Nutritional inequality: 91% due to demand, only 9% due to availability (food deserts)

[Horatio Parker]

Big business employs professional marketeers who use every trick in the book to sell their products to consumers, making it appear like a desirable lifestyle choice, glamorous even, a form of conditioning to sell gunk that may be full of trans-fat, sugar, starch, addictive, generating a captive market, but of little nutritional value, in fact doing more harm than good. It verges on criminal behavior, like tobacco companies were doing in their heyday.

Also there is not much public service information out there. Anyone watching television is constantly being told to eat, even to lose weight. Our "culture", such as it is, consists of continous exposure to misinformation and manipulation.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

I bet the effects of eating less calories but more fresh produce would on average improve health outcomes ignoring the other factors given the current normal diets.

Imagine the effect on health and cost if one labored in their own garden for these vegetables.

1) Other than soil prep (if you live where that's a big deal) it's not that much labor.

2) I don't really think you save that much growing your own. We grow a lot of fruit but we do it for taste, not to save money. The stuff you buy in the store is chosen first for being able to get to market in decent shape, taste is very secondary to that. Home grown stuff doesn't need to be able to survive the trip to market, the varieties you buy in the nursery are much tastier.

We grow food because it's healthy and fun. Soil prep is initially very labor intensive but after that it's easy. Gardening and orcharding are physical activity, something everyone needs more of.

My one fruit was selling for $10.00 per pound at market this year. I'd never pay that much for it myself but I can grow it for virtually nothing if I'm willing to spend a few hours in the orchard.

Eating real, whole food is very satisfying.

 

[TV and credit cards]

Imagine if the US poor had only fruits, vegetables, healthy grains and protein available to them growing up. Then it was decided to introduce unhealthy energy dense food into their neighborhoods. Do you think it would just be a matter of choice whether to eat what they’ve been eating their entire lives or opt for a cheeseburger and fries? Or might conditioning come into play?
I’ve witnessed in the Philippines, you cannot just take people from an agrarian society, introduce them to American style junk food and think they will just switch over. I’ve had the opportunity to observe a handful of individual do just this. Given the choice between their traditional foods and American fare, they tended to stick to their traditional foods. I was somewhat more apt to incorporate their food into my diet. Partly due to knowledge, partly due to fitness requirements of the military, and partly due to the fact that I wasn’t doing the cooking and was conditioned by my father to eat what was put in front of me.
On the point of education about nutrition; through secondary school, how much education did you receive about nutrition? I don’t recall much beyond “the food pyramid”. How much education did your primary care physician receive about nutrition? Probably less than 20 hours during four years of medical school. There’s no money in healthy people. Oh, and if you google “the food pyramid”, just a couple clicks away you’ll find Harvard’s rendition of it. It’s worth a look.
It is very shortsighted to think an unhealthy diet is simply a matter of choice especially among the poor for reasons that have already been spelled out but some seemingly do not want to bother addressing or perhaps even reading. I will reiterate, make the choice to try veganism for six months. What’s the worse that can happen, a more informed opinion?

 

[Horatio Parker]

Imagine if the US poor had only fruits, vegetables, healthy grains and protein available to them growing up. Then it was decided to introduce unhealthy energy dense food into their neighborhoods. Do you think it would just be a matter of choice whether to eat what they’ve been eating their entire lives or opt for a cheeseburger and fries? Or might conditioning come into play?
I’ve witnessed in the Philippines, you cannot just take people from an agrarian society, introduce them to American style junk food and think they will just switch over. I’ve had the opportunity to observe a handful of individual do just this. Given the choice between their traditional foods and American fare, they tended to stick to their traditional foods. I was somewhat more apt to incorporate their food into my diet. Partly due to knowledge, partly due to fitness requirements of the military, and partly due to the fact that I wasn’t doing the cooking and was conditioned by my father to eat what was put in front of me.
On the point of education about nutrition; through secondary school, how much education did you receive about nutrition? I don’t recall much beyond “the food pyramid”. How much education did your primary care physician receive about nutrition? Probably less than 20 hours during four years of medical school. There’s no money in healthy people. Oh, and if you google “the food pyramid”, just a couple clicks away you’ll find Harvard’s rendition of it. It’s worth a look.
It is very shortsighted to think an unhealthy diet is simply a matter of choice especially among the poor for reasons that have already been spelled out but some seemingly do not want to bother addressing or perhaps even reading. I will reiterate, make the choice to try veganism for six months. What’s the worse that can happen, a more informed opinion?

