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The Urban Food Desert Myth
Replies
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lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »stanmann571 wrote: »stanmann571 wrote: »RosieRose7673 wrote: »Gallowmere1984 wrote: »RosieRose7673 wrote: »ladyannique2017 wrote: »Food deserts in general are not a myth. Yes, it's a myth that all poor urban areas are food deserts, but that doesn't mean food deserts don't exist. I've lived in a few. One was a poor urban area in the Midwest. Yes you can look at a street map and see there is a grocery store within walking distance, but street maps do not take into account gang territories or other hazards between you and the food. I lived in a place where it was not safe to go two blocks uptown which is where the grocery store was due to gang boundaries but I could go ten blocks down the hill to the river where there were bars and corner stores just fine. That area was a kind of a neutral zone because it was run by pimps and their hookers.
Another food desert was also a water desert out in the west when I lived in a single wide trailer in a desperately poor rural area. Nearest grocery store was 45mikes away and although we had plumbing, the tap water wasn't safe to drink (EPA notice about arsenic in water) so my dad had to use our beat up rusted out truck to bring home a tank of water every week as well as food.
Electricity wasn't too dependable in either place...urban or country and so we couldn't buy fresh veg or meat because it would rot to nothing in a day. Lots of canned and dried foods. I think people assume everyone has access to a refrigerator/freezer when many poor people don't.
Thank you very much for posting this. I really feel that it is very easy for people to put horse blinders on when it comes to this.
It's very easy to say that there's a supermarket a mile away. Why don't they go there?
I live in Chicago currently and in a decent part of the city. However, for my job, I did have to travel to very high crime, poor areas. I've met a family who lived in an unfinished basement. 3 kids and a mom who was taking online classes to get a better job. However, the area was extremely dangerous. Homicides are high in the area as well as gang violence. Sure, if they could hop in a car and drive to a supermarket a mile or so away, they could. BUT- when you don't have a car, don't have any money to spare and have to walk that all the way to a supermarket that far with 3 kids in a high crime area, it's not the super market they are looking for. They are looking for something to eat that's both affordable and safe to get. Often times, that may mean the corner convenience store.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you look a statistics about proximity to supermarkets, it's easy to overlook other factors that can influence the ability to get fresh food.
This is another area where I am admittedly biased. I have lived in "the hood" in multiple cities over the years, and never once had a problem out of anyone. We'd regularly have people shot in the parking lots of two of the places I live, yet I never got so much as a sideways glance. I attribute this to the fact that I mind my own damned business, and never got tangled up in the things that tend to get people shot (drug money, *kitten* with someone's wife/girlfriend, having a big mouth, etc.)
I don't give a damn if someone got capped right under my window, I didn't crack the blinds, I didn't see *kitten*, it's not my business. So yeah, even fat and nerdy whitey can live in some nasty neighborhoods without incident, if you know what you are doing. vOv
It's good for you that you didn't care and kept to yourself. That means only gang members and drug dealers get shot?
There are so many bystanders shot yearly by stray bullets or simply because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time. Sure- a percentage of them were involved in drug or gang activity but that definitely doesn't account for all of those affected by the violence.
While I'm not discrediting your experiences, I don't think that just because you lived in a poor area and survived means that it must be okay for everyone else.
Chicago's violence is skyrocketing. The thing to remember is that chicago is big. Percentagewise, we have a ridiculously high murder and violent crime rate for the population of the city. Then you actually break it down to where these crimes happen, they tend to be concentrated in the areas with the most poverty. Then you look at the percentages in those areas- it's extremely dangerous to even live there.
So yes- my experiences with these families and being able to spend time with them does show that there are indeed "food deserts" because of other factors than proximity to a supermarket.
Food deserts are only a symptom of an unadressed root cause. Why is this level of violence allowed to exist?
All this is a waste of time, money, and most importantly - life if the root cause is not addressed.
Because there's no actual appetite to take the measures needed to curb the violence.
Profiling, stop and frisk, etc.
This simply reinforces the fact that government is not in the business of solving problems. They are in the business of creating problems which will further the size and power of government.
In this case, the government is able and willing to solve the problems. The communities prefer the violence to the solution.
How are you separating gov't from community here? The police are an arm of the local gov't, local policies about law enforcement are an arm of the local gov't. (I don't agree with your claims anyway, and am rather puzzled at how profiling -- which happens in reality all the time -- would stop crime in neighborhoods that are largely all one race, but setting that aside, it's the government acting or not.)
Curious where this 'hood is that you lived that required a 6 mile walk for a public library, though. That's not the case in the cities I know.
Not necessarily to get to a public library, but getting to one larger than a closet with a computer could require commuting a few neighborhoods over. It would have been ~4 miles one way for me to get to the Central library from where I grew up (thankfully via a single bus line in my case).
The way it was phrased implied just to get a book, and that there was no public transportation available:
"25 years ago(when I was a teenager) a 12 mile total distance walk to get to and from the public library to get a book, or use a computer for research was routine."
I grew up in the '80s, and in a middle-sized city, not a big city (about 250K, but sprawling), and it would have been at least a 6 mile walk (more, I think, but would have to check a map) to the main library, although we would have taken public transportation (a bus). To a regular library to get a book, nowhere near that far. Here, in a big city? Even in the terrible neighborhoods that's not so.
We were reasonably active, but wouldn't have been walking 12 miles in a day to go to and from the library. Certainly not through bad neighborhoods. So that as routinely how people lived in '92, no, I am skeptical.
I grew up in rural Illinois in a town <2k (currently over 11k) and would bike pretty much everywhere when the weather allowed. We lived 7.2 miles out of town, so I can easily see this. My closest friend lived 1.2 miles away and I grew up continually testing how fast I could make it to his house. There were two grocery stores in town.
Bottom line is people adapt. Free market adapts based upon numerous forces, the primary being profitability. If this does not exist there is a very good reason for it.
I just learned my husband would get up at 5 in the morning and ride his bike in the dark 6 miles to get to our high school for cross-country practice. That blew my mind--he was dedicated.
Bikes are a marvelous thing, aren't they.2 -
lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »stanmann571 wrote: »stanmann571 wrote: »RosieRose7673 wrote: »Gallowmere1984 wrote: »RosieRose7673 wrote: »ladyannique2017 wrote: »Food deserts in general are not a myth. Yes, it's a myth that all poor urban areas are food deserts, but that doesn't mean food deserts don't exist. I've lived in a few. One was a poor urban area in the Midwest. Yes you can look at a street map and see there is a grocery store within walking distance, but street maps do not take into account gang territories or other hazards between you and the food. I lived in a place where it was not safe to go two blocks uptown which is where the grocery store was due to gang boundaries but I could go ten blocks down the hill to the river where there were bars and corner stores just fine. That area was a kind of a neutral zone because it was run by pimps and their hookers.
Another food desert was also a water desert out in the west when I lived in a single wide trailer in a desperately poor rural area. Nearest grocery store was 45mikes away and although we had plumbing, the tap water wasn't safe to drink (EPA notice about arsenic in water) so my dad had to use our beat up rusted out truck to bring home a tank of water every week as well as food.
Electricity wasn't too dependable in either place...urban or country and so we couldn't buy fresh veg or meat because it would rot to nothing in a day. Lots of canned and dried foods. I think people assume everyone has access to a refrigerator/freezer when many poor people don't.
Thank you very much for posting this. I really feel that it is very easy for people to put horse blinders on when it comes to this.
It's very easy to say that there's a supermarket a mile away. Why don't they go there?
I live in Chicago currently and in a decent part of the city. However, for my job, I did have to travel to very high crime, poor areas. I've met a family who lived in an unfinished basement. 3 kids and a mom who was taking online classes to get a better job. However, the area was extremely dangerous. Homicides are high in the area as well as gang violence. Sure, if they could hop in a car and drive to a supermarket a mile or so away, they could. BUT- when you don't have a car, don't have any money to spare and have to walk that all the way to a supermarket that far with 3 kids in a high crime area, it's not the super market they are looking for. They are looking for something to eat that's both affordable and safe to get. Often times, that may mean the corner convenience store.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you look a statistics about proximity to supermarkets, it's easy to overlook other factors that can influence the ability to get fresh food.
This is another area where I am admittedly biased. I have lived in "the hood" in multiple cities over the years, and never once had a problem out of anyone. We'd regularly have people shot in the parking lots of two of the places I live, yet I never got so much as a sideways glance. I attribute this to the fact that I mind my own damned business, and never got tangled up in the things that tend to get people shot (drug money, *kitten* with someone's wife/girlfriend, having a big mouth, etc.)
I don't give a damn if someone got capped right under my window, I didn't crack the blinds, I didn't see *kitten*, it's not my business. So yeah, even fat and nerdy whitey can live in some nasty neighborhoods without incident, if you know what you are doing. vOv
It's good for you that you didn't care and kept to yourself. That means only gang members and drug dealers get shot?
There are so many bystanders shot yearly by stray bullets or simply because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time. Sure- a percentage of them were involved in drug or gang activity but that definitely doesn't account for all of those affected by the violence.
While I'm not discrediting your experiences, I don't think that just because you lived in a poor area and survived means that it must be okay for everyone else.
Chicago's violence is skyrocketing. The thing to remember is that chicago is big. Percentagewise, we have a ridiculously high murder and violent crime rate for the population of the city. Then you actually break it down to where these crimes happen, they tend to be concentrated in the areas with the most poverty. Then you look at the percentages in those areas- it's extremely dangerous to even live there.
So yes- my experiences with these families and being able to spend time with them does show that there are indeed "food deserts" because of other factors than proximity to a supermarket.
Food deserts are only a symptom of an unadressed root cause. Why is this level of violence allowed to exist?
All this is a waste of time, money, and most importantly - life if the root cause is not addressed.
Because there's no actual appetite to take the measures needed to curb the violence.
Profiling, stop and frisk, etc.
This simply reinforces the fact that government is not in the business of solving problems. They are in the business of creating problems which will further the size and power of government.
In this case, the government is able and willing to solve the problems. The communities prefer the violence to the solution.
How are you separating gov't from community here? The police are an arm of the local gov't, local policies about law enforcement are an arm of the local gov't. (I don't agree with your claims anyway, and am rather puzzled at how profiling -- which happens in reality all the time -- would stop crime in neighborhoods that are largely all one race, but setting that aside, it's the government acting or not.)
Curious where this 'hood is that you lived that required a 6 mile walk for a public library, though. That's not the case in the cities I know.
Not necessarily to get to a public library, but getting to one larger than a closet with a computer could require commuting a few neighborhoods over. It would have been ~4 miles one way for me to get to the Central library from where I grew up (thankfully via a single bus line in my case).
The way it was phrased implied just to get a book, and that there was no public transportation available:
"25 years ago(when I was a teenager) a 12 mile total distance walk to get to and from the public library to get a book, or use a computer for research was routine."
I grew up in the '80s, and in a middle-sized city, not a big city (about 250K, but sprawling), and it would have been at least a 6 mile walk (more, I think, but would have to check a map) to the main library, although we would have taken public transportation (a bus). To a regular library to get a book, nowhere near that far. Here, in a big city? Even in the terrible neighborhoods that's not so.
We were reasonably active, but wouldn't have been walking 12 miles in a day to go to and from the library. Certainly not through bad neighborhoods. So that as routinely how people lived in '92, no, I am skeptical.
I grew up in rural Illinois in a town <2k (currently over 11k) and would bike pretty much everywhere when the weather allowed.
I did too (bike everywhere, I mean).
But this is supposed to be in the 'hood of a city, which is why it struck me as strange and I asked where. I'm not saying it's not possible to walk 6 miles each way somewhere (I do that now sometimes), but that it was what everyone did back in '92 in that environment is what seemed rather, well, unusual. ('92 isn't that long ago.)Bottom line is people adapt. Free market adapts based upon numerous forces, the primary being profitability. If this does not exist there is a very good reason for it.
No question. Not sure what this has to do with what we were talking about, though.0 -
lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »stanmann571 wrote: »stanmann571 wrote: »RosieRose7673 wrote: »Gallowmere1984 wrote: »RosieRose7673 wrote: »ladyannique2017 wrote: »Food deserts in general are not a myth. Yes, it's a myth that all poor urban areas are food deserts, but that doesn't mean food deserts don't exist. I've lived in a few. One was a poor urban area in the Midwest. Yes you can look at a street map and see there is a grocery store within walking distance, but street maps do not take into account gang territories or other hazards between you and the food. I lived in a place where it was not safe to go two blocks uptown which is where the grocery store was due to gang boundaries but I could go ten blocks down the hill to the river where there were bars and corner stores just fine. That area was a kind of a neutral zone because it was run by pimps and their hookers.
Another food desert was also a water desert out in the west when I lived in a single wide trailer in a desperately poor rural area. Nearest grocery store was 45mikes away and although we had plumbing, the tap water wasn't safe to drink (EPA notice about arsenic in water) so my dad had to use our beat up rusted out truck to bring home a tank of water every week as well as food.
Electricity wasn't too dependable in either place...urban or country and so we couldn't buy fresh veg or meat because it would rot to nothing in a day. Lots of canned and dried foods. I think people assume everyone has access to a refrigerator/freezer when many poor people don't.
Thank you very much for posting this. I really feel that it is very easy for people to put horse blinders on when it comes to this.
It's very easy to say that there's a supermarket a mile away. Why don't they go there?
I live in Chicago currently and in a decent part of the city. However, for my job, I did have to travel to very high crime, poor areas. I've met a family who lived in an unfinished basement. 3 kids and a mom who was taking online classes to get a better job. However, the area was extremely dangerous. Homicides are high in the area as well as gang violence. Sure, if they could hop in a car and drive to a supermarket a mile or so away, they could. BUT- when you don't have a car, don't have any money to spare and have to walk that all the way to a supermarket that far with 3 kids in a high crime area, it's not the super market they are looking for. They are looking for something to eat that's both affordable and safe to get. Often times, that may mean the corner convenience store.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you look a statistics about proximity to supermarkets, it's easy to overlook other factors that can influence the ability to get fresh food.
This is another area where I am admittedly biased. I have lived in "the hood" in multiple cities over the years, and never once had a problem out of anyone. We'd regularly have people shot in the parking lots of two of the places I live, yet I never got so much as a sideways glance. I attribute this to the fact that I mind my own damned business, and never got tangled up in the things that tend to get people shot (drug money, *kitten* with someone's wife/girlfriend, having a big mouth, etc.)
I don't give a damn if someone got capped right under my window, I didn't crack the blinds, I didn't see *kitten*, it's not my business. So yeah, even fat and nerdy whitey can live in some nasty neighborhoods without incident, if you know what you are doing. vOv
It's good for you that you didn't care and kept to yourself. That means only gang members and drug dealers get shot?
There are so many bystanders shot yearly by stray bullets or simply because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time. Sure- a percentage of them were involved in drug or gang activity but that definitely doesn't account for all of those affected by the violence.
While I'm not discrediting your experiences, I don't think that just because you lived in a poor area and survived means that it must be okay for everyone else.
Chicago's violence is skyrocketing. The thing to remember is that chicago is big. Percentagewise, we have a ridiculously high murder and violent crime rate for the population of the city. Then you actually break it down to where these crimes happen, they tend to be concentrated in the areas with the most poverty. Then you look at the percentages in those areas- it's extremely dangerous to even live there.
So yes- my experiences with these families and being able to spend time with them does show that there are indeed "food deserts" because of other factors than proximity to a supermarket.
Food deserts are only a symptom of an unadressed root cause. Why is this level of violence allowed to exist?
All this is a waste of time, money, and most importantly - life if the root cause is not addressed.
Because there's no actual appetite to take the measures needed to curb the violence.
Profiling, stop and frisk, etc.
This simply reinforces the fact that government is not in the business of solving problems. They are in the business of creating problems which will further the size and power of government.
In this case, the government is able and willing to solve the problems. The communities prefer the violence to the solution.
How are you separating gov't from community here? The police are an arm of the local gov't, local policies about law enforcement are an arm of the local gov't. (I don't agree with your claims anyway, and am rather puzzled at how profiling -- which happens in reality all the time -- would stop crime in neighborhoods that are largely all one race, but setting that aside, it's the government acting or not.)
Curious where this 'hood is that you lived that required a 6 mile walk for a public library, though. That's not the case in the cities I know.
Not necessarily to get to a public library, but getting to one larger than a closet with a computer could require commuting a few neighborhoods over. It would have been ~4 miles one way for me to get to the Central library from where I grew up (thankfully via a single bus line in my case).
The way it was phrased implied just to get a book, and that there was no public transportation available:
"25 years ago(when I was a teenager) a 12 mile total distance walk to get to and from the public library to get a book, or use a computer for research was routine."
I grew up in the '80s, and in a middle-sized city, not a big city (about 250K, but sprawling), and it would have been at least a 6 mile walk (more, I think, but would have to check a map) to the main library, although we would have taken public transportation (a bus). To a regular library to get a book, nowhere near that far. Here, in a big city? Even in the terrible neighborhoods that's not so.
We were reasonably active, but wouldn't have been walking 12 miles in a day to go to and from the library. Certainly not through bad neighborhoods. So that as routinely how people lived in '92, no, I am skeptical.
I grew up in rural Illinois in a town <2k (currently over 11k) and would bike pretty much everywhere when the weather allowed.
I did too (bike everywhere, I mean).
But this is supposed to be in the 'hood of a city, which is why it struck me as strange and I asked where. I'm not saying it's not possible to walk 6 miles each way somewhere (I do that now sometimes), but that it was what everyone did back in '92 in that environment is what seemed rather, well, unusual. ('92 isn't that long ago.)Bottom line is people adapt. Free market adapts based upon numerous forces, the primary being profitability. If this does not exist there is a very good reason for it.
No question. Not sure what this has to do with what we were talking about, though.
I believe it started with a few of us trying to explain that most of us urban folk are quite used to doing a lot more than waddling to a car in our driveway, and thus not having a fully-stocked green grocer on every other corner is not an insurmountable hardship.0 -
lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »stanmann571 wrote: »stanmann571 wrote: »RosieRose7673 wrote: »Gallowmere1984 wrote: »RosieRose7673 wrote: »ladyannique2017 wrote: »Food deserts in general are not a myth. Yes, it's a myth that all poor urban areas are food deserts, but that doesn't mean food deserts don't exist. I've lived in a few. One was a poor urban area in the Midwest. Yes you can look at a street map and see there is a grocery store within walking distance, but street maps do not take into account gang territories or other hazards between you and the food. I lived in a place where it was not safe to go two blocks uptown which is where the grocery store was due to gang boundaries but I could go ten blocks down the hill to the river where there were bars and corner stores just fine. That area was a kind of a neutral zone because it was run by pimps and their hookers.
Another food desert was also a water desert out in the west when I lived in a single wide trailer in a desperately poor rural area. Nearest grocery store was 45mikes away and although we had plumbing, the tap water wasn't safe to drink (EPA notice about arsenic in water) so my dad had to use our beat up rusted out truck to bring home a tank of water every week as well as food.
Electricity wasn't too dependable in either place...urban or country and so we couldn't buy fresh veg or meat because it would rot to nothing in a day. Lots of canned and dried foods. I think people assume everyone has access to a refrigerator/freezer when many poor people don't.
Thank you very much for posting this. I really feel that it is very easy for people to put horse blinders on when it comes to this.
It's very easy to say that there's a supermarket a mile away. Why don't they go there?
