My objection to the Obama plan is that it won’t work, there’s existing evidence that says so, and it cost nearly a million dollars.
But that answer doesn’t work.
Which sort of proves my point. The liberal answer is an expression of a well intentioned impulse, absolutely unfettered by the reality of the world. Liberals want to help. They have concern for people.
But when the facts contradict the ideology, the ideology seems to win more often than it should. Here is an example.
Well, it seems to me, having grown up poor, that there are a lot of things the objections aren’t factoring in.
I lived far enough from a grocery store that we either had to steal a shopping cart or catch a cab home. We did that (and returned the carts), but that’s obviously a pressure against large grocery store use.
The program you’re decrying in the OP is to increase access at small corner stores. It would seem that corner stores, since they have less buying power, will charge more for healthier foods than a larger grocery store. Improving their storage facilities will allow them to charge less, since spoilage will decrease.
Couple that with them competing with truly cheap calories from fast food, and I don’t see how this program, is utterly stupid and out of line with reality.
I love it when they do that, reach over and pat us on the head and, in kindly avuncular tones, tell us that yes, indeed, your hearts are in the right place, but your ideas are frothy and impractical. You aren’t equipped to think like us, us hard-headed realists.
You see, Opie, a business is there to make a profit, and this single fact is what has brought us to this paradisaical state. Sure, science helped, advances in justice had some marginal impact, but greed! greed is what makes the world go 'round…
What are healthier people worth? What value do we place on it? Healthier people isn’t going to profit anybody, not in any bottom line sense, only in the intangible variables. Mother wit says its likely, just like our Moms told us: finish your vegetables, go play outside, no, you can’t have any fucking Doritos! OK, maybe your Mom didn’t talk like that…
We are experimenting, here. Try stuff out. As many of you may already know, despite my personal reticence, I am somewhat counter-cultural. Spent years working in the co-op foods arena. Maybe we won (organic vegetables at Piggly Wiggly, at a profit margin we couldn’t even hope to match) and, of course maybe we lost. AssWhole Foods (fewer bicycles, more Bentleys. OK, the occasional Prius. Fucking liberals…)
If I have one good reason to look askance at such programs, it is my conviction that the real change is cultural. “Junk food” is a start, people know what the term means. If you are as old as dirt, you remember a time there was no such term. Food was food. Except when Mom was there.
(With Dad, of course, broke yer leg? Slap some mud on it, wrap it in duct tape, and walk it off! Which partly explains why women are slightly more liberal than men, they are smarter. I have that on very good authority. But I digress…)
But something is wrong, something is clearly and fundamentally wrong. Our obesity rates are ridiculous, our diabetes problem is gnawing at our vitals. I don’t think a simple matter like availability is the silver bullet, there has to be a huge effort in education. But even if this effort were a spectacular success, how would we know? How would we prove that?
And, of course, the people who sell Dead Munchies want to continue to sell Dead Munchies. If we succeed beyond our wildest dreams, they don’t see healthier people. They see people not buying Dead Munchies. Maybe their Moms will scold them. Dare we hope? We do dare. Do dare.
This only a problem with liberals?
BTW, I am not stating anything plus or minus on this program but $1200 is dirt cheap for a commercial display fridge.
“Yeah, you’re gonna need to wash these veg, they’re straight from the Farmers Market, but that isn’t dirt, that’s Earth! Have a little respect…”
It’s an unfortunate reality that the people targeted with this plan are simply not going to choose the healthy option. How many do you think even know what an eggplant is much less what to do with it? America (and many other places) have created a society where a $2 pop seems cheaper than a $1 apple. Even in this thread people talk about how expensive health food is, but that’s bullshit. We’ve been trained to think that a $5 meal at McDonalds is cheaper than $4 worth of fresh food.
As a contrast, there is a Walmart in a very poor area of Toronto. I was shocked one September to go there and see they were selling tomatoes. Huge stacks of them at well below what typical grocery stores were selling them for. Walmart was doing what it does best: it negotiated with a local distributor to get tons of tomatoes at an extremely low cost, then mark them up for $1, knowing they could sell thousands of flats. Along with the tomatoes were all the required tools and nicknacks for pealing, grinding, straining seeds, cooking, and like mentioned above–canning.
