[flagged]
Did you just interpret "I had to drive for an hour each way to buy clothes or decent vegetables" as "I demand ready access to every product and experience there is" and then call the commenter a socialist?
Farm country feeds America, but try buying groceries there
121–130 of 337 posts
Re: Farm country feeds America, but try buying groceries there
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting, most of Europe has much less of a car culture, and engineers seem to get jobs okay.
How many engineers in Europe live on small farms 20+ miles from their employer? Look, engineers can get jobs in the United States without owning a car, too -- but they'd better live in an urban area with public transit, or work remotely (and live in an area where they can still get where they need by transit, bike, or walking). I suppose it's possible that engineers in the French or German equivalents of rural farm c…
>How many engineers in Europe live on small farms 20+ miles from their employer?
Not many, because their urban planning is better.
Bottom line, car culture is not some fundamental invariant of reality for getting a job, as the original comment was suggesting.
Re: Farm country feeds America, but try buying groceries there
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
What real choice did consumers have? Walmart came in and drastically slashed prices on groceries because they had the size, money and infrastructure to cheaply move goods around. This was intentional behavior to kill local grocery stores and it worked, because consumers in these areas tend to be poorer and will shop at places that save them the most money. This is intentional behavior abused by Walmart to intentional…
How do these towns even exist if there are no jobs? One guy talks about a collection of 100+ guns(from my understanding guns are worth quite a chunk of money if well maintained) This story makes no sense to me, just sounds like a town where people don't want to leave and have no incentive to stay. The only sane person is the one who started sustenance farming - that's the way to go if you want to live in the middle o…
Anyone living actually out in the country has already been driving 30-60min each way a couple times a month for "major shopping" including groceries, and maybe gardening or raising some livestock to supplement that if they're so inclined. The folks in these marginal towns are just getting introduced to that way of life, I guess, and that's the story here? If they don't like it... well, sorry, but it costs a lot more to get groceries at small volumes out to little, remote towns, so unless your town grows a bunch (unlikely) people are gonna keep driving farther away for better prices, killing new stores that try to start up, just as TFA describes. Start living like a real Country Person or move to where the grocery stores (that everyone actually wants to shop at, apparently) are.
Re: Farm country feeds America, but try buying groceries there
#124[flagged]
Oh yeah that would be great if we could have afforded it. Not everyone lived in a world where they could "get out and enjoy ethnic food" and some having it local and have the ability to make it yourself was the only option.
Your comment comes off very condescending.
Re: Farm country feeds America, but try buying groceries there
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I doubt you can name a single Republican politician who has run and been elected on this platform. A whole lot of Republican politicians since around 2000 (including George W. Bush) have run for and been elected to federal office on an overt platform of dismantling both the revenue and benefit payment sides of Social Security. Sure, the soundbite has been “saving social security”, but the concrete policy of dismant…
So, can you name a single Republican politician or not? I'm still waiting for a name and a winning campaign from this century.
https://lmgtfy.com/?q=republican+politicians+dismantling+soc...
C'mon, is "Republicans routinely run against entitlement programs" really some crazy controversial assertion you think isn't remotely backed up by reality?
Re: Farm country feeds America, but try buying groceries there
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Out of curiosity: why did you choose to live in such a remote/rural place?
stevehawk's reasons are not far off. I'd add that my wife really loves the scope of practice - she does literally everything from delivering babies (w/an occasional C-section) to gerontology, from addiction medicine to ER. This just doesn't happen elsewhere. And we like the space. The road we live on ends in a wilderness area, the hiking and X-C skiing and so on is amazing. And both us and our 6 year old love having…
Thank you both for your answers!
Re: Farm country feeds America, but try buying groceries there
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh for sure, but stores focused on bringing high margin cheap imported goods and base minimum wage jobs into communities that formerly bought locally produced goods does not exactly help this problem. Dollar General's expansion would burn if the minimum wage were raised.
That would be a pretty strong incentive for certain groups to oppose a minimum wage hike then. In my experience, a small town in the midwest is likely to have 1. A grocery store, 2. A hardware store, and 3. a Dollar General. If you come along with a plan that is going to shutter one of the three remaining businesses where you can buy actual day to day goods, people aren't going to be too thrilled.
Very much so.
Re: Farm country feeds America, but try buying groceries there
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh for sure, but stores focused on bringing high margin cheap imported goods and base minimum wage jobs into communities that formerly bought locally produced goods does not exactly help this problem. Dollar General's expansion would burn if the minimum wage were raised.
communities that formerly bought locally produced goods How long has it been since these communities actually did that? Small towns can't really support the diversity of industry it takes to buy more local goods than shipped-in goods in a modern-day lifestyle.
Sorry, by locally produced, I'm referring to (mostly) foodstuffs, additionally, local small retailers that were resellers.
Re: Farm country feeds America, but try buying groceries there
#129We are very fortunate. We live in a very rural, conservative, very northern coastal town of California (next door to Oregon). Our typical shopping day has us first visiting a local farm to purchase Eggs, Cream, Beef, and Pork products all organic and locally grown (Alexandre Family Farms). Our next stop is the farm stand for our local organic farm to get in-season fresh vegetables picked very recently (Ocean Air Farm…
Crescent City?
Yep. A few miles north of town. Beautiful area, mostly nice people. The few who are not are easy to avoid :)
Re: Farm country feeds America, but try buying groceries there
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
The car dependency of rural America is certainly worth discussing, and this specific grocery store case does have consequences. As one example, in towns like this retirement homes or apartments catering to older people are often within walking or shuttle distance of a town center with a grocery store, which helps preserve independence for people who no longer drive. But the focus of the article is strange, and seems…
The reporter made the mistake of not measuring distance in a unit of time! 10 miles in rural areas is just more than 10 minutes if you obey the speed limit - nobody actually does that though, so in reality it probably is less than 10 minutes. The same distance in NYC could be well over an hour (Note that I don't live in NYC so I have to guess). Depending of course on where you are going and how you get there, but mos…
It's particularly surprising since the story references "rural food deserts" and cites the USDA "number living 10 miles from a grocer" statistic, but doesn't put 2 and 2 together. The USDA publishes that stat because of its food desert definition: "more than one mile from a supermarket in urban or suburban areas, and more than 10 miles from a supermarket in rural areas".
Now, the USDA definition sound weirdly broad to me. I apparently grew up in a suburban 'food desert' which encompassed most of the town, including several extremely rich subdivisions. Since it was a suburb with practically no traffic or stoplights, that means "desert" applies to a ~15 minute walk or ~3 minute drive to the store. And in a town with brutal winters and minimal public transit, even the sub-poverty-line families outside that 1 mile radius completely relied on cars. So looking into this has made me more skeptical of "23.5M Americans live in food deserts".
(Ironically, people did what this story promotes: bought short-lifespan foods at the close store, and expensive or bulk goods >10 miles away. The USDA just needed to apply its rural definition to that suburb.)
But the USDA at least has the right idea: access is defined by time and effort, not distance. Time is fairly obvious; walking, public transit, and driving in traffic are all slower. More subtly, my experience living 20+ minutes from groceries in a rural and an urban setting is that it was much more pleasant with a car than on foot. With a car, you can freely get heavy or bulky stuff, stock up for longer, go after dark when you're tired, or shop in summer and winter without spoiled groceries or frostbite.
There's no way to write this story effectively without understanding that 10 miles can be 10 minutes, or that for farms outside these small towns everything is 10+ miles away. Hence the people in New Mexico saying that a grocer right in town is still less good than driving 45 miles to a better store: you're already planning major trips to get goods regardless.