I live in Chicago currently and in a decent part of the city. However, for my job, I did have to travel to very high crime, poor areas. I've met a family who lived in an unfinished basement. 3 kids and a mom who was taking online classes to get a better job. However, the area was extremely dangerous. Homicides are high in the area as well as gang violence. Sure, if they could hop in a car and drive to a supermarket a mile or so away, they could. BUT- when you don't have a car, don't have any money to spare and have to walk that all the way to a supermarket that far with 3 kids in a high crime area, it's not the super market they are looking for. They are looking for something to eat that's both affordable and safe to get. Often times, that may mean the corner convenience store.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you look a statistics about proximity to supermarkets, it's easy to overlook other factors that can influence the ability to get fresh food.
This is another area where I am admittedly biased. I have lived in "the hood" in multiple cities over the years, and never once had a problem out of anyone. We'd regularly have people shot in the parking lots of two of the places I live, yet I never got so much as a sideways glance. I attribute this to the fact that I mind my own damned business, and never got tangled up in the things that tend to get people shot (drug money, *kitten* with someone's wife/girlfriend, having a big mouth, etc.)
I don't give a damn if someone got capped right under my window, I didn't crack the blinds, I didn't see *kitten*, it's not my business. So yeah, even fat and nerdy whitey can live in some nasty neighborhoods without incident, if you know what you are doing. vOv
It's good for you that you didn't care and kept to yourself. That means only gang members and drug dealers get shot?
There are so many bystanders shot yearly by stray bullets or simply because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time. Sure- a percentage of them were involved in drug or gang activity but that definitely doesn't account for all of those affected by the violence.
While I'm not discrediting your experiences, I don't think that just because you lived in a poor area and survived means that it must be okay for everyone else.
Chicago's violence is skyrocketing. The thing to remember is that chicago is big. Percentagewise, we have a ridiculously high murder and violent crime rate for the population of the city. Then you actually break it down to where these crimes happen, they tend to be concentrated in the areas with the most poverty. Then you look at the percentages in those areas- it's extremely dangerous to even live there.
So yes- my experiences with these families and being able to spend time with them does show that there are indeed "food deserts" because of other factors than proximity to a supermarket.
Food deserts are only a symptom of an unadressed root cause. Why is this level of violence allowed to exist?
All this is a waste of time, money, and most importantly - life if the root cause is not addressed.
Because there's no actual appetite to take the measures needed to curb the violence.
Profiling, stop and frisk, etc.
This simply reinforces the fact that government is not in the business of solving problems. They are in the business of creating problems which will further the size and power of government.
In this case, the government is able and willing to solve the problems. The communities prefer the violence to the solution.
How are you separating gov't from community here? The police are an arm of the local gov't, local policies about law enforcement are an arm of the local gov't. (I don't agree with your claims anyway, and am rather puzzled at how profiling -- which happens in reality all the time -- would stop crime in neighborhoods that are largely all one race, but setting that aside, it's the government acting or not.)
Curious where this 'hood is that you lived that required a 6 mile walk for a public library, though. That's not the case in the cities I know.
Not necessarily to get to a public library, but getting to one larger than a closet with a computer could require commuting a few neighborhoods over. It would have been ~4 miles one way for me to get to the Central library from where I grew up (thankfully via a single bus line in my case).
The way it was phrased implied just to get a book, and that there was no public transportation available:
"25 years ago(when I was a teenager) a 12 mile total distance walk to get to and from the public library to get a book, or use a computer for research was routine."
I grew up in the '80s, and in a middle-sized city, not a big city (about 250K, but sprawling), and it would have been at least a 6 mile walk (more, I think, but would have to check a map) to the main library, although we would have taken public transportation (a bus). To a regular library to get a book, nowhere near that far. Here, in a big city? Even in the terrible neighborhoods that's not so.
We were reasonably active, but wouldn't have been walking 12 miles in a day to go to and from the library. Certainly not through bad neighborhoods. So that as routinely how people lived in '92, no, I am skeptical.
I grew up in rural Illinois in a town <2k (currently over 11k) and would bike pretty much everywhere when the weather allowed.
I did too (bike everywhere, I mean).
But this is supposed to be in the 'hood of a city, which is why it struck me as strange and I asked where. I'm not saying it's not possible to walk 6 miles each way somewhere (I do that now sometimes), but that it was what everyone did back in '92 in that environment is what seemed rather, well, unusual. ('92 isn't that long ago.)Bottom line is people adapt. Free market adapts based upon numerous forces, the primary being profitability. If this does not exist there is a very good reason for it.
No question. Not sure what this has to do with what we were talking about, though.
I believe it started with a few of us trying to explain that most of us urban folk are quite used to doing a lot more than waddling to a car in our driveway, and thus not having a fully-stocked green grocer on every other corner is not an insurmountable hardship.
Oh, no, I followed and agreed with that bit. I was asking about the "Free market adapts based upon numerous forces, the primary being profitability. If this does not exist there is a very good reason for it." as I did not see how it related. Like I said, I agree, but given the context (sidewalks?, walking to the library in '92?, riding one's bike everywhere as a kid?) I wasn't following WHAT didn't exist and what the free market had to do with it -- I mean I know there are people who think libraries should only be for profit and not gov't sponsored, but even so I didn't see how it fit into the conversation that we were having.
I will say, again, that I DON'T think having to walk 12 miles roundtrip to get somewhere is particularly an urban thing (indeed, although I sometimes do it, for exercise mainly, and because I enjoy walking), I don't think it's particularly common in an urban area to HAVE to walk that far to do something because public transportation is usually much more available. The places where I've HAD to walk several miles to get somewhere have been in suburbs (if I happened not to have a car) or other places where most people drove everywhere. And in doing that there have been times when I was stuck walking in a place where it really wasn't conducive to it and where I felt a little uncomfortable (walking on the side of a busy street or some such).3 -
I've been thinking about this thread and after all the comments I would say it is a myth that there is an urban food desert. There will be food within traveling distance, it might be just candy bars at a gas station, or pizza and burgers from a fast food diner, but there will be 'food' available. There will be walking, buses, cars, trams, subways, trains, taxis, bikes, motorinos for navigating the way toward the food. Its not a desert.
edited 4 spelling2 -
lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »stanmann571 wrote: »stanmann571 wrote: »RosieRose7673 wrote: »Gallowmere1984 wrote: »RosieRose7673 wrote: »ladyannique2017 wrote: »Food deserts in general are not a myth. Yes, it's a myth that all poor urban areas are food deserts, but that doesn't mean food deserts don't exist. I've lived in a few. One was a poor urban area in the Midwest. Yes you can look at a street map and see there is a grocery store within walking distance, but street maps do not take into account gang territories or other hazards between you and the food. I lived in a place where it was not safe to go two blocks uptown which is where the grocery store was due to gang boundaries but I could go ten blocks down the hill to the river where there were bars and corner stores just fine. That area was a kind of a neutral zone because it was run by pimps and their hookers.
Another food desert was also a water desert out in the west when I lived in a single wide trailer in a desperately poor rural area. Nearest grocery store was 45mikes away and although we had plumbing, the tap water wasn't safe to drink (EPA notice about arsenic in water) so my dad had to use our beat up rusted out truck to bring home a tank of water every week as well as food.
Electricity wasn't too dependable in either place...urban or country and so we couldn't buy fresh veg or meat because it would rot to nothing in a day. Lots of canned and dried foods. I think people assume everyone has access to a refrigerator/freezer when many poor people don't.
Thank you very much for posting this. I really feel that it is very easy for people to put horse blinders on when it comes to this.
It's very easy to say that there's a supermarket a mile away. Why don't they go there?
I live in Chicago currently and in a decent part of the city. However, for my job, I did have to travel to very high crime, poor areas. I've met a family who lived in an unfinished basement. 3 kids and a mom who was taking online classes to get a better job. However, the area was extremely dangerous. Homicides are high in the area as well as gang violence. Sure, if they could hop in a car and drive to a supermarket a mile or so away, they could. BUT- when you don't have a car, don't have any money to spare and have to walk that all the way to a supermarket that far with 3 kids in a high crime area, it's not the super market they are looking for. They are looking for something to eat that's both affordable and safe to get. Often times, that may mean the corner convenience store.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you look a statistics about proximity to supermarkets, it's easy to overlook other factors that can influence the ability to get fresh food.
This is another area where I am admittedly biased. I have lived in "the hood" in multiple cities over the years, and never once had a problem out of anyone. We'd regularly have people shot in the parking lots of two of the places I live, yet I never got so much as a sideways glance. I attribute this to the fact that I mind my own damned business, and never got tangled up in the things that tend to get people shot (drug money, *kitten* with someone's wife/girlfriend, having a big mouth, etc.)
I don't give a damn if someone got capped right under my window, I didn't crack the blinds, I didn't see *kitten*, it's not my business. So yeah, even fat and nerdy whitey can live in some nasty neighborhoods without incident, if you know what you are doing. vOv
It's good for you that you didn't care and kept to yourself. That means only gang members and drug dealers get shot?
There are so many bystanders shot yearly by stray bullets or simply because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time. Sure- a percentage of them were involved in drug or gang activity but that definitely doesn't account for all of those affected by the violence.
While I'm not discrediting your experiences, I don't think that just because you lived in a poor area and survived means that it must be okay for everyone else.
Chicago's violence is skyrocketing. The thing to remember is that chicago is big. Percentagewise, we have a ridiculously high murder and violent crime rate for the population of the city. Then you actually break it down to where these crimes happen, they tend to be concentrated in the areas with the most poverty. Then you look at the percentages in those areas- it's extremely dangerous to even live there.
So yes- my experiences with these families and being able to spend time with them does show that there are indeed "food deserts" because of other factors than proximity to a supermarket.
Food deserts are only a symptom of an unadressed root cause. Why is this level of violence allowed to exist?
All this is a waste of time, money, and most importantly - life if the root cause is not addressed.
Because there's no actual appetite to take the measures needed to curb the violence.
Profiling, stop and frisk, etc.
This simply reinforces the fact that government is not in the business of solving problems. They are in the business of creating problems which will further the size and power of government.
In this case, the government is able and willing to solve the problems. The communities prefer the violence to the solution.
How are you separating gov't from community here? The police are an arm of the local gov't, local policies about law enforcement are an arm of the local gov't. (I don't agree with your claims anyway, and am rather puzzled at how profiling -- which happens in reality all the time -- would stop crime in neighborhoods that are largely all one race, but setting that aside, it's the government acting or not.)
Curious where this 'hood is that you lived that required a 6 mile walk for a public library, though. That's not the case in the cities I know.
Not necessarily to get to a public library, but getting to one larger than a closet with a computer could require commuting a few neighborhoods over. It would have been ~4 miles one way for me to get to the Central library from where I grew up (thankfully via a single bus line in my case).
The way it was phrased implied just to get a book, and that there was no public transportation available:
"25 years ago(when I was a teenager) a 12 mile total distance walk to get to and from the public library to get a book, or use a computer for research was routine."
I grew up in the '80s, and in a middle-sized city, not a big city (about 250K, but sprawling), and it would have been at least a 6 mile walk (more, I think, but would have to check a map) to the main library, although we would have taken public transportation (a bus). To a regular library to get a book, nowhere near that far. Here, in a big city? Even in the terrible neighborhoods that's not so.
We were reasonably active, but wouldn't have been walking 12 miles in a day to go to and from the library. Certainly not through bad neighborhoods. So that as routinely how people lived in '92, no, I am skeptical.
I grew up in rural Illinois in a town <2k (currently over 11k) and would bike pretty much everywhere when the weather allowed.
I did too (bike everywhere, I mean).
But this is supposed to be in the 'hood of a city, which is why it struck me as strange and I asked where. I'm not saying it's not possible to walk 6 miles each way somewhere (I do that now sometimes), but that it was what everyone did back in '92 in that environment is what seemed rather, well, unusual. ('92 isn't that long ago.)Bottom line is people adapt. Free market adapts based upon numerous forces, the primary being profitability. If this does not exist there is a very good reason for it.
No question. Not sure what this has to do with what we were talking about, though.
I believe it started with a few of us trying to explain that most of us urban folk are quite used to doing a lot more than waddling to a car in our driveway, and thus not having a fully-stocked green grocer on every other corner is not an insurmountable hardship.
Oh, no, I followed and agreed with that bit. I was asking about the "Free market adapts based upon numerous forces, the primary being profitability. If this does not exist there is a very good reason for it." as I did not see how it related. Like I said, I agree, but given the context (sidewalks?, walking to the library in '92?, riding one's bike everywhere as a kid?) I wasn't following WHAT didn't exist and what the free market had to do with it -- I mean I know there are people who think libraries should only be for profit and not gov't sponsored, but even so I didn't see how it fit into the conversation that we were having.
I will say, again, that I DON'T think having to walk 12 miles roundtrip to get somewhere is particularly an urban thing (indeed, although I sometimes do it, for exercise mainly, and because I enjoy walking), I don't think it's particularly common in an urban area to HAVE to walk that far to do something because public transportation is usually much more available. The places where I've HAD to walk several miles to get somewhere have been in suburbs (if I happened not to have a car) or other places where most people drove everywhere. And in doing that there have been times when I was stuck walking in a place where it really wasn't conducive to it and where I felt a little uncomfortable (walking on the side of a busy street or some such).
I think he meant the original topic. As in there aren't places to easily access whatever food in certain areas, because the demand for it isn't there. I will admit, after living in several major cities, a lot of the old districts still have looming corpses of what used to be grocery stores.0 -
Gallowmere1984 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »stanmann571 wrote: »stanmann571 wrote: »RosieRose7673 wrote: »Gallowmere1984 wrote: »RosieRose7673 wrote: »ladyannique2017 wrote: »Food deserts in general are not a myth. Yes, it's a myth that all poor urban areas are food deserts, but that doesn't mean food deserts don't exist. I've lived in a few. One was a poor urban area in the Midwest. Yes you can look at a street map and see there is a grocery store within walking distance, but street maps do not take into account gang territories or other hazards between you and the food. I lived in a place where it was not safe to go two blocks uptown which is where the grocery store was due to gang boundaries but I could go ten blocks down the hill to the river where there were bars and corner stores just fine. That area was a kind of a neutral zone because it was run by pimps and their hookers.
Another food desert was also a water desert out in the west when I lived in a single wide trailer in a desperately poor rural area. Nearest grocery store was 45mikes away and although we had plumbing, the tap water wasn't safe to drink (EPA notice about arsenic in water) so my dad had to use our beat up rusted out truck to bring home a tank of water every week as well as food.
Electricity wasn't too dependable in either place...urban or country and so we couldn't buy fresh veg or meat because it would rot to nothing in a day. Lots of canned and dried foods. I think people assume everyone has access to a refrigerator/freezer when many poor people don't.
Thank you very much for posting this. I really feel that it is very easy for people to put horse blinders on when it comes to this.
It's very easy to say that there's a supermarket a mile away. Why don't they go there?
I live in Chicago currently and in a decent part of the city. However, for my job, I did have to travel to very high crime, poor areas. I've met a family who lived in an unfinished basement. 3 kids and a mom who was taking online classes to get a better job. However, the area was extremely dangerous. Homicides are high in the area as well as gang violence. Sure, if they could hop in a car and drive to a supermarket a mile or so away, they could. BUT- when you don't have a car, don't have any money to spare and have to walk that all the way to a supermarket that far with 3 kids in a high crime area, it's not the super market they are looking for. They are looking for something to eat that's both affordable and safe to get. Often times, that may mean the corner convenience store.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you look a statistics about proximity to supermarkets, it's easy to overlook other factors that can influence the ability to get fresh food.
This is another area where I am admittedly biased. I have lived in "the hood" in multiple cities over the years, and never once had a problem out of anyone. We'd regularly have people shot in the parking lots of two of the places I live, yet I never got so much as a sideways glance. I attribute this to the fact that I mind my own damned business, and never got tangled up in the things that tend to get people shot (drug money, *kitten* with someone's wife/girlfriend, having a big mouth, etc.)
I don't give a damn if someone got capped right under my window, I didn't crack the blinds, I didn't see *kitten*, it's not my business. So yeah, even fat and nerdy whitey can live in some nasty neighborhoods without incident, if you know what you are doing. vOv
It's good for you that you didn't care and kept to yourself. That means only gang members and drug dealers get shot?
There are so many bystanders shot yearly by stray bullets or simply because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time. Sure- a percentage of them were involved in drug or gang activity but that definitely doesn't account for all of those affected by the violence.
While I'm not discrediting your experiences, I don't think that just because you lived in a poor area and survived means that it must be okay for everyone else.
Chicago's violence is skyrocketing. The thing to remember is that chicago is big. Percentagewise, we have a ridiculously high murder and violent crime rate for the population of the city. Then you actually break it down to where these crimes happen, they tend to be concentrated in the areas with the most poverty. Then you look at the percentages in those areas- it's extremely dangerous to even live there.
So yes- my experiences with these families and being able to spend time with them does show that there are indeed "food deserts" because of other factors than proximity to a supermarket.
Food deserts are only a symptom of an unadressed root cause. Why is this level of violence allowed to exist?
All this is a waste of time, money, and most importantly - life if the root cause is not addressed.
Because there's no actual appetite to take the measures needed to curb the violence.
Profiling, stop and frisk, etc.
This simply reinforces the fact that government is not in the business of solving problems. They are in the business of creating problems which will further the size and power of government.
In this case, the government is able and willing to solve the problems. The communities prefer the violence to the solution.
How are you separating gov't from community here? The police are an arm of the local gov't, local policies about law enforcement are an arm of the local gov't. (I don't agree with your claims anyway, and am rather puzzled at how profiling -- which happens in reality all the time -- would stop crime in neighborhoods that are largely all one race, but setting that aside, it's the government acting or not.)
Curious where this 'hood is that you lived that required a 6 mile walk for a public library, though. That's not the case in the cities I know.
Not necessarily to get to a public library, but getting to one larger than a closet with a computer could require commuting a few neighborhoods over. It would have been ~4 miles one way for me to get to the Central library from where I grew up (thankfully via a single bus line in my case).
The way it was phrased implied just to get a book, and that there was no public transportation available:
"25 years ago(when I was a teenager) a 12 mile total distance walk to get to and from the public library to get a book, or use a computer for research was routine."
I grew up in the '80s, and in a middle-sized city, not a big city (about 250K, but sprawling), and it would have been at least a 6 mile walk (more, I think, but would have to check a map) to the main library, although we would have taken public transportation (a bus). To a regular library to get a book, nowhere near that far. Here, in a big city? Even in the terrible neighborhoods that's not so.
We were reasonably active, but wouldn't have been walking 12 miles in a day to go to and from the library. Certainly not through bad neighborhoods. So that as routinely how people lived in '92, no, I am skeptical.
I grew up in rural Illinois in a town <2k (currently over 11k) and would bike pretty much everywhere when the weather allowed.
I did too (bike everywhere, I mean).
But this is supposed to be in the 'hood of a city, which is why it struck me as strange and I asked where. I'm not saying it's not possible to walk 6 miles each way somewhere (I do that now sometimes), but that it was what everyone did back in '92 in that environment is what seemed rather, well, unusual. ('92 isn't that long ago.)Bottom line is people adapt. Free market adapts based upon numerous forces, the primary being profitability. If this does not exist there is a very good reason for it.
No question. Not sure what this has to do with what we were talking about, though.
I believe it started with a few of us trying to explain that most of us urban folk are quite used to doing a lot more than waddling to a car in our driveway, and thus not having a fully-stocked green grocer on every other corner is not an insurmountable hardship.
Oh, no, I followed and agreed with that bit. I was asking about the "Free market adapts based upon numerous forces, the primary being profitability. If this does not exist there is a very good reason for it." as I did not see how it related. Like I said, I agree, but given the context (sidewalks?, walking to the library in '92?, riding one's bike everywhere as a kid?) I wasn't following WHAT didn't exist and what the free market had to do with it -- I mean I know there are people who think libraries should only be for profit and not gov't sponsored, but even so I didn't see how it fit into the conversation that we were having.
