And…err… what the alternative would be, exactly?
Serving a set plateful to each person and not having the whole bowl there for seconds, thirds, etc., I guess.
Funny, because when I go to Kroger’s website, the only Michigan Ave store listed is 15255 Michigan Ave, which is in Dearborn. I did a search for Krogers within a 10 mile radius of Detroit proper (not metro area), and the closest one is also in Dearborn, on Colson St, 6.71 miles away.
A good chunk of poor people in Detroit have to take the bus. DDOT is notoriously pathetic, so no, there are likely no bus routes that go out to a Kroger and back. You might be able to do it in a couple of transfers with a bunch of walking and take at least a couple of hours to get there (not including the time back), but why the fuck would you do that when you’ve been working all day, the kids are hungry now, and the convenience store or fast food restaurants are right around the corner?
Here in Oakland, we have a bunch of local greenies growing organic vegetables and selling them very cheaply at various points in the poor neighborhoods. Man, they rock! Produce grown in whole, healthy soil tastes so much better than the bland stuff from the store! In fact, that may be a factor too – poor folks have much less access to fruits and vegetables that taste good.
The greenies (for lack of a better collective term) will actually come out and **build **you a planter box, fill it w/ dirt & seeds, & make periodic house calls to see how it’s doing.
My roommate goes and gets a weekly box of produce from them for $10 that has the most gorgeous stuff you’ve ever seen. Even if you don’t have a vegetable fetish, heh.
Could you point me to a poor neighborhood in Detroit? Like I said, I’m not familiar with it. But, I googled Detroit’s poorest neighborhood and got two likely candidates: Cass Corridor, and Brightmoor. Brightmoor is north of Detroit proper, and seems to have grocery stores.
Cass Corridor is Detroit proper, so just for fun, taking the bus, I started out at 4600 Cass Ave, which seems pretty central, and headed towards the Kroger in Grosse Point. It’s 46 minutes plus 8 minutes walking.
To get to the Kroger in Dearborn, it’s 1 hour 4 mins in transit and
10 mins walking
PIA for sure, and not everyone lives right close to a bus route, but it’s doable, even in awful old Detroit. There are lots of people in most big cities who aren’t even poor who endure similarly long public transit times. I know I have.
Oh, and 2300 Michigan Ave has a Kroger listed as being there. Street View shows there isn’t one, but I wasn’t hallucinating there was supposed to be one listed there.
Anyway, if a person has money to spend $20 feeding the family KFC every night, they’ve got the money to haul out to a grocery store once/week. Heck, if they’re spending $140/week on KFC for dinner, they can afford a cab and skip the bus.
Hah! It’s really obvious you aren’t familiar with Detroit, no offense.
1 - It’s great that there’s “supposed” to be a Kroger at 2300 Michigan Ave, but there isn’t. That address is across from the abandoned train station and there is no Kroger there. As much as there is “supposed” to be one there, there isn’t. That won’t help people get their groceries.
2 - SMART busses serve to get people downtown and back (to the burbs or outer Detroit, for people who work downtown). DDOT is what the majority of people in Detroit have to use if they aren’t going downtown. The route you’ve picked to go to Grosse Pointe (BWAHAHA) has someone walking down Cass (in an extremely poor neighborhood) and waiting at Warren and Cass.
I’m not one who wants to keep emphasizing the dangerousness of Detroit, when there’s already enough non-Detroiters who seem to think it’s an absolute festering shithole with no redeeming qualities, but the idea that you’re gonna walk down Cass to Warren, wait for the (usually late, sometimes never comes) bus to get to a Kroger’s is a joke. The first thing my co-worker (who grew up near that area) said when I showed him the bus route was, “why the hell would you do that? You’d get robbed waiting for the bus there!”
2a/3 - Tying to the previous point, you think that people who live in a zip code where The estimated median household income is $11,669 annually are going to be able to afford Kroger at all? And if, by some reason, they can, that they wouldn’t get jumped on the walk back to their house from the bus stop from others in the area who need food as much as they do?
4 - The dollar menu is a haven. Kids get most of their food at school because they’ll qualify for free lunches (and sometimes breakfasts). You can get a couple of items on the dollar menu per person for dinner and make do with it.
5 - The poor often end up paying more because they can’t save up money to buy in bulk or buy “future time”. There are many working poor who cannot afford $400 a month for a shitty apartment, and instead spend, say, $125 a week at a weekly motel. “But why,” you might ask, “would they do that? That would average to $500 a month, when the apartment is $100 cheaper!”
The answer is that when you have no savings and you are working an extremely low wage job, you don’t have the ability to save up for that apartment (especially since you’d need to put down at least one month’s rent as deposit). You can’t plan for future apartments; you have to have a place to live right now. You have $125 this week, but that isn’t going to get you into a $400/month apartment, so you go to the weekly motel. If shit happens and you don’t have $125 next week, then you’re homeless. You don’t have the money for an apartment.
6 - There are some cabs in Detroit, but you think people who make that little money are going to be able to afford cab fare? Really?
Being poor sucks. Being poor isn’t fun. Being poor means long term BAD financial decisions because the focus is literally on day to day survival, not saving up for a year from now. If you do manage to move up to a slightly higher level (still poor, but maybe a, literally, few bucks left over) and you’ve lived your entire life the old way, why would you think you would change your eating habits? When you’ve grown up eating crappy, that’s just how it is. It’s easy to say, with your internet connection, nicer home/apartment and access to a lot more education, that you can teach yourself or learn nutritional skills.
Be poor and find these things out. More specifically, grow up poor so you’ve never had most of the resources that folks on this board take for granted.
But if you are obese, then by definition your problem is NOT that you cannot afford enough calories. It is that you are getting too many calories.
No one is suggesting that poor people should live on carrots. What is obvious is that obese poor people are not constrained in their food choices by the inability to afford enough calories to keep them alive. They clearly can afford far more calories than that - enough calories, in fact, that they are obese.
They would be better served, in other words, if they spent the money they are using to obtain excess calories on foods with less calories and more micronutrients such as vitamin A.
Poor people do not over eat because it is cost effective. That’s a strawman.
Regards,
Shodan