Such considerations threaten the food industry. Remember, the free market is always right and good.

Other countries seem to manage. I recall the produce in Portugal as very good. One of my first dinners at a restaurant there I ordered a steak. It came with fries, which I hadn't wanted - until I tasted them - potato!

 

[Axulus]

Big business employs professional marketeers who use every trick in the book to sell their products to consumers, making it appear like a desirable lifestyle choice, glamorous even, a form of conditioning to sell gunk that may be full of trans-fat, sugar, starch, addictive, generating a captive market, but of little nutritional value, in fact doing more harm than good. It verges on criminal behavior, like tobacco companies were doing in their heyday.

If that is the case, then why doesn't Big Fruit and Big Vegetable employ the same marketeers to sell their goods?

 

[Elixir]

Big business employs professional marketeers who use every trick in the book to sell their products to consumers, making it appear like a desirable lifestyle choice, glamorous even, a form of conditioning to sell gunk that may be full of trans-fat, sugar, starch, addictive, generating a captive market, but of little nutritional value, in fact doing more harm than good. It verges on criminal behavior, like tobacco companies were doing in their heyday.

If that is the case, then why doesn't Big Fruit and Big Vegetable employ the same marketeers to sell their goods?

Because they all died of lung cancer? Just guessing...

 

[bilby]

Big business employs professional marketeers who use every trick in the book to sell their products to consumers, making it appear like a desirable lifestyle choice, glamorous even, a form of conditioning to sell gunk that may be full of trans-fat, sugar, starch, addictive, generating a captive market, but of little nutritional value, in fact doing more harm than good. It verges on criminal behavior, like tobacco companies were doing in their heyday.

If that is the case, then why doesn't Big Fruit and Big Vegetable employ the same marketeers to sell their goods?

They do. But their margins are smaller, so they don't have the same sort of cash to divert into marketing that the higher margin processed food manufacturers have.

This is not just a problem with food; Indeed, i would suggest that it's not a problem with food at all - marketing (in particular direct to consumer advertising) needs to be much more tightly regulated to prohibit misleading and untruthful claims. I would also like to see the total size of the industry capped by regulation - There's a marked and noticeable difference in the quality and quantity of TV advertisements between the highly regulated UK market (where there are strict limits on the ratio of advertising to programming), and the much less regulated Australian market, where we have even more ads per minute of programming than you have in the USA.

As a result, TV advertising in Australia is cheap (particularly away from prime-time), and consists of local used car salesmen shouting about how great their deals are; While in the UK, it is expensive, and is dominated by well-made slots with high production values, usually for big brand-names.

I would like to see advertisements for food subjected to the same kinds of rules that currently apply (outside the USA) to prescription drugs - the direct advertisement of which to the consumer is prohibited. Indeed, that might be a good rule for all consumer goods - Business to business advertising only, to provide information; None of the emotional manipulation of customers to produce artificial demand.

A free market cannot work when information provided to consumers is misleading, incomplete, or manipulative. Advertising is the business of trying to make sure that the information provided to consumers misleading, incomplete, and manipulative.

 

[DBT]

Big business employs professional marketeers who use every trick in the book to sell their products to consumers, making it appear like a desirable lifestyle choice, glamorous even, a form of conditioning to sell gunk that may be full of trans-fat, sugar, starch, addictive, generating a captive market, but of little nutritional value, in fact doing more harm than good. It verges on criminal behavior, like tobacco companies were doing in their heyday.