I will say, again, that I DON'T think having to walk 12 miles roundtrip to get somewhere is particularly an urban thing (indeed, although I sometimes do it, for exercise mainly, and because I enjoy walking), I don't think it's particularly common in an urban area to HAVE to walk that far to do something because public transportation is usually much more available. The places where I've HAD to walk several miles to get somewhere have been in suburbs (if I happened not to have a car) or other places where most people drove everywhere. And in doing that there have been times when I was stuck walking in a place where it really wasn't conducive to it and where I felt a little uncomfortable (walking on the side of a busy street or some such).
I think he meant the original topic. As in there aren't places to easily access whatever food in certain areas, because the demand for it isn't there. I will admit, after living in several major cities, a lot of the old districts still have looming corpses of what used to be grocery stores.
Here in mainland Europe the urban corpses are the medium sized and small grocery shops in the urban centers. Oh, and then there are these giganic empty apartment blocks over built in the last 10 - 15 years. The really large grocery store chains are doing extrmely well, most are placed far outside city limits or at the edges of the towns and include grand parking lots all of them more or less inaccessible to bikes or the walking population because of the highways and cloverleaf traffic switches. This is a real change in the landscape of continental europe, maybe comparable to the shifts during the 60's and 70's in America if my recall is accurate.
Not that anyone here seems to be much interested though.
edited thru a perpetual need to edit.
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lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »stanmann571 wrote: »stanmann571 wrote: »RosieRose7673 wrote: »Gallowmere1984 wrote: »RosieRose7673 wrote: »ladyannique2017 wrote: »Food deserts in general are not a myth. Yes, it's a myth that all poor urban areas are food deserts, but that doesn't mean food deserts don't exist. I've lived in a few. One was a poor urban area in the Midwest. Yes you can look at a street map and see there is a grocery store within walking distance, but street maps do not take into account gang territories or other hazards between you and the food. I lived in a place where it was not safe to go two blocks uptown which is where the grocery store was due to gang boundaries but I could go ten blocks down the hill to the river where there were bars and corner stores just fine. That area was a kind of a neutral zone because it was run by pimps and their hookers.
Another food desert was also a water desert out in the west when I lived in a single wide trailer in a desperately poor rural area. Nearest grocery store was 45mikes away and although we had plumbing, the tap water wasn't safe to drink (EPA notice about arsenic in water) so my dad had to use our beat up rusted out truck to bring home a tank of water every week as well as food.
Electricity wasn't too dependable in either place...urban or country and so we couldn't buy fresh veg or meat because it would rot to nothing in a day. Lots of canned and dried foods. I think people assume everyone has access to a refrigerator/freezer when many poor people don't.
Thank you very much for posting this. I really feel that it is very easy for people to put horse blinders on when it comes to this.
It's very easy to say that there's a supermarket a mile away. Why don't they go there?
I live in Chicago currently and in a decent part of the city. However, for my job, I did have to travel to very high crime, poor areas. I've met a family who lived in an unfinished basement. 3 kids and a mom who was taking online classes to get a better job. However, the area was extremely dangerous. Homicides are high in the area as well as gang violence. Sure, if they could hop in a car and drive to a supermarket a mile or so away, they could. BUT- when you don't have a car, don't have any money to spare and have to walk that all the way to a supermarket that far with 3 kids in a high crime area, it's not the super market they are looking for. They are looking for something to eat that's both affordable and safe to get. Often times, that may mean the corner convenience store.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you look a statistics about proximity to supermarkets, it's easy to overlook other factors that can influence the ability to get fresh food.
This is another area where I am admittedly biased. I have lived in "the hood" in multiple cities over the years, and never once had a problem out of anyone. We'd regularly have people shot in the parking lots of two of the places I live, yet I never got so much as a sideways glance. I attribute this to the fact that I mind my own damned business, and never got tangled up in the things that tend to get people shot (drug money, *kitten* with someone's wife/girlfriend, having a big mouth, etc.)
I don't give a damn if someone got capped right under my window, I didn't crack the blinds, I didn't see *kitten*, it's not my business. So yeah, even fat and nerdy whitey can live in some nasty neighborhoods without incident, if you know what you are doing. vOv
It's good for you that you didn't care and kept to yourself. That means only gang members and drug dealers get shot?
There are so many bystanders shot yearly by stray bullets or simply because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time. Sure- a percentage of them were involved in drug or gang activity but that definitely doesn't account for all of those affected by the violence.
While I'm not discrediting your experiences, I don't think that just because you lived in a poor area and survived means that it must be okay for everyone else.
Chicago's violence is skyrocketing. The thing to remember is that chicago is big. Percentagewise, we have a ridiculously high murder and violent crime rate for the population of the city. Then you actually break it down to where these crimes happen, they tend to be concentrated in the areas with the most poverty. Then you look at the percentages in those areas- it's extremely dangerous to even live there.
So yes- my experiences with these families and being able to spend time with them does show that there are indeed "food deserts" because of other factors than proximity to a supermarket.
Food deserts are only a symptom of an unadressed root cause. Why is this level of violence allowed to exist?
All this is a waste of time, money, and most importantly - life if the root cause is not addressed.
Because there's no actual appetite to take the measures needed to curb the violence.
Profiling, stop and frisk, etc.
This simply reinforces the fact that government is not in the business of solving problems. They are in the business of creating problems which will further the size and power of government.
In this case, the government is able and willing to solve the problems. The communities prefer the violence to the solution.
How are you separating gov't from community here? The police are an arm of the local gov't, local policies about law enforcement are an arm of the local gov't. (I don't agree with your claims anyway, and am rather puzzled at how profiling -- which happens in reality all the time -- would stop crime in neighborhoods that are largely all one race, but setting that aside, it's the government acting or not.)
Curious where this 'hood is that you lived that required a 6 mile walk for a public library, though. That's not the case in the cities I know.
Not necessarily to get to a public library, but getting to one larger than a closet with a computer could require commuting a few neighborhoods over. It would have been ~4 miles one way for me to get to the Central library from where I grew up (thankfully via a single bus line in my case).
The way it was phrased implied just to get a book, and that there was no public transportation available:
"25 years ago(when I was a teenager) a 12 mile total distance walk to get to and from the public library to get a book, or use a computer for research was routine."
I grew up in the '80s, and in a middle-sized city, not a big city (about 250K, but sprawling), and it would have been at least a 6 mile walk (more, I think, but would have to check a map) to the main library, although we would have taken public transportation (a bus). To a regular library to get a book, nowhere near that far. Here, in a big city? Even in the terrible neighborhoods that's not so.
We were reasonably active, but wouldn't have been walking 12 miles in a day to go to and from the library. Certainly not through bad neighborhoods. So that as routinely how people lived in '92, no, I am skeptical.
I grew up in rural Illinois in a town <2k (currently over 11k) and would bike pretty much everywhere when the weather allowed.
I did too (bike everywhere, I mean).
But this is supposed to be in the 'hood of a city, which is why it struck me as strange and I asked where. I'm not saying it's not possible to walk 6 miles each way somewhere (I do that now sometimes), but that it was what everyone did back in '92 in that environment is what seemed rather, well, unusual. ('92 isn't that long ago.)Bottom line is people adapt. Free market adapts based upon numerous forces, the primary being profitability. If this does not exist there is a very good reason for it.
No question. Not sure what this has to do with what we were talking about, though.
I believe it started with a few of us trying to explain that most of us urban folk are quite used to doing a lot more than waddling to a car in our driveway, and thus not having a fully-stocked green grocer on every other corner is not an insurmountable hardship.
It's all about what you really want.
The route is below for your amusement. It's approximate since some of the routes are no longer there and new routes are available.
And while a bike would have been nice, at 15, it was a luxury that we couldn't afford... so I walked. It would be 3 years before I was able to afford a bus pass, and due to route availability, some times I would still walk.
Some of the neighborhoods have gotten better, and some worse in the last 25 years.
https://www.google.com/maps/dir/321+Amherst+St,+Providence,+RI+02909/41.7542415,-71.4570759/@41.8176103,-71.4460847,19z/data=!4m14!4m13!1m10!1m1!1s0x89e44594fc2c77d1:0xd5671df2f266fa5a!2m2!1d-71.4510943!2d41.8235898!3m4!1m2!1d-71.4435094!2d41.8169839!3s0x89e445904346f13f:0xb2024270d900a77b!1m0!3e21 -
I've been thinking about this thread and after all the comments I would say it is a myth that there is an urban food desert. There will be food within traveling distance, it might be just candy bars at a gas station, or pizza and burgers from a fast food diner, but there will be 'food' available. There will be walking, buses, cars, trams, subways, trains, taxis, bikes, motorinos for navigating the way toward the food. Its not a desert.
edited 4 spelling
My personal opinion is that urban food deserts (however common), don't play much of a role in obesity, and I think they are not nearly as common as often believed, but the concept ISN'T that no food is available, but that the kind of produce and other things commonly available at a regular grocery store (dried and canned beans, meat, eggs, milk) are not available or are available only at a significant mark-up. Basically the difference between a neighborhood with a corner store (7-11, liquor store with some food) vs. one with a full-service grocery. (I do think that in cities one could normally get to a full-service grocery on public transportation and may well work nearer one or have one between home and work, which is one reason I think the study discussed in the first post was interesting.)2 -
Gallowmere1984 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »stanmann571 wrote: »stanmann571 wrote: »RosieRose7673 wrote: »Gallowmere1984 wrote: »RosieRose7673 wrote: »ladyannique2017 wrote: »Food deserts in general are not a myth. Yes, it's a myth that all poor urban areas are food deserts, but that doesn't mean food deserts don't exist. I've lived in a few. One was a poor urban area in the Midwest. Yes you can look at a street map and see there is a grocery store within walking distance, but street maps do not take into account gang territories or other hazards between you and the food. I lived in a place where it was not safe to go two blocks uptown which is where the grocery store was due to gang boundaries but I could go ten blocks down the hill to the river where there were bars and corner stores just fine. That area was a kind of a neutral zone because it was run by pimps and their hookers.
Another food desert was also a water desert out in the west when I lived in a single wide trailer in a desperately poor rural area. Nearest grocery store was 45mikes away and although we had plumbing, the tap water wasn't safe to drink (EPA notice about arsenic in water) so my dad had to use our beat up rusted out truck to bring home a tank of water every week as well as food.
Electricity wasn't too dependable in either place...urban or country and so we couldn't buy fresh veg or meat because it would rot to nothing in a day. Lots of canned and dried foods. I think people assume everyone has access to a refrigerator/freezer when many poor people don't.
Thank you very much for posting this. I really feel that it is very easy for people to put horse blinders on when it comes to this.
It's very easy to say that there's a supermarket a mile away. Why don't they go there?
I live in Chicago currently and in a decent part of the city. However, for my job, I did have to travel to very high crime, poor areas. I've met a family who lived in an unfinished basement. 3 kids and a mom who was taking online classes to get a better job. However, the area was extremely dangerous. Homicides are high in the area as well as gang violence. Sure, if they could hop in a car and drive to a supermarket a mile or so away, they could. BUT- when you don't have a car, don't have any money to spare and have to walk that all the way to a supermarket that far with 3 kids in a high crime area, it's not the super market they are looking for. They are looking for something to eat that's both affordable and safe to get. Often times, that may mean the corner convenience store.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you look a statistics about proximity to supermarkets, it's easy to overlook other factors that can influence the ability to get fresh food.
This is another area where I am admittedly biased. I have lived in "the hood" in multiple cities over the years, and never once had a problem out of anyone. We'd regularly have people shot in the parking lots of two of the places I live, yet I never got so much as a sideways glance. I attribute this to the fact that I mind my own damned business, and never got tangled up in the things that tend to get people shot (drug money, *kitten* with someone's wife/girlfriend, having a big mouth, etc.)
I don't give a damn if someone got capped right under my window, I didn't crack the blinds, I didn't see *kitten*, it's not my business. So yeah, even fat and nerdy whitey can live in some nasty neighborhoods without incident, if you know what you are doing. vOv
It's good for you that you didn't care and kept to yourself. That means only gang members and drug dealers get shot?
There are so many bystanders shot yearly by stray bullets or simply because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time. Sure- a percentage of them were involved in drug or gang activity but that definitely doesn't account for all of those affected by the violence.
While I'm not discrediting your experiences, I don't think that just because you lived in a poor area and survived means that it must be okay for everyone else.
Chicago's violence is skyrocketing. The thing to remember is that chicago is big. Percentagewise, we have a ridiculously high murder and violent crime rate for the population of the city. Then you actually break it down to where these crimes happen, they tend to be concentrated in the areas with the most poverty. Then you look at the percentages in those areas- it's extremely dangerous to even live there.
So yes- my experiences with these families and being able to spend time with them does show that there are indeed "food deserts" because of other factors than proximity to a supermarket.
Food deserts are only a symptom of an unadressed root cause. Why is this level of violence allowed to exist?
All this is a waste of time, money, and most importantly - life if the root cause is not addressed.
Because there's no actual appetite to take the measures needed to curb the violence.
Profiling, stop and frisk, etc.
This simply reinforces the fact that government is not in the business of solving problems. They are in the business of creating problems which will further the size and power of government.
In this case, the government is able and willing to solve the problems. The communities prefer the violence to the solution.
How are you separating gov't from community here? The police are an arm of the local gov't, local policies about law enforcement are an arm of the local gov't. (I don't agree with your claims anyway, and am rather puzzled at how profiling -- which happens in reality all the time -- would stop crime in neighborhoods that are largely all one race, but setting that aside, it's the government acting or not.)
Curious where this 'hood is that you lived that required a 6 mile walk for a public library, though. That's not the case in the cities I know.
Not necessarily to get to a public library, but getting to one larger than a closet with a computer could require commuting a few neighborhoods over. It would have been ~4 miles one way for me to get to the Central library from where I grew up (thankfully via a single bus line in my case).
The way it was phrased implied just to get a book, and that there was no public transportation available:
"25 years ago(when I was a teenager) a 12 mile total distance walk to get to and from the public library to get a book, or use a computer for research was routine."
I grew up in the '80s, and in a middle-sized city, not a big city (about 250K, but sprawling), and it would have been at least a 6 mile walk (more, I think, but would have to check a map) to the main library, although we would have taken public transportation (a bus). To a regular library to get a book, nowhere near that far. Here, in a big city? Even in the terrible neighborhoods that's not so.
We were reasonably active, but wouldn't have been walking 12 miles in a day to go to and from the library. Certainly not through bad neighborhoods. So that as routinely how people lived in '92, no, I am skeptical.
I grew up in rural Illinois in a town <2k (currently over 11k) and would bike pretty much everywhere when the weather allowed.
I did too (bike everywhere, I mean).
But this is supposed to be in the 'hood of a city, which is why it struck me as strange and I asked where. I'm not saying it's not possible to walk 6 miles each way somewhere (I do that now sometimes), but that it was what everyone did back in '92 in that environment is what seemed rather, well, unusual. ('92 isn't that long ago.)Bottom line is people adapt. Free market adapts based upon numerous forces, the primary being profitability. If this does not exist there is a very good reason for it.
No question. Not sure what this has to do with what we were talking about, though.
I believe it started with a few of us trying to explain that most of us urban folk are quite used to doing a lot more than waddling to a car in our driveway, and thus not having a fully-stocked green grocer on every other corner is not an insurmountable hardship.
Oh, no, I followed and agreed with that bit. I was asking about the "Free market adapts based upon numerous forces, the primary being profitability. If this does not exist there is a very good reason for it." as I did not see how it related. Like I said, I agree, but given the context (sidewalks?, walking to the library in '92?, riding one's bike everywhere as a kid?) I wasn't following WHAT didn't exist and what the free market had to do with it -- I mean I know there are people who think libraries should only be for profit and not gov't sponsored, but even so I didn't see how it fit into the conversation that we were having.
I will say, again, that I DON'T think having to walk 12 miles roundtrip to get somewhere is particularly an urban thing (indeed, although I sometimes do it, for exercise mainly, and because I enjoy walking), I don't think it's particularly common in an urban area to HAVE to walk that far to do something because public transportation is usually much more available. The places where I've HAD to walk several miles to get somewhere have been in suburbs (if I happened not to have a car) or other places where most people drove everywhere. And in doing that there have been times when I was stuck walking in a place where it really wasn't conducive to it and where I felt a little uncomfortable (walking on the side of a busy street or some such).
I think he meant the original topic. As in there aren't places to easily access whatever food in certain areas, because the demand for it isn't there. I will admit, after living in several major cities, a lot of the old districts still have looming corpses of what used to be grocery stores.
Oh, hmm. That could be -- it didn't seem to fit with the series of posts that it was added to.0 -
stanmann571 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »stanmann571 wrote: »stanmann571 wrote: »RosieRose7673 wrote: »Gallowmere1984 wrote: »RosieRose7673 wrote: »ladyannique2017 wrote: »Food deserts in general are not a myth. Yes, it's a myth that all poor urban areas are food deserts, but that doesn't mean food deserts don't exist. I've lived in a few. One was a poor urban area in the Midwest. Yes you can look at a street map and see there is a grocery store within walking distance, but street maps do not take into account gang territories or other hazards between you and the food. I lived in a place where it was not safe to go two blocks uptown which is where the grocery store was due to gang boundaries but I could go ten blocks down the hill to the river where there were bars and corner stores just fine. That area was a kind of a neutral zone because it was run by pimps and their hookers.
Another food desert was also a water desert out in the west when I lived in a single wide trailer in a desperately poor rural area. Nearest grocery store was 45mikes away and although we had plumbing, the tap water wasn't safe to drink (EPA notice about arsenic in water) so my dad had to use our beat up rusted out truck to bring home a tank of water every week as well as food.
Electricity wasn't too dependable in either place...urban or country and so we couldn't buy fresh veg or meat because it would rot to nothing in a day. Lots of canned and dried foods. I think people assume everyone has access to a refrigerator/freezer when many poor people don't.
Thank you very much for posting this. I really feel that it is very easy for people to put horse blinders on when it comes to this.
It's very easy to say that there's a supermarket a mile away. Why don't they go there?
I live in Chicago currently and in a decent part of the city. However, for my job, I did have to travel to very high crime, poor areas. I've met a family who lived in an unfinished basement. 3 kids and a mom who was taking online classes to get a better job. However, the area was extremely dangerous. Homicides are high in the area as well as gang violence. Sure, if they could hop in a car and drive to a supermarket a mile or so away, they could. BUT- when you don't have a car, don't have any money to spare and have to walk that all the way to a supermarket that far with 3 kids in a high crime area, it's not the super market they are looking for. They are looking for something to eat that's both affordable and safe to get. Often times, that may mean the corner convenience store.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you look a statistics about proximity to supermarkets, it's easy to overlook other factors that can influence the ability to get fresh food.
This is another area where I am admittedly biased. I have lived in "the hood" in multiple cities over the years, and never once had a problem out of anyone. We'd regularly have people shot in the parking lots of two of the places I live, yet I never got so much as a sideways glance. I attribute this to the fact that I mind my own damned business, and never got tangled up in the things that tend to get people shot (drug money, *kitten* with someone's wife/girlfriend, having a big mouth, etc.)
I don't give a damn if someone got capped right under my window, I didn't crack the blinds, I didn't see *kitten*, it's not my business. So yeah, even fat and nerdy whitey can live in some nasty neighborhoods without incident, if you know what you are doing. vOv
It's good for you that you didn't care and kept to yourself. That means only gang members and drug dealers get shot?
