First, I’m not here to come to Bricker’s defense. The same thing is happening in my state and I’m pretty skeptical. (Not necessarily unsupportive - just trying to see how it pans out.)
I already said that people should have access to food. Even if it’s bad food, it’s still food. And putting affordable grocers in LITERAL food deserts sounds like a reasonable thing to do. I also said that if there were a demand for such a thing, there would probably be grocery stores in these areas.
So I’m going to go out on a limb here and say putting a Safeway or something in these poor parts of Philly won’t make a dent in the health of people but it does give access to our #1 need. I don’t think that the government should fund these stores forever, but tax breaks or grants is feasable.
My state has a lot of initiatives going on that are addressing food deserts without doing either of these things, like urban farming, food on a bus, etc. Example. (Now this venture is going to be a lot more expensive than others, but it’s also citizen-driven.)
Again - for your reading comprehension - there’s a difference between having a grocery store in a highly populated area that doesn’t have one and just putting fruit in a corner store. While I am uncomfortable about subsidizing big Marts to do this (eg, Safeways in my state), the liberal weenie in me says that it’s not right that there are people who really do live in real food deserts. And as an adult who grew up hungry sometimes (and yes, I ate Little Debbies for lunch sometimes), I’m a little soft on the issue. (That’s okay. I’m a liberal.) I doubt the Obama administration is going to tackle food deserts in rural areas (like where I grew up), but hey.
So while the Obama administration says that people who have access to groceries will be healthier, I just say that people who have access to groceries may just be able to enjoy the basic necessities of life.
I am 96 per cent sure that there is no correlation between the nearest grocery store and your BMI.
The OP’s claim that this program, the vegetable one, is some kind of attack on personal freedom is clearly absurd. As noted, there is neither prohibition nor mandate here.
Shifting the focus then to pragmatism. We haven’t actually seen cites that a well-thought-out program of this type (which, granted, this particular one may or may not be) is certain to fail. Brickermentioned some alleged studies, but I don’t see any link, or nearly enough information to even tell what exactly they were studying. I would be interested to read the details and consider whether the subject really has been fairly explored. (To be clear, I am not here asserting a view on what the conclusions of such studies might be; I’m just pointing out that they are not actually in evidence.)
That said, even if it were demonstrable that the program at hand very likely was a waste of public money–if wasting public money on shaping the food industry and eating habits is the real “conservative” concern, isn’t the important area to look at the vastly-larger production subsidies for meat (in feed and water) and sugar?
Are you not attacking the idea precisely as a general attack on (your idea of) liberalism? Why else would you look to this relatively small, innocuous project?
Ah. So–yes. Like the “personal freedom” tack, the “won’t work in real life” was also a feint.
You’re right, there is a difference. Which is why a study on putting a grocery store in a food desert doesn’t tell us anything about whether putting fruit in a corner store will be effective.
My hypothesis, supported by nothing other than observation of human behavior and my own ass, is that people will be slightly more likely to pick up a few fruits and veggies at the corner store than they would to start shopping at a new grocery store IF - and only if - that produce is fresh, cheap, and of the type that the person enjoys eating.
Behavior is hard to change. Best results at behavior change focus on making very very small changes, not big ones. It seems to me that adding produce to a convenience store where people are already in the habit of shopping is inviting a small change in behavior. Putting up a new grocery store, requiring a person to plan a new activity (grocery shopping), a new bus route, and which encourages buying many items at once, and thus spending a chunk of money at once, seems like it’s asking for a large behavior change all at once, and is thus more likely to fail.
If they’re going to the corner store for smokes and Pepsi and whatever bag of chips seems appealing in the moment, maybe, just maybe, they’ll pick up a banana while they’re there. Maybe not. But at least they’re already there, and already making impulse buys. I just want to see what happens if they have healthier options to impulse buy.
Just my thoughts. I’m also fairly ambivalent about these sorts of programs. I think people are fundamentally lazy and short-term planners, and those are really hard diet impacting traits to overcome - not just poor people, but people in general. People eat what they like, and if I can’t get a diabetic patient who’s already had three toes amputated to accept that diet change is possible, I’m not sure relatively “healthy” but obese people are going to be more motivatable. But maybe I’m wrong. I do feel like it’s still worth trying out. There are very few studies that are not repeated, at least a few times and with a few tweaks along the way, and sometimes we do hit on something that makes it work when previous studies showed it didn’t.