If that is the case, then why doesn't Big Fruit and Big Vegetable employ the same marketeers to sell their goods?

Profit margins and cost of Marketing their products. Junk food is generally cheaper to produce and so more profitable for the producer. Coke is life ads, for example, use healthy young people vigoriously enjoing their lives and associate this with their product giving the impression that drinking Coke is healthy and glamorous and an intrinsic part of ''living the life'' Apples just don't have the same standing in the Marketeers scheme of things...

 

[SimpleDon]

Imagine, our premier neoliberal on this site admitting that supply side economics is a failure.

You aren't making any sense. This paper is essentially reporting findings that food deserts exist because of the lack of demand in those areas.

What does this have to do with "supply side economics" and an alleged failure?

You didn't read the paper. It said that the reason that the increasing the supply of healthy foods didn't improve the diet of the people in the food desert was because the demand wasn't there for the better food. The entire economic theory of your beloved supply side economic theory is that the supply creates the demand. I don't see how I could explain the failure any better. You normally aren't so obtuse.

This tells me that you didn't read the paper or that you don't understand the economic philosophy that you are proud to follow.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Poor health and nutrition is an accepted way of life in the U.S. Also, those organizations which ostensibly fight disease and poor health like the ACA and the ADA are funded by the industries that produce the junk food. This is why their websites will never tell you to not eat a burger or fries. Their supply of money would dry up or people would lose their jobs. That may sound conspiratorial but it is a fact.

 

[SimpleDon]

You have presented no evidence of poisoning of the food supply.

And you ignored the fact that it's people making the decisions--yet you seem to feel that people have no responsibility for decisions.

I hate to inform you but the food supply is horribly toxic. It has been made that way deliberately by scum in search of profit.

The animals raised for meat are raised in tortuous conditions and are full of disease. The meat is full of steroids and antibiotics.

Processed food is full of added chemicals and sugar. It is highly addictive and low in nutritional value besides sugar. It is also carcinogenic.

The food supply is causing obesity and diabetes. It is bankrupting the healthcare system.

Our system where the food supply is a game for profit is absolute insanity.

Humans are showing themselves to have more greed than sense.

The for profit system tailors the food supply to what people will purchase when presented with choices at the prices those choices cost to produce, not the choices you think people should be making.

If a company produces something it thinks or that you think people should be choosing but actually don't, it will fail.

This reality begets the underlying authoritarianism in your ideology: you wish to prevent people from making choices you don't like, and you support the use of government to achieve it.

See, you do understand the fundamentals behind supply and demand, that when consumers have a choice they will choose to buy the product that they prefer, whether because of price or, in this case, because of taste or habit. And you are correct that a business which doesn't fulfill a demand will fail.

It is the same in the economy as a whole, this is why supply side economics fails. Companies won't invest just because they have the money to invest. Before they invest in new production facilities there must be the demand for products that will be produced.

Supply side economics says that the companies will invest if we only provide them with the money to invest. That supply creates its own demand. Often when I say this, I am immediately told that supply only creates demand in aggregate, as if this somehow explains the contradiction. But if anything it makes it worse because whether to invest comes down to the decisions of individual companies who are even less likely to invest to increase aggregate demand.

Neoliberal economics, of which supply side economics is an intergal part, is based on classical economics and some of the neoclassical economics that followed from it. Specifically the neoliberals said that we should go back to the so-called Classical Liberal economics of England in the 1830's when the English using the works of Adam Smith et al. changed the economy to one based on the free market, free trade, a true market for labor and the gold standard. This has to sound familiar with the economics that you support and believe in, right?

Neoliberalism was a call to ignore the economics of Marx, which came later in the nineteenth century, with his revelations df the impact of class on the economy, and especially the economics of Keynes, which came in the 1930's. What Keynes said was that the industrial revolution had dramatically increased consumer choice because it was more productive than the farm and craftsman based economy that the classical economists had studied. And because of this increase in choice the industrial economy is driven by demand, not by supply as it was previously, when supply was land suitable for farming.