There are so many bystanders shot yearly by stray bullets or simply because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time. Sure- a percentage of them were involved in drug or gang activity but that definitely doesn't account for all of those affected by the violence.
While I'm not discrediting your experiences, I don't think that just because you lived in a poor area and survived means that it must be okay for everyone else.
Chicago's violence is skyrocketing. The thing to remember is that chicago is big. Percentagewise, we have a ridiculously high murder and violent crime rate for the population of the city. Then you actually break it down to where these crimes happen, they tend to be concentrated in the areas with the most poverty. Then you look at the percentages in those areas- it's extremely dangerous to even live there.
So yes- my experiences with these families and being able to spend time with them does show that there are indeed "food deserts" because of other factors than proximity to a supermarket.
Food deserts are only a symptom of an unadressed root cause. Why is this level of violence allowed to exist?
All this is a waste of time, money, and most importantly - life if the root cause is not addressed.
Because there's no actual appetite to take the measures needed to curb the violence.
Profiling, stop and frisk, etc.
This simply reinforces the fact that government is not in the business of solving problems. They are in the business of creating problems which will further the size and power of government.
In this case, the government is able and willing to solve the problems. The communities prefer the violence to the solution.
How are you separating gov't from community here? The police are an arm of the local gov't, local policies about law enforcement are an arm of the local gov't. (I don't agree with your claims anyway, and am rather puzzled at how profiling -- which happens in reality all the time -- would stop crime in neighborhoods that are largely all one race, but setting that aside, it's the government acting or not.)
Curious where this 'hood is that you lived that required a 6 mile walk for a public library, though. That's not the case in the cities I know.
Not necessarily to get to a public library, but getting to one larger than a closet with a computer could require commuting a few neighborhoods over. It would have been ~4 miles one way for me to get to the Central library from where I grew up (thankfully via a single bus line in my case).
The way it was phrased implied just to get a book, and that there was no public transportation available:
"25 years ago(when I was a teenager) a 12 mile total distance walk to get to and from the public library to get a book, or use a computer for research was routine."
I grew up in the '80s, and in a middle-sized city, not a big city (about 250K, but sprawling), and it would have been at least a 6 mile walk (more, I think, but would have to check a map) to the main library, although we would have taken public transportation (a bus). To a regular library to get a book, nowhere near that far. Here, in a big city? Even in the terrible neighborhoods that's not so.
We were reasonably active, but wouldn't have been walking 12 miles in a day to go to and from the library. Certainly not through bad neighborhoods. So that as routinely how people lived in '92, no, I am skeptical.
I grew up in rural Illinois in a town <2k (currently over 11k) and would bike pretty much everywhere when the weather allowed.
I did too (bike everywhere, I mean).
But this is supposed to be in the 'hood of a city, which is why it struck me as strange and I asked where. I'm not saying it's not possible to walk 6 miles each way somewhere (I do that now sometimes), but that it was what everyone did back in '92 in that environment is what seemed rather, well, unusual. ('92 isn't that long ago.)Bottom line is people adapt. Free market adapts based upon numerous forces, the primary being profitability. If this does not exist there is a very good reason for it.
No question. Not sure what this has to do with what we were talking about, though.
I believe it started with a few of us trying to explain that most of us urban folk are quite used to doing a lot more than waddling to a car in our driveway, and thus not having a fully-stocked green grocer on every other corner is not an insurmountable hardship.
It's all about what you really want.
So no buses, or you just preferred to walk? (I happen to think a two hour each way walk -- assuming 20 min miles, which might not be realistic with kids anyway -- probably would be tough for most adults to fit into the day. I don't think it's what we are actually talking about here either, as I don't think that's going to be required for regular grocery shopping, food desert or no, but I am skeptical about this "it doesn't matter, it's no burden, I did it all the time, so assume that anyone who really cares about eating healthfully would just do it, and if they don't they clearly don't care about that" claim. I don't think that's realistic and I don't think that it was common in '92 for people to walk 6 miles each way for groceries (which was what the claim related to, right?).)
Anyway, thanks for answering. Looks like there are closer libraries, including with computer access these days, but I am sure fewer of them had computer access in '92. (Like I said, I don't think we ever had assignments that required computer access that didn't also involve time at school to get it during the '80s, as I am not sure what computer access the public libraries even had. I don't recall any.)0 -
Gallowmere1984 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »stanmann571 wrote: »stanmann571 wrote: »RosieRose7673 wrote: »Gallowmere1984 wrote: »RosieRose7673 wrote: »ladyannique2017 wrote: »Food deserts in general are not a myth. Yes, it's a myth that all poor urban areas are food deserts, but that doesn't mean food deserts don't exist. I've lived in a few. One was a poor urban area in the Midwest. Yes you can look at a street map and see there is a grocery store within walking distance, but street maps do not take into account gang territories or other hazards between you and the food. I lived in a place where it was not safe to go two blocks uptown which is where the grocery store was due to gang boundaries but I could go ten blocks down the hill to the river where there were bars and corner stores just fine. That area was a kind of a neutral zone because it was run by pimps and their hookers.
Another food desert was also a water desert out in the west when I lived in a single wide trailer in a desperately poor rural area. Nearest grocery store was 45mikes away and although we had plumbing, the tap water wasn't safe to drink (EPA notice about arsenic in water) so my dad had to use our beat up rusted out truck to bring home a tank of water every week as well as food.
Electricity wasn't too dependable in either place...urban or country and so we couldn't buy fresh veg or meat because it would rot to nothing in a day. Lots of canned and dried foods. I think people assume everyone has access to a refrigerator/freezer when many poor people don't.
Thank you very much for posting this. I really feel that it is very easy for people to put horse blinders on when it comes to this.
It's very easy to say that there's a supermarket a mile away. Why don't they go there?
I live in Chicago currently and in a decent part of the city. However, for my job, I did have to travel to very high crime, poor areas. I've met a family who lived in an unfinished basement. 3 kids and a mom who was taking online classes to get a better job. However, the area was extremely dangerous. Homicides are high in the area as well as gang violence. Sure, if they could hop in a car and drive to a supermarket a mile or so away, they could. BUT- when you don't have a car, don't have any money to spare and have to walk that all the way to a supermarket that far with 3 kids in a high crime area, it's not the super market they are looking for. They are looking for something to eat that's both affordable and safe to get. Often times, that may mean the corner convenience store.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you look a statistics about proximity to supermarkets, it's easy to overlook other factors that can influence the ability to get fresh food.
This is another area where I am admittedly biased. I have lived in "the hood" in multiple cities over the years, and never once had a problem out of anyone. We'd regularly have people shot in the parking lots of two of the places I live, yet I never got so much as a sideways glance. I attribute this to the fact that I mind my own damned business, and never got tangled up in the things that tend to get people shot (drug money, *kitten* with someone's wife/girlfriend, having a big mouth, etc.)
I don't give a damn if someone got capped right under my window, I didn't crack the blinds, I didn't see *kitten*, it's not my business. So yeah, even fat and nerdy whitey can live in some nasty neighborhoods without incident, if you know what you are doing. vOv
It's good for you that you didn't care and kept to yourself. That means only gang members and drug dealers get shot?
There are so many bystanders shot yearly by stray bullets or simply because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time. Sure- a percentage of them were involved in drug or gang activity but that definitely doesn't account for all of those affected by the violence.
While I'm not discrediting your experiences, I don't think that just because you lived in a poor area and survived means that it must be okay for everyone else.
Chicago's violence is skyrocketing. The thing to remember is that chicago is big. Percentagewise, we have a ridiculously high murder and violent crime rate for the population of the city. Then you actually break it down to where these crimes happen, they tend to be concentrated in the areas with the most poverty. Then you look at the percentages in those areas- it's extremely dangerous to even live there.
So yes- my experiences with these families and being able to spend time with them does show that there are indeed "food deserts" because of other factors than proximity to a supermarket.
Food deserts are only a symptom of an unadressed root cause. Why is this level of violence allowed to exist?
All this is a waste of time, money, and most importantly - life if the root cause is not addressed.
Because there's no actual appetite to take the measures needed to curb the violence.
Profiling, stop and frisk, etc.
This simply reinforces the fact that government is not in the business of solving problems. They are in the business of creating problems which will further the size and power of government.
In this case, the government is able and willing to solve the problems. The communities prefer the violence to the solution.
How are you separating gov't from community here? The police are an arm of the local gov't, local policies about law enforcement are an arm of the local gov't. (I don't agree with your claims anyway, and am rather puzzled at how profiling -- which happens in reality all the time -- would stop crime in neighborhoods that are largely all one race, but setting that aside, it's the government acting or not.)
Curious where this 'hood is that you lived that required a 6 mile walk for a public library, though. That's not the case in the cities I know.
Not necessarily to get to a public library, but getting to one larger than a closet with a computer could require commuting a few neighborhoods over. It would have been ~4 miles one way for me to get to the Central library from where I grew up (thankfully via a single bus line in my case).
The way it was phrased implied just to get a book, and that there was no public transportation available:
"25 years ago(when I was a teenager) a 12 mile total distance walk to get to and from the public library to get a book, or use a computer for research was routine."
I grew up in the '80s, and in a middle-sized city, not a big city (about 250K, but sprawling), and it would have been at least a 6 mile walk (more, I think, but would have to check a map) to the main library, although we would have taken public transportation (a bus). To a regular library to get a book, nowhere near that far. Here, in a big city? Even in the terrible neighborhoods that's not so.
We were reasonably active, but wouldn't have been walking 12 miles in a day to go to and from the library. Certainly not through bad neighborhoods. So that as routinely how people lived in '92, no, I am skeptical.
I grew up in rural Illinois in a town <2k (currently over 11k) and would bike pretty much everywhere when the weather allowed.
I did too (bike everywhere, I mean).
But this is supposed to be in the 'hood of a city, which is why it struck me as strange and I asked where. I'm not saying it's not possible to walk 6 miles each way somewhere (I do that now sometimes), but that it was what everyone did back in '92 in that environment is what seemed rather, well, unusual. ('92 isn't that long ago.)Bottom line is people adapt. Free market adapts based upon numerous forces, the primary being profitability. If this does not exist there is a very good reason for it.
No question. Not sure what this has to do with what we were talking about, though.
I believe it started with a few of us trying to explain that most of us urban folk are quite used to doing a lot more than waddling to a car in our driveway, and thus not having a fully-stocked green grocer on every other corner is not an insurmountable hardship.
Oh, no, I followed and agreed with that bit. I was asking about the "Free market adapts based upon numerous forces, the primary being profitability. If this does not exist there is a very good reason for it." as I did not see how it related. Like I said, I agree, but given the context (sidewalks?, walking to the library in '92?, riding one's bike everywhere as a kid?) I wasn't following WHAT didn't exist and what the free market had to do with it -- I mean I know there are people who think libraries should only be for profit and not gov't sponsored, but even so I didn't see how it fit into the conversation that we were having.
I will say, again, that I DON'T think having to walk 12 miles roundtrip to get somewhere is particularly an urban thing (indeed, although I sometimes do it, for exercise mainly, and because I enjoy walking), I don't think it's particularly common in an urban area to HAVE to walk that far to do something because public transportation is usually much more available. The places where I've HAD to walk several miles to get somewhere have been in suburbs (if I happened not to have a car) or other places where most people drove everywhere. And in doing that there have been times when I was stuck walking in a place where it really wasn't conducive to it and where I felt a little uncomfortable (walking on the side of a busy street or some such).
I think he meant the original topic. As in there aren't places to easily access whatever food in certain areas, because the demand for it isn't there. I will admit, after living in several major cities, a lot of the old districts still have looming corpses of what used to be grocery stores.
Here in mainland Europe the urban corpses are the medium sized and small grocery shops in the urban centers. Oh, and then there are these giganic empty apartment blocks over built in the last 10 - 15 years. The really large grocery store chains are doing extrmely well, most are placed far outside city limits or at the edges of the towns and include grand parking lots all of them more or less inaccessible to bikes or the walking population because of the highways and cloverleaf traffic switches. This is a real change in the landscape of continental europe, maybe comparable to the shifts during the 60's and 70's in America if my recall is accurate. Not that anyone here seems to be much interested though.
edited thru a perpetual need to edit.
I'm interested.
So where do people who live in the city shop?
I live in a city, and I shop in my neighborhood. The stores aren't the size of the hugest ones that are farther out or in the 'burbs, but they are plenty large and I like that there are also smaller options (like a meat market or, farther away, a fish specific place and various ethnic groceries).
Right downtown shopping is harder (because not that many people live right downtown, but in the neighborhoods). That said, more are living basically downtown or very close these days, and as a result there are a lot more groceries there than there were even 10 years ago.1 -
lemurcat12 wrote: »Gallowmere1984 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »stanmann571 wrote: »stanmann571 wrote: »RosieRose7673 wrote: »Gallowmere1984 wrote: »RosieRose7673 wrote: »ladyannique2017 wrote: »Food deserts in general are not a myth. Yes, it's a myth that all poor urban areas are food deserts, but that doesn't mean food deserts don't exist. I've lived in a few. One was a poor urban area in the Midwest. Yes you can look at a street map and see there is a grocery store within walking distance, but street maps do not take into account gang territories or other hazards between you and the food. I lived in a place where it was not safe to go two blocks uptown which is where the grocery store was due to gang boundaries but I could go ten blocks down the hill to the river where there were bars and corner stores just fine. That area was a kind of a neutral zone because it was run by pimps and their hookers.
Another food desert was also a water desert out in the west when I lived in a single wide trailer in a desperately poor rural area. Nearest grocery store was 45mikes away and although we had plumbing, the tap water wasn't safe to drink (EPA notice about arsenic in water) so my dad had to use our beat up rusted out truck to bring home a tank of water every week as well as food.
Electricity wasn't too dependable in either place...urban or country and so we couldn't buy fresh veg or meat because it would rot to nothing in a day. Lots of canned and dried foods. I think people assume everyone has access to a refrigerator/freezer when many poor people don't.
Thank you very much for posting this. I really feel that it is very easy for people to put horse blinders on when it comes to this.
It's very easy to say that there's a supermarket a mile away. Why don't they go there?
I live in Chicago currently and in a decent part of the city. However, for my job, I did have to travel to very high crime, poor areas. I've met a family who lived in an unfinished basement. 3 kids and a mom who was taking online classes to get a better job. However, the area was extremely dangerous. Homicides are high in the area as well as gang violence. Sure, if they could hop in a car and drive to a supermarket a mile or so away, they could. BUT- when you don't have a car, don't have any money to spare and have to walk that all the way to a supermarket that far with 3 kids in a high crime area, it's not the super market they are looking for. They are looking for something to eat that's both affordable and safe to get. Often times, that may mean the corner convenience store.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you look a statistics about proximity to supermarkets, it's easy to overlook other factors that can influence the ability to get fresh food.
This is another area where I am admittedly biased. I have lived in "the hood" in multiple cities over the years, and never once had a problem out of anyone. We'd regularly have people shot in the parking lots of two of the places I live, yet I never got so much as a sideways glance. I attribute this to the fact that I mind my own damned business, and never got tangled up in the things that tend to get people shot (drug money, *kitten* with someone's wife/girlfriend, having a big mouth, etc.)
I don't give a damn if someone got capped right under my window, I didn't crack the blinds, I didn't see *kitten*, it's not my business. So yeah, even fat and nerdy whitey can live in some nasty neighborhoods without incident, if you know what you are doing. vOv
It's good for you that you didn't care and kept to yourself. That means only gang members and drug dealers get shot?
There are so many bystanders shot yearly by stray bullets or simply because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time. Sure- a percentage of them were involved in drug or gang activity but that definitely doesn't account for all of those affected by the violence.
While I'm not discrediting your experiences, I don't think that just because you lived in a poor area and survived means that it must be okay for everyone else.
Chicago's violence is skyrocketing. The thing to remember is that chicago is big. Percentagewise, we have a ridiculously high murder and violent crime rate for the population of the city. Then you actually break it down to where these crimes happen, they tend to be concentrated in the areas with the most poverty. Then you look at the percentages in those areas- it's extremely dangerous to even live there.
So yes- my experiences with these families and being able to spend time with them does show that there are indeed "food deserts" because of other factors than proximity to a supermarket.
Food deserts are only a symptom of an unadressed root cause. Why is this level of violence allowed to exist?
All this is a waste of time, money, and most importantly - life if the root cause is not addressed.
Because there's no actual appetite to take the measures needed to curb the violence.
Profiling, stop and frisk, etc.
This simply reinforces the fact that government is not in the business of solving problems. They are in the business of creating problems which will further the size and power of government.
In this case, the government is able and willing to solve the problems. The communities prefer the violence to the solution.
How are you separating gov't from community here? The police are an arm of the local gov't, local policies about law enforcement are an arm of the local gov't. (I don't agree with your claims anyway, and am rather puzzled at how profiling -- which happens in reality all the time -- would stop crime in neighborhoods that are largely all one race, but setting that aside, it's the government acting or not.)
Curious where this 'hood is that you lived that required a 6 mile walk for a public library, though. That's not the case in the cities I know.
Not necessarily to get to a public library, but getting to one larger than a closet with a computer could require commuting a few neighborhoods over. It would have been ~4 miles one way for me to get to the Central library from where I grew up (thankfully via a single bus line in my case).
The way it was phrased implied just to get a book, and that there was no public transportation available:
"25 years ago(when I was a teenager) a 12 mile total distance walk to get to and from the public library to get a book, or use a computer for research was routine."
I grew up in the '80s, and in a middle-sized city, not a big city (about 250K, but sprawling), and it would have been at least a 6 mile walk (more, I think, but would have to check a map) to the main library, although we would have taken public transportation (a bus). To a regular library to get a book, nowhere near that far. Here, in a big city? Even in the terrible neighborhoods that's not so.
We were reasonably active, but wouldn't have been walking 12 miles in a day to go to and from the library. Certainly not through bad neighborhoods. So that as routinely how people lived in '92, no, I am skeptical.
I grew up in rural Illinois in a town <2k (currently over 11k) and would bike pretty much everywhere when the weather allowed.
I did too (bike everywhere, I mean).
But this is supposed to be in the 'hood of a city, which is why it struck me as strange and I asked where. I'm not saying it's not possible to walk 6 miles each way somewhere (I do that now sometimes), but that it was what everyone did back in '92 in that environment is what seemed rather, well, unusual. ('92 isn't that long ago.)Bottom line is people adapt. Free market adapts based upon numerous forces, the primary being profitability. If this does not exist there is a very good reason for it.
No question. Not sure what this has to do with what we were talking about, though.
I believe it started with a few of us trying to explain that most of us urban folk are quite used to doing a lot more than waddling to a car in our driveway, and thus not having a fully-stocked green grocer on every other corner is not an insurmountable hardship.
Oh, no, I followed and agreed with that bit. I was asking about the "Free market adapts based upon numerous forces, the primary being profitability. If this does not exist there is a very good reason for it." as I did not see how it related. Like I said, I agree, but given the context (sidewalks?, walking to the library in '92?, riding one's bike everywhere as a kid?) I wasn't following WHAT didn't exist and what the free market had to do with it -- I mean I know there are people who think libraries should only be for profit and not gov't sponsored, but even so I didn't see how it fit into the conversation that we were having.
I will say, again, that I DON'T think having to walk 12 miles roundtrip to get somewhere is particularly an urban thing (indeed, although I sometimes do it, for exercise mainly, and because I enjoy walking), I don't think it's particularly common in an urban area to HAVE to walk that far to do something because public transportation is usually much more available. The places where I've HAD to walk several miles to get somewhere have been in suburbs (if I happened not to have a car) or other places where most people drove everywhere. And in doing that there have been times when I was stuck walking in a place where it really wasn't conducive to it and where I felt a little uncomfortable (walking on the side of a busy street or some such).