Calories alone cannot sustain life, much less decent health. Life and health require
nutrient vitamins, minerals and protein. Soda contains z-e-r-o nutrients, so it should
not even be mentioned in a discussion of dietary needs.
Healthy food is cheap where I live (east coast US):
Here you can buy 2-4 pounds of fresh produce for $5.00. That should last one person
several days, say 1/2 a week, so $10 a week will cover that category of food.
Another $5.00 will get you a pound of of >90% lean ground beef, and chicken and
canned tuna are even cheaper, so say another $10 per week for animal protein.
Grains and dairy combined should not be more than another $10.
So for $30 per week divided by 3 meals a day (30/21) you can provide balanced meals
for yourself at $1.42 per meal, less than a third the price per meal of eating at McDonalds.
Public health initiatives do work. Public health initiatives are why we no longer have malaria in the US, no longer smoke at the rates we used to, no longer tolerate drunk driving, don’t knock down six packs when we are pregnant and have low rates of infectious disease. There are some things we know how to do better than other things- we are great at vaccination campaigns, but pretty bad at drug treatment. But on the whole the philosophy of having public health initiatives is a solid one.
Public health risks exist on multiple levels at once. On the lowest level are individual risk factors- your personal biology and preferences. For HIV, a individual risk factor might be that you just happen to really enjoy barebacking, or that you have thin skin. Then comes the social risk factors. For HIV, this might be that your culture discourages condom use. Next are factors in the built environment. In Tanzania, for example, there is a direct correlation between HIV infection and the distance between your home and the nearest brothel. Finally, there are high level policy factors. For HIV, this may be that your government doesn’t provide ARVs that keep viral loads (and therefor transmission) down.
A successful public health campaign almost always works across these levels. For obesity, it’s clear that there are more than individual risk factors (preferring fatty food, being biologically prone to put on weight) at play. For one, we’ve seen too much rapid change in a short time. For another, obesity is so strongly correlated with geography that it’s clear there is something going on that makes Washington DC one of the leanest cities in the US and McAllen, TX the fattest. The trick is to figure out what this difference is, and address it. Usually this means trying to make sustainable, enduring, cultural changes.
I’m not sure what the best public health response for obesity is, but it’s certainly not “nothing.” Indeed, an experimental approach is often a good way to tackle a new public health problem. How else is this stuff supposed to be discovered?
I disagree, to an extent. The difference is that liberals’ subjective goals are capable of being quantified empirically. Infant mortality and income inequality (for example) are objective measures by anyone’s definition. Social morality and freedom (again, for example) are not.
Lest you suggest I am cherry-picking examples, those were the first two which came to mind on both sides.
The obvious difference, of course, being that an obese person near me eating potato chips and drinking a Big Gulp does not result in calories flying through the air and making me fat, whereas a smoker in an enclosed public space is sharing carcinogens with me whether I like it or not.
Using government resources to increase healthy food choices (rather than mandating them) makes sense to me. Education takes time.
N.Y.C.'s proposed ban on large-sized sugary drinks strikes me as overbearing and stupid, about as dumb as slippery slope arguments used to fight anti-smoking laws.
As an alien freshly landed from another planet, I think…er, I mean, I would think… that the obvious solution is to just get rid of all the unhealthy stuff.
I disagree. I think that if people had a grocery store within a 1 mile radius (pretty easy to get to), they are more inclined to shop there than at the local corner store. The local corner store sucks and the grocery store is cheaper.
A lot of corner stores to stock fruit - just not that much. If there were a demand for such things, there’d be a supply. Right?
Maybe. This is part of what the pilot program is trying to figure out. It would appear that so far, people will shop at the grocery store but not make better food choices.
As for ‘real food’ at the corner store, you’re limited to $3 macaroni, $2 Campbell’s Soup, $7 frozen pizza, whatever. Always more expensive.
Finally…what you said about habits is kind of what I was saying. Change is hard to come by. And if you have moms feeding picky kids who grew up on junk, do you REALLY think the kids are suddenly going to start eating a banana a day because it’s at the corner store?
I think people should have access to affordable food. That’s why I’d support a grocery store. I’d much rather see community-owned operatives, though, like the one I linked to in Denver.
White people, I mean, um, liberals, er, well-doers, often approach public policy from a ‘we can change their behaviors if we just give them a couple of tools and they’ll see how AWESOME we are!’ We’re elitist to a fault. But putting a banana in a corner store is NOT going to change how people behave.
