,
Shodan
Except that lots of people (not just poor people) think they do cost more. IT doesn’t matter whether or not carrots cost more than McDonalds: (some) people are fat because they think carrots cost more than McDonalds.
So if we listen to them, we can then ask them why they think that. And if the reason is that they’re buying baby carrots, we can attempt to educate them that baby carrots are nothing more than regular carrots that don’t last as long in your fridge anyway. And if the reason is that to get to the carrots, they have to take a bus both ways, which is close to $5 before they buy anything, we can suggest to their local convenience store that carrying carrots might be a good idea, or we can offer bus waivers with the purchase of produce or something creative.
And ditto on down the line. Are there going to be whiners who won’t eat better no matter how many of their reasons you address? Absolutely. But there are also lots of people out there who have started eating better after they’ve taken cooking or nutrition classes, too. I’d like to tie those into food stamp receipt, to be honest. You can’t fix everything by fighting ignorance, but you can fix some.
Why should we bother to educate them? 'Cause their parents can’t, because *they *think McDonald’s is cheaper than carrots. And if we don’t teach them, they won’t be able to teach their children, either. I started a thread here once about feeding a family on the cheap, and was chided that red bell peppers are “rich people’s food” and I should forget about them and concentrate on things like rice and pot roast. Rice and pot roast are great, but there are no antioxidants, no Vitamin C, not a lot of fiber (there’s fiber in brown rice, but it costs more)…
About that “Dollar a Say” site: I’m a bit confused. They have a price under a buck for their recipes, but those recipes call for all sorts of spices that cost well over $5 an ounce even at the home economist spice store. Where do they account for that expense? I realize that you don’t have to buy a new jar of turmeric for every curry you make, but buying spices to make cheap food taste good can be a prohibitive investment, as well.
That’s insulting. We have to tell stupid people the difference between baby carrots and regular carrots. We don’t have to tell them the difference between Sprint and Verizon, or Xbox vs. PS3, but apparently they are too stupid to know the difference between baby carrots and regular carrots. That’s so patronizing. They know exactly what they’re doing and I’m not buying off on this “we need to educate them” thing. PATRONIZING!
Let’s fix why they’re depressed and eat like cows.
Meh, whatevs. I’m willing to risk patronizing and insulting people when the kids in my son’s high school health class can’t name 3 vegetables. I wish I was making that up.
One of the factors most strongly associated with living in poverty is dropping out of high school. If they could learn anything in class, then they wouldn’t be poor, very often.
Besides, I thought their big problem was that they were too stressed out to cook for themselves. How is a class teaching them how to do something they don’t want to do going to help?
My experience is that the chronically poor will always come up with another excuse. If you send them to cooking class, they tell you they don’t have the time to cook.
My mother said something wise. "If someone tells you they are hungry, and you give them an apple, and they eat the apple, you have done a good thing. If they tell you ‘I don’t like apples’, then they weren’t hungry.’
I have even been involved in the food shelf our church supports, and the kitchen near where I used to work that feeds people for free. They didn’t even have to lift a finger to cook any of the food, just show up. The one thing we could count on throwing away a lot of was salads. It wouldn’t have cost them anything more than eating the French fries.
But somehow, they didn’t. And when we donate anything other than processed foods, they complain about that too.
Regards,
Shodan
Sprint, Verizon, Microsoft, and Sony advertise. Carrots don’t. It’s not stupidity, it’s simply ignorance.