I think he meant the original topic. As in there aren't places to easily access whatever food in certain areas, because the demand for it isn't there. I will admit, after living in several major cities, a lot of the old districts still have looming corpses of what used to be grocery stores.
Here in mainland Europe the urban corpses are the medium sized and small grocery shops in the urban centers. Oh, and then there are these giganic empty apartment blocks over built in the last 10 - 15 years. The really large grocery store chains are doing extrmely well, most are placed far outside city limits or at the edges of the towns and include grand parking lots all of them more or less inaccessible to bikes or the walking population because of the highways and cloverleaf traffic switches. This is a real change in the landscape of continental europe, maybe comparable to the shifts during the 60's and 70's in America if my recall is accurate. Not that anyone here seems to be much interested though.
edited thru a perpetual need to edit.
I'm interested.
So where do people who live in the city shop?
I live in a city, and I shop in my neighborhood. The stores aren't the size of the hugest ones that are farther out or in the 'burbs, but they are plenty large and I like that there are also smaller options (like a meat market or, farther away, a fish specific place and various ethnic groceries).
Right downtown shopping is harder (because not that many people live right downtown, but in the neighborhoods). That said, more are living basically downtown or very close these days, and as a result there are a lot more groceries there than there were even 10 years ago.
I live in a city.
My husband and I use the car once a week to drive to a grocery store about fifteen minutes away and buy staples/heavier items. We tend to get perishable items 2-3 times a week at a smaller grocery store that is a couple of blocks away (their prices are higher and that's another reason we don't do all our shopping there). It costs a bit more, but the selection and quality for produce (and meat and dairy for my husband) is much better there.
We don't live downtown, but fairly close to it. I can think of at least two options for groceries in the downtown area of my city, both of which include lots of cheaper staple foods and produce. I use the bus a lot and I frequently see people who are obviously doing bigger grocery shops. Our public transit is better than average here. If someone in my area told me that they were struggling to get grocery shopping done without a car, I would be very confused.2 -
janejellyroll wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »Gallowmere1984 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »stanmann571 wrote: »stanmann571 wrote: »RosieRose7673 wrote: »Gallowmere1984 wrote: »RosieRose7673 wrote: »ladyannique2017 wrote: »Food deserts in general are not a myth. Yes, it's a myth that all poor urban areas are food deserts, but that doesn't mean food deserts don't exist. I've lived in a few. One was a poor urban area in the Midwest. Yes you can look at a street map and see there is a grocery store within walking distance, but street maps do not take into account gang territories or other hazards between you and the food. I lived in a place where it was not safe to go two blocks uptown which is where the grocery store was due to gang boundaries but I could go ten blocks down the hill to the river where there were bars and corner stores just fine. That area was a kind of a neutral zone because it was run by pimps and their hookers.
Another food desert was also a water desert out in the west when I lived in a single wide trailer in a desperately poor rural area. Nearest grocery store was 45mikes away and although we had plumbing, the tap water wasn't safe to drink (EPA notice about arsenic in water) so my dad had to use our beat up rusted out truck to bring home a tank of water every week as well as food.
Electricity wasn't too dependable in either place...urban or country and so we couldn't buy fresh veg or meat because it would rot to nothing in a day. Lots of canned and dried foods. I think people assume everyone has access to a refrigerator/freezer when many poor people don't.
Thank you very much for posting this. I really feel that it is very easy for people to put horse blinders on when it comes to this.
It's very easy to say that there's a supermarket a mile away. Why don't they go there?
I live in Chicago currently and in a decent part of the city. However, for my job, I did have to travel to very high crime, poor areas. I've met a family who lived in an unfinished basement. 3 kids and a mom who was taking online classes to get a better job. However, the area was extremely dangerous. Homicides are high in the area as well as gang violence. Sure, if they could hop in a car and drive to a supermarket a mile or so away, they could. BUT- when you don't have a car, don't have any money to spare and have to walk that all the way to a supermarket that far with 3 kids in a high crime area, it's not the super market they are looking for. They are looking for something to eat that's both affordable and safe to get. Often times, that may mean the corner convenience store.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you look a statistics about proximity to supermarkets, it's easy to overlook other factors that can influence the ability to get fresh food.
This is another area where I am admittedly biased. I have lived in "the hood" in multiple cities over the years, and never once had a problem out of anyone. We'd regularly have people shot in the parking lots of two of the places I live, yet I never got so much as a sideways glance. I attribute this to the fact that I mind my own damned business, and never got tangled up in the things that tend to get people shot (drug money, *kitten* with someone's wife/girlfriend, having a big mouth, etc.)
I don't give a damn if someone got capped right under my window, I didn't crack the blinds, I didn't see *kitten*, it's not my business. So yeah, even fat and nerdy whitey can live in some nasty neighborhoods without incident, if you know what you are doing. vOv
It's good for you that you didn't care and kept to yourself. That means only gang members and drug dealers get shot?
There are so many bystanders shot yearly by stray bullets or simply because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time. Sure- a percentage of them were involved in drug or gang activity but that definitely doesn't account for all of those affected by the violence.
While I'm not discrediting your experiences, I don't think that just because you lived in a poor area and survived means that it must be okay for everyone else.
Chicago's violence is skyrocketing. The thing to remember is that chicago is big. Percentagewise, we have a ridiculously high murder and violent crime rate for the population of the city. Then you actually break it down to where these crimes happen, they tend to be concentrated in the areas with the most poverty. Then you look at the percentages in those areas- it's extremely dangerous to even live there.
So yes- my experiences with these families and being able to spend time with them does show that there are indeed "food deserts" because of other factors than proximity to a supermarket.
Food deserts are only a symptom of an unadressed root cause. Why is this level of violence allowed to exist?
All this is a waste of time, money, and most importantly - life if the root cause is not addressed.
Because there's no actual appetite to take the measures needed to curb the violence.
Profiling, stop and frisk, etc.
This simply reinforces the fact that government is not in the business of solving problems. They are in the business of creating problems which will further the size and power of government.
In this case, the government is able and willing to solve the problems. The communities prefer the violence to the solution.
How are you separating gov't from community here? The police are an arm of the local gov't, local policies about law enforcement are an arm of the local gov't. (I don't agree with your claims anyway, and am rather puzzled at how profiling -- which happens in reality all the time -- would stop crime in neighborhoods that are largely all one race, but setting that aside, it's the government acting or not.)
Curious where this 'hood is that you lived that required a 6 mile walk for a public library, though. That's not the case in the cities I know.
Not necessarily to get to a public library, but getting to one larger than a closet with a computer could require commuting a few neighborhoods over. It would have been ~4 miles one way for me to get to the Central library from where I grew up (thankfully via a single bus line in my case).
The way it was phrased implied just to get a book, and that there was no public transportation available:
"25 years ago(when I was a teenager) a 12 mile total distance walk to get to and from the public library to get a book, or use a computer for research was routine."
I grew up in the '80s, and in a middle-sized city, not a big city (about 250K, but sprawling), and it would have been at least a 6 mile walk (more, I think, but would have to check a map) to the main library, although we would have taken public transportation (a bus). To a regular library to get a book, nowhere near that far. Here, in a big city? Even in the terrible neighborhoods that's not so.
We were reasonably active, but wouldn't have been walking 12 miles in a day to go to and from the library. Certainly not through bad neighborhoods. So that as routinely how people lived in '92, no, I am skeptical.
I grew up in rural Illinois in a town <2k (currently over 11k) and would bike pretty much everywhere when the weather allowed.
I did too (bike everywhere, I mean).
But this is supposed to be in the 'hood of a city, which is why it struck me as strange and I asked where. I'm not saying it's not possible to walk 6 miles each way somewhere (I do that now sometimes), but that it was what everyone did back in '92 in that environment is what seemed rather, well, unusual. ('92 isn't that long ago.)Bottom line is people adapt. Free market adapts based upon numerous forces, the primary being profitability. If this does not exist there is a very good reason for it.
No question. Not sure what this has to do with what we were talking about, though.
I believe it started with a few of us trying to explain that most of us urban folk are quite used to doing a lot more than waddling to a car in our driveway, and thus not having a fully-stocked green grocer on every other corner is not an insurmountable hardship.
Oh, no, I followed and agreed with that bit. I was asking about the "Free market adapts based upon numerous forces, the primary being profitability. If this does not exist there is a very good reason for it." as I did not see how it related. Like I said, I agree, but given the context (sidewalks?, walking to the library in '92?, riding one's bike everywhere as a kid?) I wasn't following WHAT didn't exist and what the free market had to do with it -- I mean I know there are people who think libraries should only be for profit and not gov't sponsored, but even so I didn't see how it fit into the conversation that we were having.
I will say, again, that I DON'T think having to walk 12 miles roundtrip to get somewhere is particularly an urban thing (indeed, although I sometimes do it, for exercise mainly, and because I enjoy walking), I don't think it's particularly common in an urban area to HAVE to walk that far to do something because public transportation is usually much more available. The places where I've HAD to walk several miles to get somewhere have been in suburbs (if I happened not to have a car) or other places where most people drove everywhere. And in doing that there have been times when I was stuck walking in a place where it really wasn't conducive to it and where I felt a little uncomfortable (walking on the side of a busy street or some such).
I think he meant the original topic. As in there aren't places to easily access whatever food in certain areas, because the demand for it isn't there. I will admit, after living in several major cities, a lot of the old districts still have looming corpses of what used to be grocery stores.
Here in mainland Europe the urban corpses are the medium sized and small grocery shops in the urban centers. Oh, and then there are these giganic empty apartment blocks over built in the last 10 - 15 years. The really large grocery store chains are doing extrmely well, most are placed far outside city limits or at the edges of the towns and include grand parking lots all of them more or less inaccessible to bikes or the walking population because of the highways and cloverleaf traffic switches. This is a real change in the landscape of continental europe, maybe comparable to the shifts during the 60's and 70's in America if my recall is accurate. Not that anyone here seems to be much interested though.
edited thru a perpetual need to edit.
I'm interested.
So where do people who live in the city shop?
I live in a city, and I shop in my neighborhood. The stores aren't the size of the hugest ones that are farther out or in the 'burbs, but they are plenty large and I like that there are also smaller options (like a meat market or, farther away, a fish specific place and various ethnic groceries).
Right downtown shopping is harder (because not that many people live right downtown, but in the neighborhoods). That said, more are living basically downtown or very close these days, and as a result there are a lot more groceries there than there were even 10 years ago.
I live in a city.
My husband and I use the car once a week to drive to a grocery store about fifteen minutes away and buy staples/heavier items. We tend to get perishable items 2-3 times a week at a smaller grocery store that is a couple of blocks away (their prices are higher and that's another reason we don't do all our shopping there). It costs a bit more, but the selection and quality for produce (and meat and dairy for my husband) is much better there.
We don't live downtown, but fairly close to it. I can think of at least two options for groceries in the downtown area of my city, both of which include lots of cheaper staple foods and produce. I use the bus a lot and I frequently see people who are obviously doing bigger grocery shops. Our public transit is better than average here. If someone in my area told me that they were struggling to get grocery shopping done without a car, I would be very confused.
Just to be clear, I was not at all suggesting that it is hard to shop in a city in the US (that's not my experience), but referring to Gamliela's comment:
"Here in mainland Europe the urban corpses are the medium sized and small grocery shops in the urban centers. Oh, and then there are these giganic empty apartment blocks over built in the last 10 - 15 years. The really large grocery store chains are doing extrmely well, most are placed far outside city limits or at the edges of the towns and include grand parking lots all of them more or less inaccessible to bikes or the walking population because of the highways and cloverleaf traffic switches."
I lived in a city for years without a car (and rarely use my car for shopping now, while I do sometimes use public transportation for that purpose) and it wasn't an issue for me either. (My neighborhood is better than some others, though, for that.)
I am curious about other people's experiences, and am glad you added yours.0 -
lemurcat12 wrote: »stanmann571 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »stanmann571 wrote: »stanmann571 wrote: »RosieRose7673 wrote: »Gallowmere1984 wrote: »RosieRose7673 wrote: »ladyannique2017 wrote: »Food deserts in general are not a myth. Yes, it's a myth that all poor urban areas are food deserts, but that doesn't mean food deserts don't exist. I've lived in a few. One was a poor urban area in the Midwest. Yes you can look at a street map and see there is a grocery store within walking distance, but street maps do not take into account gang territories or other hazards between you and the food. I lived in a place where it was not safe to go two blocks uptown which is where the grocery store was due to gang boundaries but I could go ten blocks down the hill to the river where there were bars and corner stores just fine. That area was a kind of a neutral zone because it was run by pimps and their hookers.
Another food desert was also a water desert out in the west when I lived in a single wide trailer in a desperately poor rural area. Nearest grocery store was 45mikes away and although we had plumbing, the tap water wasn't safe to drink (EPA notice about arsenic in water) so my dad had to use our beat up rusted out truck to bring home a tank of water every week as well as food.
Electricity wasn't too dependable in either place...urban or country and so we couldn't buy fresh veg or meat because it would rot to nothing in a day. Lots of canned and dried foods. I think people assume everyone has access to a refrigerator/freezer when many poor people don't.
Thank you very much for posting this. I really feel that it is very easy for people to put horse blinders on when it comes to this.
It's very easy to say that there's a supermarket a mile away. Why don't they go there?
I live in Chicago currently and in a decent part of the city. However, for my job, I did have to travel to very high crime, poor areas. I've met a family who lived in an unfinished basement. 3 kids and a mom who was taking online classes to get a better job. However, the area was extremely dangerous. Homicides are high in the area as well as gang violence. Sure, if they could hop in a car and drive to a supermarket a mile or so away, they could. BUT- when you don't have a car, don't have any money to spare and have to walk that all the way to a supermarket that far with 3 kids in a high crime area, it's not the super market they are looking for. They are looking for something to eat that's both affordable and safe to get. Often times, that may mean the corner convenience store.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you look a statistics about proximity to supermarkets, it's easy to overlook other factors that can influence the ability to get fresh food.
This is another area where I am admittedly biased. I have lived in "the hood" in multiple cities over the years, and never once had a problem out of anyone. We'd regularly have people shot in the parking lots of two of the places I live, yet I never got so much as a sideways glance. I attribute this to the fact that I mind my own damned business, and never got tangled up in the things that tend to get people shot (drug money, *kitten* with someone's wife/girlfriend, having a big mouth, etc.)
I don't give a damn if someone got capped right under my window, I didn't crack the blinds, I didn't see *kitten*, it's not my business. So yeah, even fat and nerdy whitey can live in some nasty neighborhoods without incident, if you know what you are doing. vOv
It's good for you that you didn't care and kept to yourself. That means only gang members and drug dealers get shot?
There are so many bystanders shot yearly by stray bullets or simply because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time. Sure- a percentage of them were involved in drug or gang activity but that definitely doesn't account for all of those affected by the violence.
While I'm not discrediting your experiences, I don't think that just because you lived in a poor area and survived means that it must be okay for everyone else.
Chicago's violence is skyrocketing. The thing to remember is that chicago is big. Percentagewise, we have a ridiculously high murder and violent crime rate for the population of the city. Then you actually break it down to where these crimes happen, they tend to be concentrated in the areas with the most poverty. Then you look at the percentages in those areas- it's extremely dangerous to even live there.
So yes- my experiences with these families and being able to spend time with them does show that there are indeed "food deserts" because of other factors than proximity to a supermarket.
Food deserts are only a symptom of an unadressed root cause. Why is this level of violence allowed to exist?
All this is a waste of time, money, and most importantly - life if the root cause is not addressed.
Because there's no actual appetite to take the measures needed to curb the violence.
Profiling, stop and frisk, etc.
This simply reinforces the fact that government is not in the business of solving problems. They are in the business of creating problems which will further the size and power of government.
In this case, the government is able and willing to solve the problems. The communities prefer the violence to the solution.
How are you separating gov't from community here? The police are an arm of the local gov't, local policies about law enforcement are an arm of the local gov't. (I don't agree with your claims anyway, and am rather puzzled at how profiling -- which happens in reality all the time -- would stop crime in neighborhoods that are largely all one race, but setting that aside, it's the government acting or not.)
Curious where this 'hood is that you lived that required a 6 mile walk for a public library, though. That's not the case in the cities I know.
Not necessarily to get to a public library, but getting to one larger than a closet with a computer could require commuting a few neighborhoods over. It would have been ~4 miles one way for me to get to the Central library from where I grew up (thankfully via a single bus line in my case).
The way it was phrased implied just to get a book, and that there was no public transportation available:
"25 years ago(when I was a teenager) a 12 mile total distance walk to get to and from the public library to get a book, or use a computer for research was routine."
I grew up in the '80s, and in a middle-sized city, not a big city (about 250K, but sprawling), and it would have been at least a 6 mile walk (more, I think, but would have to check a map) to the main library, although we would have taken public transportation (a bus). To a regular library to get a book, nowhere near that far. Here, in a big city? Even in the terrible neighborhoods that's not so.
We were reasonably active, but wouldn't have been walking 12 miles in a day to go to and from the library. Certainly not through bad neighborhoods. So that as routinely how people lived in '92, no, I am skeptical.
I grew up in rural Illinois in a town <2k (currently over 11k) and would bike pretty much everywhere when the weather allowed.
I did too (bike everywhere, I mean).
But this is supposed to be in the 'hood of a city, which is why it struck me as strange and I asked where. I'm not saying it's not possible to walk 6 miles each way somewhere (I do that now sometimes), but that it was what everyone did back in '92 in that environment is what seemed rather, well, unusual. ('92 isn't that long ago.)Bottom line is people adapt. Free market adapts based upon numerous forces, the primary being profitability. If this does not exist there is a very good reason for it.
No question. Not sure what this has to do with what we were talking about, though.
I believe it started with a few of us trying to explain that most of us urban folk are quite used to doing a lot more than waddling to a car in our driveway, and thus not having a fully-stocked green grocer on every other corner is not an insurmountable hardship.
It's all about what you really want.
So no buses, or you just preferred to walk? (I happen to think a two hour each way walk -- assuming 20 min miles, which might not be realistic with kids anyway -- probably would be tough for most adults to fit into the day. I don't think it's what we are actually talking about here either, as I don't think that's going to be required for regular grocery shopping, food desert or no, but I am skeptical about this "it doesn't matter, it's no burden, I did it all the time, so assume that anyone who really cares about eating healthfully would just do it, and if they don't they clearly don't care about that" claim. I don't think that's realistic and I don't think that it was common in '92 for people to walk 6 miles each way for groceries (which was what the claim related to, right?).)
Anyway, thanks for answering. Looks like there are closer libraries, including with computer access these days, but I am sure fewer of them had computer access in '92. (Like I said, I don't think we ever had assignments that required computer access that didn't also involve time at school to get it during the '80s, as I am not sure what computer access the public libraries even had. I don't recall any.)
1. Bus was cost prohibitive for a 15 year old.
2. The computer was capable of running some of the very best games(and the library provided them).
3. It was very much a treat, maybe once a week during summer break and maybe once a month during school.
At the time, there was a market less than half a mile down that route, by the time I had left the city, it was shuttered. It's now an O'Reilly's.0 -
lemurcat12 wrote: »janejellyroll wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »Gallowmere1984 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »stanmann571 wrote: »stanmann571 wrote: »RosieRose7673 wrote: »Gallowmere1984 wrote: »RosieRose7673 wrote: »ladyannique2017 wrote: »Food deserts in general are not a myth. Yes, it's a myth that all poor urban areas are food deserts, but that doesn't mean food deserts don't exist. I've lived in a few. One was a poor urban area in the Midwest. Yes you can look at a street map and see there is a grocery store within walking distance, but street maps do not take into account gang territories or other hazards between you and the food. I lived in a place where it was not safe to go two blocks uptown which is where the grocery store was due to gang boundaries but I could go ten blocks down the hill to the river where there were bars and corner stores just fine. That area was a kind of a neutral zone because it was run by pimps and their hookers.