It is important to note that Keynes was talking about the way that the economy had changed due to industrialization, he was explaining how the existing economy operates. The classical liberals and the neoliberals were proposing changes to the existing economy that they thought that we should make, to make it better. The neoliberals ignored the damage that the classical liberals did to the English economy. Their free trade policies killed or forced millions of Irish to immigrate and their strict gold standard was largely responsible for the expansion of colonialism to avoid the discipline of currency exchange in foreign trade. The colonialism that brought on World War I and the Great Depression.

untermensche is not so much proposing to use the government to force people to eat well as he is overreacting to a capitalism that is being manipulated to provide as much money as possible to the already wealthy, which is the sole purpose of neoliberalism. You neoliberals take the risk of these kinds of overreactions by many diverse interests in the economy in order to manipulate the economy to intentionally suppress wages to increase profits. The only reason that you want to run a demand lead economy as if it was a supply lead economy. Unless you want to intentionally damage the economy, that is.

 

[Horatio Parker]

Poor health and nutrition is an accepted way of life in the U.S.

Well sure. It's proof that the lower classes don't deserve any better. Obviously any effort to improve things will be wasted.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Poor health and nutrition is an accepted way of life in the U.S.

Well sure. It's proof that the lower classes don't deserve any better. Obviously any effort to improve things will be wasted.

Sarcasm noted.

I think it sad that people accept heart disease, obesity, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, etc as normal conditions. Yes, they treat them with medicine, pills, surgery, etc. but eat themselves into these very states. It needn't be.

Sometimes I view it as addictive behavior, not habit or choice.

 

[Horatio Parker]

Poor health and nutrition is an accepted way of life in the U.S.

Well sure. It's proof that the lower classes don't deserve any better. Obviously any effort to improve things will be wasted.

Sarcasm noted.

I think it sad that people accept heart disease, obesity, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, etc as normal conditions. Yes, they treat them with medicine, pills, surgery, etc. but eat themselves into these very states. It needn't be.

Sometimes I view it as addictive behavior, not habit or choice.

Of course anyone can have bad eating habits. Look at our Prez...

But I was referring more specifically to "food deserts". Apparently the self validation of those better off is worth the lower classes health costs to society.

 

[Axulus]

Imagine, our premier neoliberal on this site admitting that supply side economics is a failure.

You aren't making any sense. This paper is essentially reporting findings that food deserts exist because of the lack of demand in those areas.

What does this have to do with "supply side economics" and an alleged failure?

You didn't read the paper. It said that the reason that the increasing the supply of healthy foods didn't improve the diet of the people in the food desert was because the demand wasn't there for the better food. The entire economic theory of your beloved supply side economic theory is that the supply creates the demand. I don't see how I could explain the failure any better. You normally aren't so obtuse.

This tells me that you didn't read the paper or that you don't understand the economic philosophy that you are proud to follow.

You obviously haven't a clue what "supply side" economics is. This strange idea that you think it is about people demanding whatever is for sale in their area once it becomes available is assinine.

 

[ronburgundy]

It might Your home grown tomato might taste a bit better than the one from the shops (or you might be able to persuade yourself that it does), but to get it, you throw out ten times as many that spoiled or were inedible.

While the taste quality of most homegrown crops may not be much better than store options, no one who has ever grown their own tomatoes would say such a thing. It is near impossible to get market tomatoes that are of the quality of home grown. The reason farmers must use tons of pesticides is because commercial farming creates an environment where pests thrive. Other than squirrels (which pesticides don't help with) crop destroying pests in backyard gardens are far less common. The scale of commercial crops attract every pest from miles around, and the clear cutting and tilling of vast acres of land eliminates all the pests' natural predators that keep them in check.