Look, if a group came together and petitioned the city to help them because they had no grocery store, that’s one thing. But government looking at obesity rates and deciding to influence the community’s behaviors without taking into consideration their habits…is one that’s doomed to fail. And I say this because kids have more purchasing power than adults when it comes to food choices, and look at the (somewhat) failed school lunches in Chicago and LA. Admins said, ‘Kids are fat! Feed em good food!’ and the kids said, ‘Your food SUCKS.’ So they stopped eating it.
School districts were forced to bring back burgers and chicken nuggets.
edit: As far as smoking goes, people still smoke. It’s cut down on teenage smoking, though, because of the cost. So maybe we should tax the F out of shit foods. I used to disagree with sin taxes before I realized how stupid people are. I’m not quite 100 per cent behind the idea, but it’s probably more effective than this initiative.
Again, we could start by not subsidizing them. Let the market set truer prices for hamburger and soda and corn chips, and then spending these much smaller sums to boost vegetables might really make a difference.
Could you kindly share some other examples of idealistic, but impractical, liberal ideas? This is perhaps one, but if you’re going to paint with such a broad brush, we can’t just point to a single data point, can we?
For your convenience: “Deprivation, diet, and food-retail access: findings from the Leeds ‘food deserts’ study,” by Neil Wrigley, Daniel Warm, Barrie Margetts, Environment and Planning - Part A Volume: 35, Issue: 1, Publisher: PION LTD, Pages: 151-188, (2003).
I quoted the salient results:
Subsequent studies:
Here’s a USDA paper that summarizes their study released in 2009:
Then there was “Fast Food Restaurants and Food Stores: Longitudinal Associations With Diet in Young to Middle-aged Adults: The CARDIA Study,” by Janne Boone-Heinonen, PhD; Penny Gordon-Larsen, PhD; Catarina I. Kiefe, MD, PhD; James M. Shikany, DrPH; Cora E. Lewis, MD; Barry M. Popkin, PhD; Arch Intern Med. 2011;171(13):1162-1170. doi:10.1001/archinternmed.2011.283.
From that study:
Then there’s “Interventions in Small Food Stores to Change the Food Environment, Improve Diet, and Reduce Risk of Chronic Disease,” Gittelsohn J, Rowan M, Gadhoke P. ; Prev Chronic Dis 2012;9:110015. DOI:
What do they say?
Would you like any other details?
And an even more important area is curing breast cancer. So let’s not even look at this issue until we can say we’ve cured breast cancer. And stopped child abuse.
Look, start a thread on other subsidies if you like. But whether they exist or not is not relevant to this particular waste of $900,000.
Lots of people have said, “Hey, let’s try.” My point is: this has already BEEN tried. A bunch of times.
How many more times should we try, hoping thta these poor benighted people will see the wise light?
The emphasis on fresh fruits and vegtables is bullshit. You can provide healthy meals for a family of 4 for a week for less than one meal at McDonald costs. If the federal government wants to sell stuff like this at cost and even pay 7-11 to provide the shelf space and even provide the casserole dishes at cost, then I’m okay with that.
The main ingredients appear to be rice, lentils and dehydrated vegetables.
I wonder if we might even do better if we made cooking classes mandatory in High School or maybe even Junior High. The problem isn’t food deserts, but a generation of people who don’t know how to feed themselves or their children.
Commodity corn (for grain, oil and extractives) is the single biggest direct agricultural subsidy in the country.
The beef subsidy in practice is mostly a secondary one, in the form of subsidized feed grain–mostly corn–plus sweetheart water deals for ranchers in certain states.
There is a small direct subsidy for cane sugar but there again the most significant part in practice is the corn subsidy which makes corn syrup for processed foods even cheaper than cane sugar.
I, personally, don’t believe it will work. People are stupid and lazy. Poor people to a greater degree, usually. Eating healthy isn’t always easy. It takes planning and practice and CAN be expensive if you’re not careful. More important, probably, is the perception that eating healthy is expensive.
Regardless, at the beginning of the thread you stated that it was ideas like these that make you a conservative. I’ve been of the opinion the entire thread that the thread’s been off-track and arguing over this one point was foolish as you were arguing about ideas in general, not this particular idea.
I had to catch up and read the whole thread before I chimed in, though.