US of America, where half the population is incapable of trusting their own eyes and would rather believe in asinine excuses as to why 80% of Americans are overweight, half of them morbidly so.

One such excuse is that the poor don’t have convenient access to healthy and affordable produce and if they did, they’d be just as healthy as the wealthy.  First of all, obesity rates are worse among the middle-class in the US, 38% for low income versus 42% for middle income (CDC NHANES data (2017-2020), JAMA studies). Second, obesity rates in the US are aligned more with race (culture?) than income. The Vietnamese international students who worked for me would qualify as low income (only 24 hours of work per week no food stamps) yet none of them are overweight, not even by Vietnamese standards (a developing lower-middle income nation with 1% obesity rate).  Asian American obesity rates is ~10%, regardless of income level.

But making excuses is a powerful lucrative industry here in the US and throughout the global Anglosphere. In fact, this dumbfucking idea came out of the UK sometime in the early 1990s, and was soon picked up by their American counterparts to explain why so many people were suddenly turning into fat asses.  Soon, American social scientists were securing grants to study this phenomenon.

Here’s one, the follow-up University of Washington proposal to study food security among “vulnerable” populations in Washington state.  The purpose of this study:

Objective: We explored new ways to identify food deserts.[1]

Why did they explore “new ways” to identify food deserts?  Why did we spend $5 million of tax money to support this objective?  Because in a preliminary study, they couldn’t find any food deserts in Seattle!  They initially wanted to use the $5 million dollar grant to show that the poor are obese because they lack access to markets that sell fresh fruit and vegetables.  Which anyone who has been to the south side of Seattle knows isn’t true, there are markets everywhere, from independent Asian ones to chains like Safeway, and all of them sell fresh produce.  This Woke paper confirms what I saw whenever I visited Seattle’s south side to look for a home:

Results. The 5 low-income group definitions yielded total vulnerable populations ranging from 4% to 33% of the county’s population. Almost all of the vulnerable populations lived within a 10-minute drive or bus ride of a low- or medium-cost supermarket [emphasis mine]. Yet at most 34% of the vulnerable populations could walk to any supermarket, and as few as 3% could walk to a low-cost supermarket.

The results show that their thesis is wrong, nearly all of the poor (by their definition, which is a relational one rather than an absolute one, like malnutrition and not having basic utilities) do in fact have reasonable access to healthy food.  It’s worth repeating what was written: “Almost all of the vulnerable populations lived within a 10-minute drive or bus ride of a low or medium-cost supermarket.”  Since they’re ideological instead of pragmatic, they can’t admit that they’re wrong.  So they conclude:

The criteria used to define low-income status and access to supermarkets greatly affect estimates of populations living in food deserts. Measures of access to food must include travel duration and mode and supermarket food costs.

They contend that they’re not wrong, they just need to move the goalposts until they’re right.  Here’s how they did it:

When supermarket access was defined as pedestrian access to a low-cost supermarket, the area defined as a food desert dramatically increased.

Voila, there are food deserts on the south side of Seattle once the goalposts are moved!  That’s because “as few as 3% could walk to a low-cost supermarket” and 34% of the “vulnerable” don’t live within a 10-minute walk to a grocery store.  Like, no shit, most of the south side has a low-density suburban layout, most everyone who lives there regardless of income are more than a 10-minute walk to commercial centers. And since when did anything more than a 10-minute walk become an issue, especially when the problem they’re trying to address is obesity?  Fatties should walk more to get food, okay?  (But they’re not going to probably because they drive, the study states that most of the “vulnerable” in this study have cars).  And I doubt the markets are any farther away than the fast-food restaurants the poor are supposedly forced to eat at.  Look around, restaurants are usually in commercial centers anchored by markets because it makes sense to do so.

In many parts of the world, being poor means walking an hour each way to get fresh water for the day.  Having a car, as most of the “vulnerable” in Seattle do, or being able to afford fast-food, which is a lot more expensive than cooking with fresh produce, are luxuries even in middle-income nations like Mexico.  The key point here is that these feckless dumbfucks fabricate poverty to sustain its so-called progressive ideology.  That doesn’t help anyone, it doesn’t solve any problems because it’s not based on reality.  They’re going to throw money at and create policies to solve a problem that doesn’t exist – food deserts and whatever other lame excuses they come up as to why people are obese.

So we throw money to fund studies that should never have happened, just spend 20 minutes at the grocery line at low cost groceries with lots of fresh produce like Winco or Grocery Outlet (where I shop) to see what people buy. Not just Sunny Delight and sugary yogurt (both of which are probably deemed healthy), but also expensive stupid shit like boneless and skinless chicken breast, which isn’t healthier than the more affordable leg and thigh still intact.

It’s learned helplessness, not food deserts, that makes people fat. And the academics who push this nonsense onto people know it; they couldn’t care less about the harm it causes. All they care about is preserving and advancing their ego-driven political identity, built on the idea that inequality ruins society. Ironically, they’re the ones creating more inequality.

Want to learn how to cook healthy and tasty meals for $5 a day, per person?  Check out our latest cookbook, How to Cook Like a Peasant. 

Here’s one recommendation our cookbook: DON’T shop with a list.  Shop with a budget and keep shrinking that budget until you get it to where you want it.  You don’t need eggs if it’s expensive.  You need protein, just find the ones that are the most affordable.  Be flexible.  Be a Jedi chef.

[1] Am J Public Health. 2012 October; 102(10): e32–e39.

Published online 2012 October. doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2012.300675