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I feel that I have a lot of useful thoughts on the subject, as someone who lives in one of these neighborhoods and has seen all of the proposed solutions in situ. I don’t know how to put them into a coherent narrative, however.
One of the best solutions I’ve seen, which is what opens the article, is when members of the local community do the education. A bunch of do-gooders from a different neighborhood, race, and economic class aren’t as convincing as people you can immediately recognize as being one of your own.
Saying that there are more grocery stores in low-income neighborhoods isn’t as definitive as it sounds: speaking as someone who lives here, I can tell you that the produce section in such stores will usually be tiny, not-diverse, wilted, and damaged. They’re “grocery” stores, but barely.
We have a number of religious communities on the south side of Chicago which incorporate vegetarianism in their lifestyle, and many of them create freshly prepared foods which are sold in local stores. They offer free samples, talk about the value of eating more plant-based meals, etc. Having said that, one group which has a thriving restaurant (Soul Veg, for those who know) tried to open a healthy sandwich shop in a nearby neighborhood and couldn’t make a go of it. (There were other factors involved than just getting enough customers to be financially viable, though.)
As has been pointed out over and over again, here and many other places, learning how to cook healthy food – and being able to do it in a timely fashion when exhausted from work – is at least as important a component as availability of quality fresh ingredients. I would argue much more important.
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The problem isn’t just junk food, fast food, food deserts, or gluten. The problem is processed foods - those wonderful scientifically created food products that are so cheap and easy compared to making a meal from real ingredients.
Disclaimer: No scientific proof here, only anecdotal.
I stopped eating almost all processed foods a few years ago, and dropped a lot of excess weight. Everyone I know who cut out processed foods has gotten somewhat healthier and dropped weight without adding exercise or doing anything else. Oh, and I usually have bakery for at least one meal a day, because I enjoy it, and I’ve made it from scratch from ingredients free of most chemicals and preservatives.
Until people start preparing their own meals from real food ingredients, there will continue to be obesity correlated with poverty. It’s a not just soda pop and snacks - it’s a lot cheaper to buy a microwave meal than ingredients to make the same meal, and the “meat” ingredient, as well as most of the flavorings and sauces, contains chemically processed corn and soy, things our bodies don’t digest easily. Cheap foods usually are processed foods. Doesn’t matter which carb or sugar or fat is the bad guy this week - they all contribute to a balanced diet when done right, and can help kill ya quicker when done wrong.
I don’t think the article actually makes a very good case. It waves around a bunch of studied but does nothing to contextualize them. The reason for this is probably that the studies cited contradict each other and thus don’t sit very well together as mutually confirmatory evidence. Are “food environments” correlated to “food choice”? Some of the cited studies say yes, some say no.
As for the studies finding that there are no such things as food desserts in the first place, I am skeptical of the assumptions baked into those studies. Every city mile should count as multiple suburb miles for a variety of reasons (e.g. a greater proportion of urbanites don’t have cars; each shopper with no car will have to make multiple trips to get an equivalent amount of groceries; even with a closer supermarket the urbanite may well end up traveling more miles for an equivalent amount of food; traveling that distance will take more time since it will probably be a mix of travel on foot and public transit).
I suspect “food desserts” are a contributing factor, but that the contribution is difficult to disentangle from poverty stress and cultural factors. (Simply opening up a new supermarket won’t necessarily change anyone’s habits if those habits are already ingrained.)
Pedantically, I can affirm the headline though: the only cause of obesity is consuming more calories than are used. That is literally the only way to become obese. What’s being debated is why so many people consume more calories than they use. I don’t think the linked article does much to dispel the idea that the relative availability of certain foods influences this. One of the cited studies directly supports it.
I see access to reasonable everyday shopping as an important aspect of overall quality of life. Currently I live half a mile from the nearest grocery store and that’s a lot more than I’d like.
However one thing that bothers me about the food desert discussion is that is so often intertwined with this paternalistic attitude that poor people should live like your grandparents (cf. “Obamaphone”.) That’s just too simplistic at best and oppressive at worst.
When it’s published somewhere other than Slate(pitch) I’ll take a look. Slate has never been, and never will be, a place to read serious discussions about anything.
It really is puzzling. Anecdotally, I see surprisingly little correlation between diet and exercise, and physical composition, in my own life, and in the lives of people around me.
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“Anecdotes” is already a plural. And enough of them do add up to data.
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