Another food desert was also a water desert out in the west when I lived in a single wide trailer in a desperately poor rural area. Nearest grocery store was 45mikes away and although we had plumbing, the tap water wasn't safe to drink (EPA notice about arsenic in water) so my dad had to use our beat up rusted out truck to bring home a tank of water every week as well as food.
Electricity wasn't too dependable in either place...urban or country and so we couldn't buy fresh veg or meat because it would rot to nothing in a day. Lots of canned and dried foods. I think people assume everyone has access to a refrigerator/freezer when many poor people don't.
Thank you very much for posting this. I really feel that it is very easy for people to put horse blinders on when it comes to this.
It's very easy to say that there's a supermarket a mile away. Why don't they go there?
I live in Chicago currently and in a decent part of the city. However, for my job, I did have to travel to very high crime, poor areas. I've met a family who lived in an unfinished basement. 3 kids and a mom who was taking online classes to get a better job. However, the area was extremely dangerous. Homicides are high in the area as well as gang violence. Sure, if they could hop in a car and drive to a supermarket a mile or so away, they could. BUT- when you don't have a car, don't have any money to spare and have to walk that all the way to a supermarket that far with 3 kids in a high crime area, it's not the super market they are looking for. They are looking for something to eat that's both affordable and safe to get. Often times, that may mean the corner convenience store.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you look a statistics about proximity to supermarkets, it's easy to overlook other factors that can influence the ability to get fresh food.
This is another area where I am admittedly biased. I have lived in "the hood" in multiple cities over the years, and never once had a problem out of anyone. We'd regularly have people shot in the parking lots of two of the places I live, yet I never got so much as a sideways glance. I attribute this to the fact that I mind my own damned business, and never got tangled up in the things that tend to get people shot (drug money, *kitten* with someone's wife/girlfriend, having a big mouth, etc.)
I don't give a damn if someone got capped right under my window, I didn't crack the blinds, I didn't see *kitten*, it's not my business. So yeah, even fat and nerdy whitey can live in some nasty neighborhoods without incident, if you know what you are doing. vOv
It's good for you that you didn't care and kept to yourself. That means only gang members and drug dealers get shot?
There are so many bystanders shot yearly by stray bullets or simply because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time. Sure- a percentage of them were involved in drug or gang activity but that definitely doesn't account for all of those affected by the violence.
While I'm not discrediting your experiences, I don't think that just because you lived in a poor area and survived means that it must be okay for everyone else.
Chicago's violence is skyrocketing. The thing to remember is that chicago is big. Percentagewise, we have a ridiculously high murder and violent crime rate for the population of the city. Then you actually break it down to where these crimes happen, they tend to be concentrated in the areas with the most poverty. Then you look at the percentages in those areas- it's extremely dangerous to even live there.
So yes- my experiences with these families and being able to spend time with them does show that there are indeed "food deserts" because of other factors than proximity to a supermarket.
Food deserts are only a symptom of an unadressed root cause. Why is this level of violence allowed to exist?
All this is a waste of time, money, and most importantly - life if the root cause is not addressed.
Because there's no actual appetite to take the measures needed to curb the violence.
Profiling, stop and frisk, etc.
This simply reinforces the fact that government is not in the business of solving problems. They are in the business of creating problems which will further the size and power of government.
In this case, the government is able and willing to solve the problems. The communities prefer the violence to the solution.
How are you separating gov't from community here? The police are an arm of the local gov't, local policies about law enforcement are an arm of the local gov't. (I don't agree with your claims anyway, and am rather puzzled at how profiling -- which happens in reality all the time -- would stop crime in neighborhoods that are largely all one race, but setting that aside, it's the government acting or not.)
Curious where this 'hood is that you lived that required a 6 mile walk for a public library, though. That's not the case in the cities I know.
Not necessarily to get to a public library, but getting to one larger than a closet with a computer could require commuting a few neighborhoods over. It would have been ~4 miles one way for me to get to the Central library from where I grew up (thankfully via a single bus line in my case).
The way it was phrased implied just to get a book, and that there was no public transportation available:
"25 years ago(when I was a teenager) a 12 mile total distance walk to get to and from the public library to get a book, or use a computer for research was routine."
I grew up in the '80s, and in a middle-sized city, not a big city (about 250K, but sprawling), and it would have been at least a 6 mile walk (more, I think, but would have to check a map) to the main library, although we would have taken public transportation (a bus). To a regular library to get a book, nowhere near that far. Here, in a big city? Even in the terrible neighborhoods that's not so.
We were reasonably active, but wouldn't have been walking 12 miles in a day to go to and from the library. Certainly not through bad neighborhoods. So that as routinely how people lived in '92, no, I am skeptical.
I grew up in rural Illinois in a town <2k (currently over 11k) and would bike pretty much everywhere when the weather allowed.
I did too (bike everywhere, I mean).
But this is supposed to be in the 'hood of a city, which is why it struck me as strange and I asked where. I'm not saying it's not possible to walk 6 miles each way somewhere (I do that now sometimes), but that it was what everyone did back in '92 in that environment is what seemed rather, well, unusual. ('92 isn't that long ago.)Bottom line is people adapt. Free market adapts based upon numerous forces, the primary being profitability. If this does not exist there is a very good reason for it.
No question. Not sure what this has to do with what we were talking about, though.
I believe it started with a few of us trying to explain that most of us urban folk are quite used to doing a lot more than waddling to a car in our driveway, and thus not having a fully-stocked green grocer on every other corner is not an insurmountable hardship.
Oh, no, I followed and agreed with that bit. I was asking about the "Free market adapts based upon numerous forces, the primary being profitability. If this does not exist there is a very good reason for it." as I did not see how it related. Like I said, I agree, but given the context (sidewalks?, walking to the library in '92?, riding one's bike everywhere as a kid?) I wasn't following WHAT didn't exist and what the free market had to do with it -- I mean I know there are people who think libraries should only be for profit and not gov't sponsored, but even so I didn't see how it fit into the conversation that we were having.
I will say, again, that I DON'T think having to walk 12 miles roundtrip to get somewhere is particularly an urban thing (indeed, although I sometimes do it, for exercise mainly, and because I enjoy walking), I don't think it's particularly common in an urban area to HAVE to walk that far to do something because public transportation is usually much more available. The places where I've HAD to walk several miles to get somewhere have been in suburbs (if I happened not to have a car) or other places where most people drove everywhere. And in doing that there have been times when I was stuck walking in a place where it really wasn't conducive to it and where I felt a little uncomfortable (walking on the side of a busy street or some such).
I think he meant the original topic. As in there aren't places to easily access whatever food in certain areas, because the demand for it isn't there. I will admit, after living in several major cities, a lot of the old districts still have looming corpses of what used to be grocery stores.
Here in mainland Europe the urban corpses are the medium sized and small grocery shops in the urban centers. Oh, and then there are these giganic empty apartment blocks over built in the last 10 - 15 years. The really large grocery store chains are doing extrmely well, most are placed far outside city limits or at the edges of the towns and include grand parking lots all of them more or less inaccessible to bikes or the walking population because of the highways and cloverleaf traffic switches. This is a real change in the landscape of continental europe, maybe comparable to the shifts during the 60's and 70's in America if my recall is accurate. Not that anyone here seems to be much interested though.
edited thru a perpetual need to edit.
I'm interested.
So where do people who live in the city shop?
I live in a city, and I shop in my neighborhood. The stores aren't the size of the hugest ones that are farther out or in the 'burbs, but they are plenty large and I like that there are also smaller options (like a meat market or, farther away, a fish specific place and various ethnic groceries).
Right downtown shopping is harder (because not that many people live right downtown, but in the neighborhoods). That said, more are living basically downtown or very close these days, and as a result there are a lot more groceries there than there were even 10 years ago.
I live in a city.
My husband and I use the car once a week to drive to a grocery store about fifteen minutes away and buy staples/heavier items. We tend to get perishable items 2-3 times a week at a smaller grocery store that is a couple of blocks away (their prices are higher and that's another reason we don't do all our shopping there). It costs a bit more, but the selection and quality for produce (and meat and dairy for my husband) is much better there.
We don't live downtown, but fairly close to it. I can think of at least two options for groceries in the downtown area of my city, both of which include lots of cheaper staple foods and produce. I use the bus a lot and I frequently see people who are obviously doing bigger grocery shops. Our public transit is better than average here. If someone in my area told me that they were struggling to get grocery shopping done without a car, I would be very confused.
Just to be clear, I was not at all suggesting that it is hard to shop in a city in the US (that's not my experience), but referring to Gamliela's comment:
"Here in mainland Europe the urban corpses are the medium sized and small grocery shops in the urban centers. Oh, and then there are these giganic empty apartment blocks over built in the last 10 - 15 years. The really large grocery store chains are doing extrmely well, most are placed far outside city limits or at the edges of the towns and include grand parking lots all of them more or less inaccessible to bikes or the walking population because of the highways and cloverleaf traffic switches."
I lived in a city for years without a car (and rarely use my car for shopping now, while I do sometimes use public transportation for that purpose) and it wasn't an issue for me either. (My neighborhood is better than some others, though, for that.)
I am curious about other people's experiences, and am glad you added yours.
Yes, I understood you weren't suggesting that it is hard to shop in a city. I think it's going to depend a lot on which city, one's grocery budget, and how much free time one has for shopping/transportation which is why it's cool to read about different experiences.
2 -
lemurcat12 wrote: »Gallowmere1984 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »stanmann571 wrote: »stanmann571 wrote: »RosieRose7673 wrote: »Gallowmere1984 wrote: »RosieRose7673 wrote: »ladyannique2017 wrote: »Food deserts in general are not a myth. Yes, it's a myth that all poor urban areas are food deserts, but that doesn't mean food deserts don't exist. I've lived in a few. One was a poor urban area in the Midwest. Yes you can look at a street map and see there is a grocery store within walking distance, but street maps do not take into account gang territories or other hazards between you and the food. I lived in a place where it was not safe to go two blocks uptown which is where the grocery store was due to gang boundaries but I could go ten blocks down the hill to the river where there were bars and corner stores just fine. That area was a kind of a neutral zone because it was run by pimps and their hookers.
Another food desert was also a water desert out in the west when I lived in a single wide trailer in a desperately poor rural area. Nearest grocery store was 45mikes away and although we had plumbing, the tap water wasn't safe to drink (EPA notice about arsenic in water) so my dad had to use our beat up rusted out truck to bring home a tank of water every week as well as food.
Electricity wasn't too dependable in either place...urban or country and so we couldn't buy fresh veg or meat because it would rot to nothing in a day. Lots of canned and dried foods. I think people assume everyone has access to a refrigerator/freezer when many poor people don't.
Thank you very much for posting this. I really feel that it is very easy for people to put horse blinders on when it comes to this.
It's very easy to say that there's a supermarket a mile away. Why don't they go there?
I live in Chicago currently and in a decent part of the city. However, for my job, I did have to travel to very high crime, poor areas. I've met a family who lived in an unfinished basement. 3 kids and a mom who was taking online classes to get a better job. However, the area was extremely dangerous. Homicides are high in the area as well as gang violence. Sure, if they could hop in a car and drive to a supermarket a mile or so away, they could. BUT- when you don't have a car, don't have any money to spare and have to walk that all the way to a supermarket that far with 3 kids in a high crime area, it's not the super market they are looking for. They are looking for something to eat that's both affordable and safe to get. Often times, that may mean the corner convenience store.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you look a statistics about proximity to supermarkets, it's easy to overlook other factors that can influence the ability to get fresh food.
This is another area where I am admittedly biased. I have lived in "the hood" in multiple cities over the years, and never once had a problem out of anyone. We'd regularly have people shot in the parking lots of two of the places I live, yet I never got so much as a sideways glance. I attribute this to the fact that I mind my own damned business, and never got tangled up in the things that tend to get people shot (drug money, *kitten* with someone's wife/girlfriend, having a big mouth, etc.)
I don't give a damn if someone got capped right under my window, I didn't crack the blinds, I didn't see *kitten*, it's not my business. So yeah, even fat and nerdy whitey can live in some nasty neighborhoods without incident, if you know what you are doing. vOv
It's good for you that you didn't care and kept to yourself. That means only gang members and drug dealers get shot?
There are so many bystanders shot yearly by stray bullets or simply because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time. Sure- a percentage of them were involved in drug or gang activity but that definitely doesn't account for all of those affected by the violence.
While I'm not discrediting your experiences, I don't think that just because you lived in a poor area and survived means that it must be okay for everyone else.
Chicago's violence is skyrocketing. The thing to remember is that chicago is big. Percentagewise, we have a ridiculously high murder and violent crime rate for the population of the city. Then you actually break it down to where these crimes happen, they tend to be concentrated in the areas with the most poverty. Then you look at the percentages in those areas- it's extremely dangerous to even live there.
So yes- my experiences with these families and being able to spend time with them does show that there are indeed "food deserts" because of other factors than proximity to a supermarket.
Food deserts are only a symptom of an unadressed root cause. Why is this level of violence allowed to exist?
All this is a waste of time, money, and most importantly - life if the root cause is not addressed.
Because there's no actual appetite to take the measures needed to curb the violence.
Profiling, stop and frisk, etc.
This simply reinforces the fact that government is not in the business of solving problems. They are in the business of creating problems which will further the size and power of government.
In this case, the government is able and willing to solve the problems. The communities prefer the violence to the solution.
How are you separating gov't from community here? The police are an arm of the local gov't, local policies about law enforcement are an arm of the local gov't. (I don't agree with your claims anyway, and am rather puzzled at how profiling -- which happens in reality all the time -- would stop crime in neighborhoods that are largely all one race, but setting that aside, it's the government acting or not.)
Curious where this 'hood is that you lived that required a 6 mile walk for a public library, though. That's not the case in the cities I know.
Not necessarily to get to a public library, but getting to one larger than a closet with a computer could require commuting a few neighborhoods over. It would have been ~4 miles one way for me to get to the Central library from where I grew up (thankfully via a single bus line in my case).
The way it was phrased implied just to get a book, and that there was no public transportation available:
"25 years ago(when I was a teenager) a 12 mile total distance walk to get to and from the public library to get a book, or use a computer for research was routine."
I grew up in the '80s, and in a middle-sized city, not a big city (about 250K, but sprawling), and it would have been at least a 6 mile walk (more, I think, but would have to check a map) to the main library, although we would have taken public transportation (a bus). To a regular library to get a book, nowhere near that far. Here, in a big city? Even in the terrible neighborhoods that's not so.
We were reasonably active, but wouldn't have been walking 12 miles in a day to go to and from the library. Certainly not through bad neighborhoods. So that as routinely how people lived in '92, no, I am skeptical.
I grew up in rural Illinois in a town <2k (currently over 11k) and would bike pretty much everywhere when the weather allowed.
I did too (bike everywhere, I mean).
But this is supposed to be in the 'hood of a city, which is why it struck me as strange and I asked where. I'm not saying it's not possible to walk 6 miles each way somewhere (I do that now sometimes), but that it was what everyone did back in '92 in that environment is what seemed rather, well, unusual. ('92 isn't that long ago.)Bottom line is people adapt. Free market adapts based upon numerous forces, the primary being profitability. If this does not exist there is a very good reason for it.
No question. Not sure what this has to do with what we were talking about, though.
I believe it started with a few of us trying to explain that most of us urban folk are quite used to doing a lot more than waddling to a car in our driveway, and thus not having a fully-stocked green grocer on every other corner is not an insurmountable hardship.
Oh, no, I followed and agreed with that bit. I was asking about the "Free market adapts based upon numerous forces, the primary being profitability. If this does not exist there is a very good reason for it." as I did not see how it related. Like I said, I agree, but given the context (sidewalks?, walking to the library in '92?, riding one's bike everywhere as a kid?) I wasn't following WHAT didn't exist and what the free market had to do with it -- I mean I know there are people who think libraries should only be for profit and not gov't sponsored, but even so I didn't see how it fit into the conversation that we were having.
I will say, again, that I DON'T think having to walk 12 miles roundtrip to get somewhere is particularly an urban thing (indeed, although I sometimes do it, for exercise mainly, and because I enjoy walking), I don't think it's particularly common in an urban area to HAVE to walk that far to do something because public transportation is usually much more available. The places where I've HAD to walk several miles to get somewhere have been in suburbs (if I happened not to have a car) or other places where most people drove everywhere. And in doing that there have been times when I was stuck walking in a place where it really wasn't conducive to it and where I felt a little uncomfortable (walking on the side of a busy street or some such).
I think he meant the original topic. As in there aren't places to easily access whatever food in certain areas, because the demand for it isn't there. I will admit, after living in several major cities, a lot of the old districts still have looming corpses of what used to be grocery stores.
Here in mainland Europe the urban corpses are the medium sized and small grocery shops in the urban centers. Oh, and then there are these giganic empty apartment blocks over built in the last 10 - 15 years. The really large grocery store chains are doing extrmely well, most are placed far outside city limits or at the edges of the towns and include grand parking lots all of them more or less inaccessible to bikes or the walking population because of the highways and cloverleaf traffic switches. This is a real change in the landscape of continental europe, maybe comparable to the shifts during the 60's and 70's in America if my recall is accurate. Not that anyone here seems to be much interested though.
edited thru a perpetual need to edit.
I'm interested.
So where do people who live in the city shop?
I live in a city, and I shop in my neighborhood. The stores aren't the size of the hugest ones that are farther out or in the 'burbs, but they are plenty large and I like that there are also smaller options (like a meat market or, farther away, a fish specific place and various ethnic groceries).
Right downtown shopping is harder (because not that many people live right downtown, but in the neighborhoods). That said, more are living basically downtown or very close these days, and as a result there are a lot more groceries there than there were even 10 years ago.
I live in a city - but not downtown. I'm about 4 miles from work, and there are close to 10 groceries within a couple of miles of my home/work bubble. I typically shop at the Target and Kroger that are about a mile from work, less often at the Whole Foods that's about a mile from my house, and occasionally at the TJ's that's about a 5min drive from work in the opposite direction as home. Probably 2-3 mi away?
If I want something that those stores don't carry (specialty produce, baked goods, brands), I'll head out to the Central Market that's nearly 6 mi away (*gasp*). It does seem hugely inconvenient when there's so much so close.1 -
stanmann571 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »stanmann571 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »stanmann571 wrote: »stanmann571 wrote: »RosieRose7673 wrote: »Gallowmere1984 wrote: »RosieRose7673 wrote: »ladyannique2017 wrote: »Food deserts in general are not a myth. Yes, it's a myth that all poor urban areas are food deserts, but that doesn't mean food deserts don't exist. I've lived in a few. One was a poor urban area in the Midwest. Yes you can look at a street map and see there is a grocery store within walking distance, but street maps do not take into account gang territories or other hazards between you and the food. I lived in a place where it was not safe to go two blocks uptown which is where the grocery store was due to gang boundaries but I could go ten blocks down the hill to the river where there were bars and corner stores just fine. That area was a kind of a neutral zone because it was run by pimps and their hookers.
Another food desert was also a water desert out in the west when I lived in a single wide trailer in a desperately poor rural area. Nearest grocery store was 45mikes away and although we had plumbing, the tap water wasn't safe to drink (EPA notice about arsenic in water) so my dad had to use our beat up rusted out truck to bring home a tank of water every week as well as food.
