Can only the rich afford to be thin? makes the populist argument that dieting costs too much money:
‘If you make a decent income and decide to lose some weight, you can eat grilled chicken, salads and fresh mango, and play a little tennis,’ says Adam Drewnowski, director of the Center for Public Health Nutrition at the University of Washington-Seattle. ‘But a person in a lower-paying job or working two or three jobs is in no position to do that.‘To suggest to the lower middle class or poor that they eat a diet filled with foods like red snapper, radicchio, fresh tomatoes, baby lamb chops, olive oil and merlot wine is blatant economic elitism.’
It then supports this notion with statistics showing that the poor are much more likely to be obese:
About 60.5% of people who earn $15,000 to $75,000 are overweight or obese, compared with 56% of people who earn more than $75,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2002 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, a large state-based telephone system in which 250,000 participants report their own weight and height. (When adults are actually weighed and measured, about 65% of people overall weigh too much.)The disparity is even more obvious when it comes to obesity (30 or more pounds overweight), according to the National Health Interview Survey from 1999 to 2001. For people below the poverty level, which was then defined as anyone with an annual household income of less than about $17,000, about 26% were obese, compared with 18% of those with incomes of $67,000 or more.
This brings us to food deserts:
People who live in these “deserts” typically need to drive or take a bus for a half-hour or more to get to a major store; otherwise they need to rely on small grocery stores, convenience markets and “hybrid gas stations” where they choose from a smaller selection of food items at higher prices, Blanchard says. The stores may have hot dogs, fried chicken, doughnuts, deli meats, frozen pizza, pork rinds, candy and some canned foods, but they don’t have many — if any — fresh fruits and vegetables.
Here’s a snippet of what Theodore Dalrymple has to say on food deserts, in his The Starving Criminal:
Recently, at a lunch I attended, given by a left-wing magazine to which I sometimes contribute, the matter of food poverty and food deserts came up, and it was with some pride that I heard an area, not more than a mile from where I live, described as the very worst of these deserts, positively the Atacama of food.As the only person present with personal knowledge — what Bertrand Russell used to call “knowledge by acquaintance” — of the area in question, I felt constrained to point out that I frequently shopped there, at a small Indian store in which one could buy, for example, 22-pound sacks of onions for about $3.40, and in which a huge variety of extremely fresh vegetables could be bought at prices less than half of those in the supermarket chains. Yet the only poor people who shopped there were Indian immigrants or their descendants — housewives who sifted through the produce looking carefully for the best. Practically no poor whites (or blacks) ever went there, though plenty of both live in the area. Only a few members of the white middle class from outside the area took advantage of the wide range and exceptionally low prices.
Moreover, unlike the people who spoke so fluently of the food deserts, I had, in the course of my medical duties, visited many homes in the area. The only homes in which there were ever any signs of genuine cookery and of eating as a social activity, where families discussed the topics of daily life and affirmed their bonds to one another, were those of the Indian immigrants. In white and black homes, cookery meant (at its best) re-heating in a microwave oven, and there was no table round which people could sit together to eat the re-heated food. Meals here were solitary, poor, nasty, British, and short.
[...]
The owners of the shop only a mile from my door, serving poor Indian immigrants, are almost certainly millionaires: and the fact that their customers are poor has not prevented them from establishing a conspicuously flourishing business. If, however, you examined the convenience stores in predominantly white working-class areas (where the per-capita income is not lower), you would find a much reduced range of produce, very little of it fresh, and the great majority of it processed for ease of preparation. While the Indian store gives the impression of intense activity and hope, the convenience store in a white working-class area gives the impression of passivity and despair. If food deserts truly exist — and they cannot in these times of easy transport be very extensive — the explanation lies in demand, not in supply. And demand is a cultural phenomenon.