Plus, tomatoes are extremely fragile, which means that they are damaged in transport, no matter what steps are taken to minimize it. A box of tomatoes gets bruised with every single jostle along the way. While piled on top of each other, they emit heat and moisture that created rot. Producers try to minimize this with refrigeration, which every decent cook knows ruins the texture of a tomato, resulting in that mealy quality that 90% of store tomatoes have. Another way farms reduce such damage is to harvest well before the crop is actually ripe and thus less fragile, which results in tomato that has significantly fewer nutrients and never gets "ripe" in the same way, lacking in flavor, sweetness, texture, etc.. All these same things apply to most other fruits that are easily damaged when ripe and/or suffer from refrigeration. That's why its rare to find a decent store bought peach, plum, or strawberry. A proper peach should disintegrate in your mouth and so juicy that your chin and hand is covered in sticky juices before your halfway done.
I've experienced that many times with peaches off of people's tree or a farmers market, but only about twice in my 48 years from a store bought peach, almost all of which are hard as rocks when you buy them and get "soft" but never actually "ripe".

Food safety is a non-issue in the developed world (except for 'organic' produce, which, like home grown, is rather less safe - e.coli contamination from the use of manure rather than safer modern fertilizers, for example, is a growing problem).

Many commercial crop farms have potential contamination from manure due to their proximity to livestock farms. This was the determined cause of the national e coli spinach outbreak in 2006. Also, commercial crops use irrigation that are not from municipal sources and not subject to the same drinking water treatment and standards of the tap water that most home gardeners use.

Plus, a number of studies show evidence that crops are resistant to root uptake of bacteria prior to harvest. Rather exposure to the bacteria post-harvest, during processing and transport is the most likely pathway, including water used to rinse crops. There are countless more opportunities for a crop to get exposed to bacteria as it makes its way from a far off field via many different stages to the a person's kitchen. Contrast that with it getting walked 20 feet from a backyard into the house.

Finally, there is evidence that damage to the crops tissues during or after harvest provide openings for bacteria to enter. Such damage is way more likely in the mechanized commercial harvest methods and as the crop gets dumped from one container to the next handled many more times along its journey.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

But I was referring more specifically to "food deserts". Apparently the self validation of those better off is worth the lower classes health costs to society.

You missed the point of the OP.

Food "deserts" happen because people don't buy the food, not because the stores aren't willing to offer it.

 

[Horatio Parker]

But I was referring more specifically to "food deserts". Apparently the self validation of those better off is worth the lower classes health costs to society.

You missed the point of the OP.

Food "deserts" happen because people don't buy the food, not because the stores aren't willing to offer it.

You missed the point of my post. That good public information about nutrition is lacking especially when compared to the resources devoted to promoting unhealthy food. The resulting lack of food desert demand is then cited as proof that people don't know any better. The crux really is that it's in (almost) everyone's best interest to at least try to get people to eat healthier.

 

[ronburgundy]

But I was referring more specifically to "food deserts". Apparently the self validation of those better off is worth the lower classes health costs to society.

You missed the point of the OP.

Food "deserts" happen because people don't buy the food, not because the stores aren't willing to offer it.

That was the invalid unsupported assertion of the OP. I explained in this prior post, why the linked article fails to provide data that allows such an inference.

The only think the article shows is that people's eating habits, conditioned by a lifetime of environmental factors including availability, don't instantly change within 1 year of a year of moving closer to better markets or better markets opening closer to them.

That merely suggests that the effects of a lifetime of availability cannot be overcome in the short term by a recent change in that availability. In no way does it support that availability is not a major root cause of those effects.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

But I was referring more specifically to "food deserts". Apparently the self validation of those better off is worth the lower classes health costs to society.

You missed the point of the OP.

Food "deserts" happen because people don't buy the food, not because the stores aren't willing to offer it.

You missed the point of my post. That good public information about nutrition is lacking especially when compared to the resources devoted to promoting unhealthy food. The resulting lack of food desert demand is then cited as proof that people don't know any better. The crux really is that it's in (almost) everyone's best interest to at least try to get people to eat healthier.

I'm not objecting to trying to get people to eat healthier. I'm objecting to blaming the stores for the problem.