The thing about this Walmart was that it was surrounded by extremely poor * immigrant* families that were used to to practice of getting lots of tomatoes cheap at the end of summer, canning them, then eating them all winter when tomatoes were expensive (if available). Turns out, this Walmart did it with all kinds of other produce that they could get their hands on cheaply.
Imagine that, the free market working.
Do you think the people targeted by the OP’s program know how to can tomatoes? I bet if asked they’d think it actually involves a can.
What’s happened in modern society is that guys like Delmonte and Heinz are buying up all the cheap tomatoes during the peak season and doing the canning for us, to the point that we’re completely removed from the process. We’ve also developed the ability to harvest vegetables in the field and have them flash frozen within hours.
It’s simply a misguided fantasy that “fresh fruits and vegetables” shipped in from Guatamala are some how healthier than a bag of frozen peas. A plan like this might work if the government actually knew what healthy eating entailed.
It’s also entirely likely that somewhere along the line a conversation happened between a government official and the owner a produce distributor to work out a system where the government will trick idiots into thinking it’s helping poor people all the while lining the pockets of someone else.
Seeing as you framed this as a reason you are conservative thread, how do you wrap your noodle around silly ineffective conservative programs like abstinance only sex education?
http://www.mathematica-mpr.com/publications/pdfs/impactabstinence.pdf
That stopped a long time ago, and may have never existed for the families targeted by this programs. There are a lot of mothers today that don’t know what vegetables are. Doritos are made from corn, corn is a vegetable, therefor Doritos are vegetables. Sure an ear of corn is only 12cents at the bag of Doritos is a $1.12, but what the fuck do you do with that weird green thing anyway? How do you make that into a Dorito so her idiot kid will shut up?
Would you bother to listen if it was proven? The USDA has been “educating” people for a couple of decades now. Shouldn’t things be getting better, not worse? Maybe all those huge efforts we’ve wasted billions of dollars on don’t work, won’t work, and never will work.
Except for the War on Drugs ™, if only we could build on that success.
You could try thinking, instead of just daring.
This is America, you only get two choices.
Cept that third one :)…which has the rest of us.
But the thing is we are right. A liter of soda runs about $2. How many calories is this compared to $1 apple? Not even close, right?
I can buy a 1200 calorie meal for $5 at McDonalds. What in the produce aisle can I buy 1200 calories for $5?
For obtaining vitamins and minerals, the decision is a no-brainer. But for calories? THAT is a no-brainer too. It is a luxury for a person to weigh nutrients over calories. A poor person cannot afford luxuries, by definition.
If they are obese or overweight, calories are not the value they need to be shopping for. Not that fruit are a good example either, they are calorie dense foods.
According conservative logic, evidence that it won’t work is no reason not to support it no matter what. We have eight years of evidence that cutting taxes and regulations won’t create jobs, but I don’t see conservatives abandoning that canard. At least liberals have good intentions.
Wow! That’s around the cost of one of the two engines for an AH -64 Apache attack helicopter. I can see why you’d be against that disgusting waste of money. Obama should be ashamed of himself.
Yes, different governments have different spending priorities.
…you can get a full meal at McDonald’s for $5?
Also, if you are a female, you don’t need to be eating 1200 calories in one meal.
Also consider time. If a given poor person uses public transportation to get to work, he or she may value the convenience of fast food over the time investment of cooking. If they aren’t there to cook for their children, giving them a couple dollars to eat at Burger King might seem better than letting them go hungry.
Also, fast food tastes better (or it tastes better if you aren’t used to healthy foods). So I’m sure given the bleak existence the poor enjoy, the pleasure of the food has higher value to them.
There are a lot of factors at play here. And a conservative vapidly intoning about free markets isn’t going to fix it.
That is 58 cents per resident of the city, which is not a lot of money.
Let’s make a bet right now.
I vote “won’t work”.
A million here, a million there! Pshaw!
That’s about $1m that could’ve gone into something else. Like schools. Or health care. Or paying the salaries of more social workers. Or __________.