Electricity wasn't too dependable in either place...urban or country and so we couldn't buy fresh veg or meat because it would rot to nothing in a day. Lots of canned and dried foods. I think people assume everyone has access to a refrigerator/freezer when many poor people don't.
Thank you very much for posting this. I really feel that it is very easy for people to put horse blinders on when it comes to this.
It's very easy to say that there's a supermarket a mile away. Why don't they go there?
I live in Chicago currently and in a decent part of the city. However, for my job, I did have to travel to very high crime, poor areas. I've met a family who lived in an unfinished basement. 3 kids and a mom who was taking online classes to get a better job. However, the area was extremely dangerous. Homicides are high in the area as well as gang violence. Sure, if they could hop in a car and drive to a supermarket a mile or so away, they could. BUT- when you don't have a car, don't have any money to spare and have to walk that all the way to a supermarket that far with 3 kids in a high crime area, it's not the super market they are looking for. They are looking for something to eat that's both affordable and safe to get. Often times, that may mean the corner convenience store.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you look a statistics about proximity to supermarkets, it's easy to overlook other factors that can influence the ability to get fresh food.
This is another area where I am admittedly biased. I have lived in "the hood" in multiple cities over the years, and never once had a problem out of anyone. We'd regularly have people shot in the parking lots of two of the places I live, yet I never got so much as a sideways glance. I attribute this to the fact that I mind my own damned business, and never got tangled up in the things that tend to get people shot (drug money, *kitten* with someone's wife/girlfriend, having a big mouth, etc.)
I don't give a damn if someone got capped right under my window, I didn't crack the blinds, I didn't see *kitten*, it's not my business. So yeah, even fat and nerdy whitey can live in some nasty neighborhoods without incident, if you know what you are doing. vOv
It's good for you that you didn't care and kept to yourself. That means only gang members and drug dealers get shot?
There are so many bystanders shot yearly by stray bullets or simply because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time. Sure- a percentage of them were involved in drug or gang activity but that definitely doesn't account for all of those affected by the violence.
While I'm not discrediting your experiences, I don't think that just because you lived in a poor area and survived means that it must be okay for everyone else.
Chicago's violence is skyrocketing. The thing to remember is that chicago is big. Percentagewise, we have a ridiculously high murder and violent crime rate for the population of the city. Then you actually break it down to where these crimes happen, they tend to be concentrated in the areas with the most poverty. Then you look at the percentages in those areas- it's extremely dangerous to even live there.
So yes- my experiences with these families and being able to spend time with them does show that there are indeed "food deserts" because of other factors than proximity to a supermarket.
Food deserts are only a symptom of an unadressed root cause. Why is this level of violence allowed to exist?
All this is a waste of time, money, and most importantly - life if the root cause is not addressed.
Because there's no actual appetite to take the measures needed to curb the violence.
Profiling, stop and frisk, etc.
This simply reinforces the fact that government is not in the business of solving problems. They are in the business of creating problems which will further the size and power of government.
In this case, the government is able and willing to solve the problems. The communities prefer the violence to the solution.
How are you separating gov't from community here? The police are an arm of the local gov't, local policies about law enforcement are an arm of the local gov't. (I don't agree with your claims anyway, and am rather puzzled at how profiling -- which happens in reality all the time -- would stop crime in neighborhoods that are largely all one race, but setting that aside, it's the government acting or not.)
Curious where this 'hood is that you lived that required a 6 mile walk for a public library, though. That's not the case in the cities I know.
Not necessarily to get to a public library, but getting to one larger than a closet with a computer could require commuting a few neighborhoods over. It would have been ~4 miles one way for me to get to the Central library from where I grew up (thankfully via a single bus line in my case).
The way it was phrased implied just to get a book, and that there was no public transportation available:
"25 years ago(when I was a teenager) a 12 mile total distance walk to get to and from the public library to get a book, or use a computer for research was routine."
I grew up in the '80s, and in a middle-sized city, not a big city (about 250K, but sprawling), and it would have been at least a 6 mile walk (more, I think, but would have to check a map) to the main library, although we would have taken public transportation (a bus). To a regular library to get a book, nowhere near that far. Here, in a big city? Even in the terrible neighborhoods that's not so.
We were reasonably active, but wouldn't have been walking 12 miles in a day to go to and from the library. Certainly not through bad neighborhoods. So that as routinely how people lived in '92, no, I am skeptical.
I grew up in rural Illinois in a town <2k (currently over 11k) and would bike pretty much everywhere when the weather allowed.
I did too (bike everywhere, I mean).
But this is supposed to be in the 'hood of a city, which is why it struck me as strange and I asked where. I'm not saying it's not possible to walk 6 miles each way somewhere (I do that now sometimes), but that it was what everyone did back in '92 in that environment is what seemed rather, well, unusual. ('92 isn't that long ago.)Bottom line is people adapt. Free market adapts based upon numerous forces, the primary being profitability. If this does not exist there is a very good reason for it.
No question. Not sure what this has to do with what we were talking about, though.
I believe it started with a few of us trying to explain that most of us urban folk are quite used to doing a lot more than waddling to a car in our driveway, and thus not having a fully-stocked green grocer on every other corner is not an insurmountable hardship.
It's all about what you really want.
So no buses, or you just preferred to walk? (I happen to think a two hour each way walk -- assuming 20 min miles, which might not be realistic with kids anyway -- probably would be tough for most adults to fit into the day. I don't think it's what we are actually talking about here either, as I don't think that's going to be required for regular grocery shopping, food desert or no, but I am skeptical about this "it doesn't matter, it's no burden, I did it all the time, so assume that anyone who really cares about eating healthfully would just do it, and if they don't they clearly don't care about that" claim. I don't think that's realistic and I don't think that it was common in '92 for people to walk 6 miles each way for groceries (which was what the claim related to, right?).)
Anyway, thanks for answering. Looks like there are closer libraries, including with computer access these days, but I am sure fewer of them had computer access in '92. (Like I said, I don't think we ever had assignments that required computer access that didn't also involve time at school to get it during the '80s, as I am not sure what computer access the public libraries even had. I don't recall any.)
1. Bus was cost prohibitive for a 15 year old.
2. The computer was capable of running some of the very best games(and the library provided them).
3. It was very much a treat, maybe once a week during summer break and maybe once a month during school.
At the time, there was a market less than half a mile down that route, by the time I had left the city, it was shuttered. It's now an O'Reilly's.
Ah, that makes more sense. Thanks for clarifying. (I am pretty sure we did not have computers for games at any public libraries, but like I said, I'm a bit older.)0 -
janejellyroll wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »janejellyroll wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »Gallowmere1984 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »stanmann571 wrote: »stanmann571 wrote: »RosieRose7673 wrote: »Gallowmere1984 wrote: »RosieRose7673 wrote: »ladyannique2017 wrote: »Food deserts in general are not a myth. Yes, it's a myth that all poor urban areas are food deserts, but that doesn't mean food deserts don't exist. I've lived in a few. One was a poor urban area in the Midwest. Yes you can look at a street map and see there is a grocery store within walking distance, but street maps do not take into account gang territories or other hazards between you and the food. I lived in a place where it was not safe to go two blocks uptown which is where the grocery store was due to gang boundaries but I could go ten blocks down the hill to the river where there were bars and corner stores just fine. That area was a kind of a neutral zone because it was run by pimps and their hookers.
Another food desert was also a water desert out in the west when I lived in a single wide trailer in a desperately poor rural area. Nearest grocery store was 45mikes away and although we had plumbing, the tap water wasn't safe to drink (EPA notice about arsenic in water) so my dad had to use our beat up rusted out truck to bring home a tank of water every week as well as food.
Electricity wasn't too dependable in either place...urban or country and so we couldn't buy fresh veg or meat because it would rot to nothing in a day. Lots of canned and dried foods. I think people assume everyone has access to a refrigerator/freezer when many poor people don't.
Thank you very much for posting this. I really feel that it is very easy for people to put horse blinders on when it comes to this.
It's very easy to say that there's a supermarket a mile away. Why don't they go there?
I live in Chicago currently and in a decent part of the city. However, for my job, I did have to travel to very high crime, poor areas. I've met a family who lived in an unfinished basement. 3 kids and a mom who was taking online classes to get a better job. However, the area was extremely dangerous. Homicides are high in the area as well as gang violence. Sure, if they could hop in a car and drive to a supermarket a mile or so away, they could. BUT- when you don't have a car, don't have any money to spare and have to walk that all the way to a supermarket that far with 3 kids in a high crime area, it's not the super market they are looking for. They are looking for something to eat that's both affordable and safe to get. Often times, that may mean the corner convenience store.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you look a statistics about proximity to supermarkets, it's easy to overlook other factors that can influence the ability to get fresh food.
This is another area where I am admittedly biased. I have lived in "the hood" in multiple cities over the years, and never once had a problem out of anyone. We'd regularly have people shot in the parking lots of two of the places I live, yet I never got so much as a sideways glance. I attribute this to the fact that I mind my own damned business, and never got tangled up in the things that tend to get people shot (drug money, *kitten* with someone's wife/girlfriend, having a big mouth, etc.)
I don't give a damn if someone got capped right under my window, I didn't crack the blinds, I didn't see *kitten*, it's not my business. So yeah, even fat and nerdy whitey can live in some nasty neighborhoods without incident, if you know what you are doing. vOv
It's good for you that you didn't care and kept to yourself. That means only gang members and drug dealers get shot?
There are so many bystanders shot yearly by stray bullets or simply because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time. Sure- a percentage of them were involved in drug or gang activity but that definitely doesn't account for all of those affected by the violence.
While I'm not discrediting your experiences, I don't think that just because you lived in a poor area and survived means that it must be okay for everyone else.
Chicago's violence is skyrocketing. The thing to remember is that chicago is big. Percentagewise, we have a ridiculously high murder and violent crime rate for the population of the city. Then you actually break it down to where these crimes happen, they tend to be concentrated in the areas with the most poverty. Then you look at the percentages in those areas- it's extremely dangerous to even live there.
So yes- my experiences with these families and being able to spend time with them does show that there are indeed "food deserts" because of other factors than proximity to a supermarket.
Food deserts are only a symptom of an unadressed root cause. Why is this level of violence allowed to exist?
All this is a waste of time, money, and most importantly - life if the root cause is not addressed.
Because there's no actual appetite to take the measures needed to curb the violence.
Profiling, stop and frisk, etc.
This simply reinforces the fact that government is not in the business of solving problems. They are in the business of creating problems which will further the size and power of government.
In this case, the government is able and willing to solve the problems. The communities prefer the violence to the solution.
How are you separating gov't from community here? The police are an arm of the local gov't, local policies about law enforcement are an arm of the local gov't. (I don't agree with your claims anyway, and am rather puzzled at how profiling -- which happens in reality all the time -- would stop crime in neighborhoods that are largely all one race, but setting that aside, it's the government acting or not.)
Curious where this 'hood is that you lived that required a 6 mile walk for a public library, though. That's not the case in the cities I know.
Not necessarily to get to a public library, but getting to one larger than a closet with a computer could require commuting a few neighborhoods over. It would have been ~4 miles one way for me to get to the Central library from where I grew up (thankfully via a single bus line in my case).
The way it was phrased implied just to get a book, and that there was no public transportation available:
"25 years ago(when I was a teenager) a 12 mile total distance walk to get to and from the public library to get a book, or use a computer for research was routine."
I grew up in the '80s, and in a middle-sized city, not a big city (about 250K, but sprawling), and it would have been at least a 6 mile walk (more, I think, but would have to check a map) to the main library, although we would have taken public transportation (a bus). To a regular library to get a book, nowhere near that far. Here, in a big city? Even in the terrible neighborhoods that's not so.
We were reasonably active, but wouldn't have been walking 12 miles in a day to go to and from the library. Certainly not through bad neighborhoods. So that as routinely how people lived in '92, no, I am skeptical.
I grew up in rural Illinois in a town <2k (currently over 11k) and would bike pretty much everywhere when the weather allowed.
I did too (bike everywhere, I mean).
But this is supposed to be in the 'hood of a city, which is why it struck me as strange and I asked where. I'm not saying it's not possible to walk 6 miles each way somewhere (I do that now sometimes), but that it was what everyone did back in '92 in that environment is what seemed rather, well, unusual. ('92 isn't that long ago.)Bottom line is people adapt. Free market adapts based upon numerous forces, the primary being profitability. If this does not exist there is a very good reason for it.
No question. Not sure what this has to do with what we were talking about, though.
I believe it started with a few of us trying to explain that most of us urban folk are quite used to doing a lot more than waddling to a car in our driveway, and thus not having a fully-stocked green grocer on every other corner is not an insurmountable hardship.
Oh, no, I followed and agreed with that bit. I was asking about the "Free market adapts based upon numerous forces, the primary being profitability. If this does not exist there is a very good reason for it." as I did not see how it related. Like I said, I agree, but given the context (sidewalks?, walking to the library in '92?, riding one's bike everywhere as a kid?) I wasn't following WHAT didn't exist and what the free market had to do with it -- I mean I know there are people who think libraries should only be for profit and not gov't sponsored, but even so I didn't see how it fit into the conversation that we were having.
I will say, again, that I DON'T think having to walk 12 miles roundtrip to get somewhere is particularly an urban thing (indeed, although I sometimes do it, for exercise mainly, and because I enjoy walking), I don't think it's particularly common in an urban area to HAVE to walk that far to do something because public transportation is usually much more available. The places where I've HAD to walk several miles to get somewhere have been in suburbs (if I happened not to have a car) or other places where most people drove everywhere. And in doing that there have been times when I was stuck walking in a place where it really wasn't conducive to it and where I felt a little uncomfortable (walking on the side of a busy street or some such).
I think he meant the original topic. As in there aren't places to easily access whatever food in certain areas, because the demand for it isn't there. I will admit, after living in several major cities, a lot of the old districts still have looming corpses of what used to be grocery stores.
Here in mainland Europe the urban corpses are the medium sized and small grocery shops in the urban centers. Oh, and then there are these giganic empty apartment blocks over built in the last 10 - 15 years. The really large grocery store chains are doing extrmely well, most are placed far outside city limits or at the edges of the towns and include grand parking lots all of them more or less inaccessible to bikes or the walking population because of the highways and cloverleaf traffic switches. This is a real change in the landscape of continental europe, maybe comparable to the shifts during the 60's and 70's in America if my recall is accurate. Not that anyone here seems to be much interested though.
edited thru a perpetual need to edit.
I'm interested.
So where do people who live in the city shop?
I live in a city, and I shop in my neighborhood. The stores aren't the size of the hugest ones that are farther out or in the 'burbs, but they are plenty large and I like that there are also smaller options (like a meat market or, farther away, a fish specific place and various ethnic groceries).
Right downtown shopping is harder (because not that many people live right downtown, but in the neighborhoods). That said, more are living basically downtown or very close these days, and as a result there are a lot more groceries there than there were even 10 years ago.
I live in a city.
My husband and I use the car once a week to drive to a grocery store about fifteen minutes away and buy staples/heavier items. We tend to get perishable items 2-3 times a week at a smaller grocery store that is a couple of blocks away (their prices are higher and that's another reason we don't do all our shopping there). It costs a bit more, but the selection and quality for produce (and meat and dairy for my husband) is much better there.
We don't live downtown, but fairly close to it. I can think of at least two options for groceries in the downtown area of my city, both of which include lots of cheaper staple foods and produce. I use the bus a lot and I frequently see people who are obviously doing bigger grocery shops. Our public transit is better than average here. If someone in my area told me that they were struggling to get grocery shopping done without a car, I would be very confused.
Just to be clear, I was not at all suggesting that it is hard to shop in a city in the US (that's not my experience), but referring to Gamliela's comment:
"Here in mainland Europe the urban corpses are the medium sized and small grocery shops in the urban centers. Oh, and then there are these giganic empty apartment blocks over built in the last 10 - 15 years. The really large grocery store chains are doing extrmely well, most are placed far outside city limits or at the edges of the towns and include grand parking lots all of them more or less inaccessible to bikes or the walking population because of the highways and cloverleaf traffic switches."
I lived in a city for years without a car (and rarely use my car for shopping now, while I do sometimes use public transportation for that purpose) and it wasn't an issue for me either. (My neighborhood is better than some others, though, for that.)
I am curious about other people's experiences, and am glad you added yours.
Yes, I understood you weren't suggesting that it is hard to shop in a city. I think it's going to depend a lot on which city, one's grocery budget, and how much free time one has for shopping/transportation which is why it's cool to read about different experiences.
Heh, I'm just getting paranoid about being misunderstood. ;-)
And totally agree.0 -
lemurcat12 wrote: »stanmann571 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »stanmann571 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »stanmann571 wrote: »stanmann571 wrote: »RosieRose7673 wrote: »Gallowmere1984 wrote: »RosieRose7673 wrote: »ladyannique2017 wrote: »Food deserts in general are not a myth. Yes, it's a myth that all poor urban areas are food deserts, but that doesn't mean food deserts don't exist. I've lived in a few. One was a poor urban area in the Midwest. Yes you can look at a street map and see there is a grocery store within walking distance, but street maps do not take into account gang territories or other hazards between you and the food. I lived in a place where it was not safe to go two blocks uptown which is where the grocery store was due to gang boundaries but I could go ten blocks down the hill to the river where there were bars and corner stores just fine. That area was a kind of a neutral zone because it was run by pimps and their hookers.
Another food desert was also a water desert out in the west when I lived in a single wide trailer in a desperately poor rural area. Nearest grocery store was 45mikes away and although we had plumbing, the tap water wasn't safe to drink (EPA notice about arsenic in water) so my dad had to use our beat up rusted out truck to bring home a tank of water every week as well as food.
Electricity wasn't too dependable in either place...urban or country and so we couldn't buy fresh veg or meat because it would rot to nothing in a day. Lots of canned and dried foods. I think people assume everyone has access to a refrigerator/freezer when many poor people don't.
Thank you very much for posting this. I really feel that it is very easy for people to put horse blinders on when it comes to this.
It's very easy to say that there's a supermarket a mile away. Why don't they go there?
I live in Chicago currently and in a decent part of the city. However, for my job, I did have to travel to very high crime, poor areas. I've met a family who lived in an unfinished basement. 3 kids and a mom who was taking online classes to get a better job. However, the area was extremely dangerous. Homicides are high in the area as well as gang violence. Sure, if they could hop in a car and drive to a supermarket a mile or so away, they could. BUT- when you don't have a car, don't have any money to spare and have to walk that all the way to a supermarket that far with 3 kids in a high crime area, it's not the super market they are looking for. They are looking for something to eat that's both affordable and safe to get. Often times, that may mean the corner convenience store.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you look a statistics about proximity to supermarkets, it's easy to overlook other factors that can influence the ability to get fresh food.
This is another area where I am admittedly biased. I have lived in "the hood" in multiple cities over the years, and never once had a problem out of anyone. We'd regularly have people shot in the parking lots of two of the places I live, yet I never got so much as a sideways glance. I attribute this to the fact that I mind my own damned business, and never got tangled up in the things that tend to get people shot (drug money, *kitten* with someone's wife/girlfriend, having a big mouth, etc.)
I don't give a damn if someone got capped right under my window, I didn't crack the blinds, I didn't see *kitten*, it's not my business. So yeah, even fat and nerdy whitey can live in some nasty neighborhoods without incident, if you know what you are doing. vOv
It's good for you that you didn't care and kept to yourself. That means only gang members and drug dealers get shot?
There are so many bystanders shot yearly by stray bullets or simply because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time. Sure- a percentage of them were involved in drug or gang activity but that definitely doesn't account for all of those affected by the violence.
