Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looking at your source, it seems as though food deserts exist almost exclusively when you're very far from civilization. In which case you can just grow the food.
A good example of a food desert would be an inner-city neighborhood, the first time I heard this term, they were talking specifically about places in Oakland, CA. Which ironically is a short train ride away from the Food Mecca of the USA.
How America got hooked on ultraprocessed foods
171–180 of 387 posts
Re: How America got hooked on ultraprocessed foods
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just get plain unsweetened full fat yogurt. Every store has that. Yeah - the sweetened/flavored variety are more but the basic unsweetened is also easily available. Bread is a bit of a shit show. Stick to something like sourdough for 0 adde sugars. Hormones are banned for meat and poultry. I’m not sure how antibiotics are treated. Fwiw - with vegetarian food you also run the risk of pesticide contamination. Either wa…
In my experience the store has 10000 different kinds of sweetened yoghurt and exactly one that is “real” yogurt - often doesn’t have full fat yogurt at all. Completely impossible to get normal bread unless you go to some hipster store that charges an insane amount for it. It’s just really really hard to get decent food in America, which is crazy because the land is so rich in resources and nature.
The bread aisle is pretty much for sliced sandwich bread (+ buns + similar things) that has preservatives to last for at least a week, and was usually not baked on site.
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I think the secondary point to note is that you're also just running into cultural differences: Americans don't really eat that much bread. And it's not a staple of meals besides 2 slices if you want a sandwich for lunch.
Hard data is shaky but most sources I can find put American per-capita bread consumption at a small fraction of the consumption of somewhere like France.
Having far fewer standalone bakeries and far less "good bread" is not so much that people are eating a bunch of worse bread instead - no one's serving sandwich bread with dinner, they're often just not eating that much bread at all.
Re: How America got hooked on ultraprocessed foods
#173Re: How America got hooked on ultraprocessed foods
#174This all has very big "uncured bacon" energy to me (if you didn't already know: there's no such thing; vendors of uncured bacon performatively drive the same chemical nitrite reaction using vegetable extracts). For example: yogurt becomes a UPF simply by dint of adding carrageenan, which is on the order of calling dashi a UPF because of the kombu. It's not that there isn't a very legitimate issue underneath all this:…
> It's just that "UPF" isn't the right metric for isolating those foods I've heard this criticism a fair bit, and I sort of agree. The only thing is, what is the right metric? And if we don't have one, and know these foods are causing harm, should we just use UPF as a term anyway?
Re: How America got hooked on ultraprocessed foods
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
Canned and frozen vegetables are also non-perishable. While some extremely poor people lack a working freezer or storage space, most consumers can easily use these options.
Absolutely nothing I've seen anywhere justifies the idea that access to food is the problem. In most cultures, you don't need cooking classes because the food is ingrained into their culture, and recipes are passed down. Americans have a much weaker link to their heritage. You might know a few dishes, but in my experience, absolutely nobody knows how to cook. By cook, I don't mean "can add one box of prepared goods t…
Re: How America got hooked on ultraprocessed foods
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that to a European citizen this is a bit unexpected. In Europe, in all countries, you can find roughly the same level of "safeness" of food across all tiers of stores. Go to a cheapest one and the most expensive one, and the yogurt, tomatoes or meat would be approximately the same quality and have the same nutritional components. The only difference would be that expensive store would additionally carr…
Romanian here: the tomato quality varies by a lot. All stores have crappy "plastic" tasting tomatoes. It's not that easy to find really good tomatoes (in summer you can find them at local markets, in winter... Fancy imports I guess).
I think it's a combination of having them year-round (they are picked before they ripen for shipping) and the emphasis on color/look being very high. A good tomato tastes much better than most store bought to the point I didn't know I liked tomatoes until I had a garden grown one. Now I eat store bought as well but it's not the same.
I don't find most other fruits/veggies to suffer nearly as much from that though.
Re: How America got hooked on ultraprocessed foods
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
I fucking hate beets. For bacon, what do you think of these? Applegate: https://www.raleys.com/product/10400628/applegate-naturals-h... Coleman: https://www.raleys.com/product/103101180/coleman-natural-bac...
Counterpoint: I fucking love beets. (and bacon. but not together. yuck)
Re: How America got hooked on ultraprocessed foods
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't forget non-perishable. If you're already having a hard time affording groceries, it really hurts to throw away wilted veggies or moldy fruit.
If you're having a hard time affording groceries, failing to plan ahead and instead throwing away food is a luxury you can't afford. (A blender and an affection for green smoothies is a good solution.) But that's still cheaper than paying for the health problems downstream of ultraprocessed food. Unfortunately my source for both claims is personal experience. I'd like to have an app that estimates the cost of groceri…
Just like $50 shoes that last 6 months and $200 shoes that last 10 years, when you’re poor, you often have to chose the less expensive, short-term option because the more expensive, far far better option is literally out of reach.
Re: How America got hooked on ultraprocessed foods
#179They're cheap, easy to find and easy to prepare. With grocery prices going up, what little progress has been made might get reversed, unfortunately. Making America healthy again means making non-ultraprocessed groceries available to everyone & cheaper, and ensuring that working families have time to cook. Pressuring Coke to create a new product with sugar is not going to move the needle.
You can make America far more healthy by doing the following: 1. Mandating lower amounts of sugar, and significantly switching to zero calorie non glycemic sweeteners. 2. Removing plastic packaging and eliminating sources of microplastics and other endocrine disruption contamination of our food supply/ 3. Banning most of the stuff that the European food agencies ban 4. Getting GLP-1's in the hands of every overweight…
I find it odd that people can think these are not bad for you. Telling your body you're eating sugar, then not eating sugar must do terrible things
Just from first principles
Re: How America got hooked on ultraprocessed foods
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
I couldn't possibly disagree with your last point harder. What's with people and blindly trusting that the pharma companies found a holy grail medicine and didn't rush it to market well before the necessary research is in? Even more than that, dosing hundreds of millions of Americans for life is one insanely expensive and ridiculous solution. Side note, is there good research on the effects of microplastics on the bo…
If you're worried about the possible, unknown side effects of GLP1s, check out the inevitable, well-known side effects of being morbidly overweight.