While I'm not discrediting your experiences, I don't think that just because you lived in a poor area and survived means that it must be okay for everyone else.
Chicago's violence is skyrocketing. The thing to remember is that chicago is big. Percentagewise, we have a ridiculously high murder and violent crime rate for the population of the city. Then you actually break it down to where these crimes happen, they tend to be concentrated in the areas with the most poverty. Then you look at the percentages in those areas- it's extremely dangerous to even live there.
So yes- my experiences with these families and being able to spend time with them does show that there are indeed "food deserts" because of other factors than proximity to a supermarket.
Food deserts are only a symptom of an unadressed root cause. Why is this level of violence allowed to exist?
All this is a waste of time, money, and most importantly - life if the root cause is not addressed.
Because there's no actual appetite to take the measures needed to curb the violence.
Profiling, stop and frisk, etc.
This simply reinforces the fact that government is not in the business of solving problems. They are in the business of creating problems which will further the size and power of government.
In this case, the government is able and willing to solve the problems. The communities prefer the violence to the solution.
How are you separating gov't from community here? The police are an arm of the local gov't, local policies about law enforcement are an arm of the local gov't. (I don't agree with your claims anyway, and am rather puzzled at how profiling -- which happens in reality all the time -- would stop crime in neighborhoods that are largely all one race, but setting that aside, it's the government acting or not.)
Curious where this 'hood is that you lived that required a 6 mile walk for a public library, though. That's not the case in the cities I know.
Not necessarily to get to a public library, but getting to one larger than a closet with a computer could require commuting a few neighborhoods over. It would have been ~4 miles one way for me to get to the Central library from where I grew up (thankfully via a single bus line in my case).
The way it was phrased implied just to get a book, and that there was no public transportation available:
"25 years ago(when I was a teenager) a 12 mile total distance walk to get to and from the public library to get a book, or use a computer for research was routine."
I grew up in the '80s, and in a middle-sized city, not a big city (about 250K, but sprawling), and it would have been at least a 6 mile walk (more, I think, but would have to check a map) to the main library, although we would have taken public transportation (a bus). To a regular library to get a book, nowhere near that far. Here, in a big city? Even in the terrible neighborhoods that's not so.
We were reasonably active, but wouldn't have been walking 12 miles in a day to go to and from the library. Certainly not through bad neighborhoods. So that as routinely how people lived in '92, no, I am skeptical.
I grew up in rural Illinois in a town <2k (currently over 11k) and would bike pretty much everywhere when the weather allowed.
I did too (bike everywhere, I mean).
But this is supposed to be in the 'hood of a city, which is why it struck me as strange and I asked where. I'm not saying it's not possible to walk 6 miles each way somewhere (I do that now sometimes), but that it was what everyone did back in '92 in that environment is what seemed rather, well, unusual. ('92 isn't that long ago.)Bottom line is people adapt. Free market adapts based upon numerous forces, the primary being profitability. If this does not exist there is a very good reason for it.
No question. Not sure what this has to do with what we were talking about, though.
I believe it started with a few of us trying to explain that most of us urban folk are quite used to doing a lot more than waddling to a car in our driveway, and thus not having a fully-stocked green grocer on every other corner is not an insurmountable hardship.
It's all about what you really want.
So no buses, or you just preferred to walk? (I happen to think a two hour each way walk -- assuming 20 min miles, which might not be realistic with kids anyway -- probably would be tough for most adults to fit into the day. I don't think it's what we are actually talking about here either, as I don't think that's going to be required for regular grocery shopping, food desert or no, but I am skeptical about this "it doesn't matter, it's no burden, I did it all the time, so assume that anyone who really cares about eating healthfully would just do it, and if they don't they clearly don't care about that" claim. I don't think that's realistic and I don't think that it was common in '92 for people to walk 6 miles each way for groceries (which was what the claim related to, right?).)
Anyway, thanks for answering. Looks like there are closer libraries, including with computer access these days, but I am sure fewer of them had computer access in '92. (Like I said, I don't think we ever had assignments that required computer access that didn't also involve time at school to get it during the '80s, as I am not sure what computer access the public libraries even had. I don't recall any.)
1. Bus was cost prohibitive for a 15 year old.
2. The computer was capable of running some of the very best games(and the library provided them).
3. It was very much a treat, maybe once a week during summer break and maybe once a month during school.
At the time, there was a market less than half a mile down that route, by the time I had left the city, it was shuttered. It's now an O'Reilly's.
Ah, that makes more sense. Thanks for clarifying. (I am pretty sure we did not have computers for games at any public libraries, but like I said, I'm a bit older.)
Like I said, it was a very special treat. and a relatively well kept secret.
There was a signup list and a 30 minute time limit, but myself and a few friends could use it for hours since almost nobody knew it was there.0 -
I think it's changing but it honestly used to be true. I've lived in some dismal city areas. I lived in one where there were no grocery stores in the immediate area, and as I didn't have a car at that time I walked across a rather large park to get decent food and then carried it home. Where I live now is getting much better but only five years ago the stores were essentially full of spoiled produce. I had to drive a ways to get decent food.0
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If anyone has read George Orwell's classic book, "The Road to Wigan Pier" written back in the 1930s about poor mining communities in the North of England they are probably familiar with this quote:Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit ‘tasty’. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let’s have three pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the kettle on and we’ll all have a nice cup of tea! That is how your mind works when you are at the P.A.C. level. White bread-and-marg and sugared tea don’t nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than brown bread-and-dripping and cold water. Unemployment is an endless misery that has got to be constantly palliated, and especially with tea, the English-man’s opium. A cup of tea or even an aspirin is much better as a temporary stimulant than a crust of brown bread.
Over-eating and therefore obesity is an expected consequence of poverty.
Tasty food and drink is one of life's greatest pleasures. Poverty is rubbish. Therefore if you are poor you are likely to seek out "luxury" goods which bring pleasure to life which is within your means. This has the effect of increasing demand for those items, driving innovation and bringing lower prices. The bonus is that means more luxury items come into the reach of those on lower incomes. And so the circle goes on...
I think its this in a nutshell.
There was a viral article some time back about a woman explaining why, on food stamps and with x number of children, she spent money on cigarettes.
Essentially, the cigarettes were just a small escape, the small pleasure in her life of working three jobs at minimum wage, etc.2 -
annaskiski wrote: »If anyone has read George Orwell's classic book, "The Road to Wigan Pier" written back in the 1930s about poor mining communities in the North of England they are probably familiar with this quote:Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit ‘tasty’. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let’s have three pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the kettle on and we’ll all have a nice cup of tea! That is how your mind works when you are at the P.A.C. level. White bread-and-marg and sugared tea don’t nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than brown bread-and-dripping and cold water. Unemployment is an endless misery that has got to be constantly palliated, and especially with tea, the English-man’s opium. A cup of tea or even an aspirin is much better as a temporary stimulant than a crust of brown bread.
Over-eating and therefore obesity is an expected consequence of poverty.
Tasty food and drink is one of life's greatest pleasures. Poverty is rubbish. Therefore if you are poor you are likely to seek out "luxury" goods which bring pleasure to life which is within your means. This has the effect of increasing demand for those items, driving innovation and bringing lower prices. The bonus is that means more luxury items come into the reach of those on lower incomes. And so the circle goes on...
I think its this in a nutshell.
There was a viral article some time back about a woman explaining why, on food stamps and with x number of children, she spent money on cigarettes.
Essentially, the cigarettes were just a small escape, the small pleasure in her life of working three jobs at minimum wage, etc.
That and tobacco is an addictive substance.0 -
annaskiski wrote: »If anyone has read George Orwell's classic book, "The Road to Wigan Pier" written back in the 1930s about poor mining communities in the North of England they are probably familiar with this quote:Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit ‘tasty’. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let’s have three pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the kettle on and we’ll all have a nice cup of tea! That is how your mind works when you are at the P.A.C. level. White bread-and-marg and sugared tea don’t nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than brown bread-and-dripping and cold water. Unemployment is an endless misery that has got to be constantly palliated, and especially with tea, the English-man’s opium. A cup of tea or even an aspirin is much better as a temporary stimulant than a crust of brown bread.
Over-eating and therefore obesity is an expected consequence of poverty.
Tasty food and drink is one of life's greatest pleasures. Poverty is rubbish. Therefore if you are poor you are likely to seek out "luxury" goods which bring pleasure to life which is within your means. This has the effect of increasing demand for those items, driving innovation and bringing lower prices. The bonus is that means more luxury items come into the reach of those on lower incomes. And so the circle goes on...
I think its this in a nutshell.
There was a viral article some time back about a woman explaining why, on food stamps and with x number of children, she spent money on cigarettes.
Essentially, the cigarettes were just a small escape, the small pleasure in her life of working three jobs at minimum wage, etc.
That and tobacco is an addictive substance.
Inb4 "sugar addiction".0 -
lemurcat12 wrote: »I do find the discussion somewhat frustrating, like people are talking past each other.
i'm just skimming since last read, and not caught up anyway. but from as far as i've gotten, it seems like people are mostly arguing about the definition of 'desert'. and the tacit underpinnings of the definition seem to be: what constitutes a reasonable expectation for how much effort should be involved in accessing food.
all the rest of the words seem to follow from that. people have wildly differing personal ideas of what's 'reasonable' for other people to do.
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stanmann571 wrote: »FreyasRebirth wrote: »Gallowmere1984 wrote: »After reading these last few posts, I think I am starting to see the real problem.
Unless you are 75, physically handicapped, or a literal midget, there is no reason in the world why walking a couple of miles while carrying 20-30 pounds in a duffel should be considered unreasonable. Holy *kitten* people are lazy as *kitten*.
Or you're heavily pregnant, have an infant/toddler, or a child who is unwilling to walk. Heck, I wouldn't be shocked if neighbors called CPS on you after one of your older preschoolers had a tantrum over having to walk.
On the other hand, walking through a poor neighborhood with a full duffel bag (or a store with an empty duffel) looks a bit suspicious. How many people are willing to bring attention to themselves over some lettuce?
[1] IDK. I think most people in poorer city areas are more apt to mind their own damn business and care more about their own lives than what their neighbors are doing. (Not so many bored housewives/SAHM's with nothing better to do than watch the neighbors). I've never seen a kid have a temper tantrum over walking...when you grow up well aware that this is the only way to get from point A to point B, it is second nature. I think the temper tanrum would be more of an issue with the spoiled suburban kid used to being ferried around by car or who wants to stay home and play video games. (though, in fairness, I should point out that most of the children walking with their parents in my neighborhood are refugees, so the walk up to the store is really, really, really not going to be seen as a hardship).
[2] No. not really suspicious at all. Bags and carts are common..people need to get stuff from point A to point B. Any local looking at someone carrying a heavy bag would assume work clothes/equipment and/or gym and/or laundry and/or groceries. (The random suburbanite driving through or going to one of the bars/clubs might potentially think they are suspicious - they are so laughably adorable sometimes).
[on original] I regularly walked long distances (or took buses) hauling heavy books or groceries or laundry as a child, and I am still only 4'10" -- I think the healthy midgets would do just fine. ;P
(Laundry and getting to/from work or the university are WAY WAY bigger P.I.T.A.'s than the grocery store). Try getting up at still night to take 2 buses and a subway to drop kids at the 1 daycare center you can (almost, but not quite) afford, then taking a few more busses to get to work - and doing this twice a day everyday. Or hauling laundry (at least nowadays there are frequent dollar stores that carry cheap rolling luggage that can be used for this purpose - I would've loved one of those when I was a kid). In comparison, grocery shopping is nothing. I think people really have gotten so much lazier nowadays in this car culture. The older urban generation would have thought nothing of walking to their destination (they didn't know anything else)(neither did I when I was a child). And unfortunately, convenience foods have been around for so long, that an entire generation (or 2) doesn't really know how to cook. Prior generations would have had no problem throwing together a soup with whatever limited root vegetables & meat they could get their hands on in the winter. Hell- there are probably still a few folks around who remember making dandelion soup during the depression.
25 years ago(when I was a teenager) a 12 mile total distance walk to get to and from the public library to get a book, or use a computer for research was routine.
And was it also uphill both ways in the snow? Sounds like the yarns my grandpa used to spin when he wanted us to understand how easy we had it compared to him.
And the walk may have been long, but you obviously had excellent resources, having a computer in a public library in 1992 for research. We didn't get email at my (private) college until 1993.
In spite of your long walk there and back again, it sounds like you might not understand the points about poverty some folks are trying to make.4 -
stanmann571 wrote: »FreyasRebirth wrote: »Gallowmere1984 wrote: »After reading these last few posts, I think I am starting to see the real problem.
Unless you are 75, physically handicapped, or a literal midget, there is no reason in the world why walking a couple of miles while carrying 20-30 pounds in a duffel should be considered unreasonable. Holy *kitten* people are lazy as *kitten*.
Or you're heavily pregnant, have an infant/toddler, or a child who is unwilling to walk. Heck, I wouldn't be shocked if neighbors called CPS on you after one of your older preschoolers had a tantrum over having to walk.
On the other hand, walking through a poor neighborhood with a full duffel bag (or a store with an empty duffel) looks a bit suspicious. How many people are willing to bring attention to themselves over some lettuce?
[1] IDK. I think most people in poorer city areas are more apt to mind their own damn business and care more about their own lives than what their neighbors are doing. (Not so many bored housewives/SAHM's with nothing better to do than watch the neighbors). I've never seen a kid have a temper tantrum over walking...when you grow up well aware that this is the only way to get from point A to point B, it is second nature. I think the temper tanrum would be more of an issue with the spoiled suburban kid used to being ferried around by car or who wants to stay home and play video games. (though, in fairness, I should point out that most of the children walking with their parents in my neighborhood are refugees, so the walk up to the store is really, really, really not going to be seen as a hardship).
[2] No. not really suspicious at all. Bags and carts are common..people need to get stuff from point A to point B. Any local looking at someone carrying a heavy bag would assume work clothes/equipment and/or gym and/or laundry and/or groceries. (The random suburbanite driving through or going to one of the bars/clubs might potentially think they are suspicious - they are so laughably adorable sometimes).
[on original] I regularly walked long distances (or took buses) hauling heavy books or groceries or laundry as a child, and I am still only 4'10" -- I think the healthy midgets would do just fine. ;P
(Laundry and getting to/from work or the university are WAY WAY bigger P.I.T.A.'s than the grocery store). Try getting up at still night to take 2 buses and a subway to drop kids at the 1 daycare center you can (almost, but not quite) afford, then taking a few more busses to get to work - and doing this twice a day everyday. Or hauling laundry (at least nowadays there are frequent dollar stores that carry cheap rolling luggage that can be used for this purpose - I would've loved one of those when I was a kid). In comparison, grocery shopping is nothing. I think people really have gotten so much lazier nowadays in this car culture. The older urban generation would have thought nothing of walking to their destination (they didn't know anything else)(neither did I when I was a child). And unfortunately, convenience foods have been around for so long, that an entire generation (or 2) doesn't really know how to cook. Prior generations would have had no problem throwing together a soup with whatever limited root vegetables & meat they could get their hands on in the winter. Hell- there are probably still a few folks around who remember making dandelion soup during the depression.
25 years ago(when I was a teenager) a 12 mile total distance walk to get to and from the public library to get a book, or use a computer for research was routine.
And was it also uphill both ways in the snow? Sounds like the yarns my grandpa used to spin when he wanted us to understand how easy we had it compared to him.
And the walk may have been long, but you obviously had excellent resources, having a computer in a public library in 1992 for research. We didn't get email at my (private) college until 1993.
In spite of your long walk there and back again, it sounds like you might not understand the points about poverty some folks are trying to make.
So a 6 mile walk to another city counts as having excellent resources?
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canadianlbs wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »I do find the discussion somewhat frustrating, like people are talking past each other.
all the rest of the words seem to follow from that. people have wildly differing personal ideas of what's 'reasonable' for other people to do.
A lot of the ideas of what is reasonable for "other people" to do is predicated on what the individual responder finds it reasonable to do themselves. Many of us who are or were urban poor consider it quite reasonable to get on a (usually single) bus 1-2 times/week to go to the grocery store because we regularly do or did that. A lot less effort for most people than daily getting to and from a specific place of employment (especially for those with kids that might need to take a few extra bus lines to get them to/from daycare). Those who have always had a car and consider a 30-minute walk to be "exercise" might not.2 -
canadianlbs wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »I do find the discussion somewhat frustrating, like people are talking past each other.
i'm just skimming since last read, and not caught up anyway. but from as far as i've gotten, it seems like people are mostly arguing about the definition of 'desert'. and the tacit underpinnings of the definition seem to be: what constitutes a reasonable expectation for how much effort should be involved in accessing food.
all the rest of the words seem to follow from that. people have wildly differing personal ideas of what's 'reasonable' for other people to do.
I wrote that a while ago, but I am someone who lives in an urban area and walks everywhere, and don't think that's what I was talking about.
My impression, best as I can remember now, is that most posters agreed that food deserts play little role in obesity.1 -
Ah, if you'd just quoted the whole thing there's context that explains the comment and the point,
indeed, was that it was not about the food desert at all.
janejellyroll said:
"I feel like the conversation has been more nuanced than that (at least in many posts). I think we can discuss how economics influence our food/activity choices without saying that anyone has been "forced" to do anything. And those influences, by the way, aren't just on the poor. We're all influenced the circumstances of our lives."
I responded:
"Agree with this.
I do find the discussion somewhat frustrating, like people are talking past each other.
The topic of the thread is whether food deserts are a significant factor in whether or not people are able to eat healthfully.
Some people brought up other factors about being poor that affect that (which I think are important and true).
Others jumped in to defend the food desert concept (if I am reading correctly) or to claim that other similar issues make it impossible for people to eat healthfully -- maybe I am reading that wrong, but that's what I was getting out of it) and seem to be assuming that a disagreement with the food desert concept means that people are saying it's easy to be poor. I understand that to some degree -- there were posts that I disagree with that suggested the only issue was self control, etc. -- but I would also say that the issue is different than people buying potato chips because they have no alternative. IMO it's a more nuanced and accurate conversation if we acknowledge that people DO have alternatives, it is not impossible for the vast majority of even poor people to cook healthfully, and yet there are a number of reasons why they may not (not just self control).
IMO, yes, there are reasons people will choose not to cook in a time-consuming way vs. convenience, or choose "healthy food" (which they may think of as unappealing) vs. junk food or other high cal ultra processed foods, and I don't think this is difficult to understand. That it's a huge pain to shop on top of everything else is probably part of it (it used to be for me before I figured it out, and that's when I was a healthy 20-something in a decent area of the city). That stores with fresh produce are less convenient than other stores, same. But to insist it's because it's impossible and people just don't get it suggests that if we just brought in a better store the problem would go away (when BMI seems to be related to poverty level, in part, but not distance from good stores). I also think to claim it's because people can't phyically cook is a questionable tactic when in the US something like 97% of people in poverty (vs. 98% of people overall) have a gas or electric oven/stove.
Also, worth noting that in the US obesity is hardly limited to poor people, urban poor people, or people in so called food deserts."
_________________
In other words, then, there were a few people committed to the idea that the food desert is significant (and if you say otherwise you are saying there's nothing hard about being poor or stresses that might play a role in having a harder time eating well). I thought those people were ignoring the fact that many of us who agreed with OP were ALSO saying that of course there were other things that made it tough for many.
And on the other side, there were those who kept claiming that if you suggested there were things that might make it hard (maybe including inconvenience), that you were saying that weight loss was impossible for poor people or that they did not have agency, which also wasn't the case at all.
That's what I meant by people talking past each other.
I didn't really think there was that much of a debate about the food desert thing itself.3
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