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12-05-2012, 04:00 PM | #1 | |||
erika
Join Date: Apr 2006
Location: "the high up north"
Posts: 6,127
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Food Deserts and Inequality in Access to Nutrition.
(Maps courtesy of USDA.) Quote:
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12-05-2012, 04:12 PM | #2 |
erika
Join Date: Apr 2006
Location: "the high up north"
Posts: 6,127
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i note that the first map especially is really closely correlated with the election results...
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12-05-2012, 04:27 PM | #3 | |
Snowflake
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Dystopia
Posts: 13,136
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Quote:
How did you determine the correlations between the maps? Even that they were "really closely correlated" --by what percentage would you estimate?
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12-05-2012, 05:16 PM | #4 | |
erika
Join Date: Apr 2006
Location: "the high up north"
Posts: 6,127
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Quote:
edit to add: so obviously I'm speaking in a political science mindset, not mathematical correlation. Just "eyeballing" it as it were.
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12-05-2012, 09:27 PM | #5 | |
Snowflake
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Dystopia
Posts: 13,136
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Quote:
For instance, which food maps show the "rings of white flight republicans surrounding southern democratic cities" or the "predominantly african-american areas"? I'm having trouble seeing this. By looking at the zoomed-in cities, it appears that the food deserts are in rural, or outlying areas. I can understand that, because where I live it takes 30 minutes to drive to a grocery store.
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****************** There's a level of facility that everyone needs to accomplish, and from there it's a matter of deciding for yourself how important ultra-facility is to your expression. ... I found, like Joseph Campbell said, if you just follow whatever gives you a little joy or excitement or awe, then you're on the right track. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Terry Bozzio |
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12-05-2012, 04:51 PM | #6 |
Radical Centrist
Join Date: Jan 2001
Location: Cottage of Prussia
Posts: 31,423
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The pawn shop is two doors down from a ghetto supermarket. I will have to take pics sometime to show their goods. There are freezers full of racks of ribs, with spices above them, in the same place where the produce section would be found.
This is an education problem. The ribs are not utterly cheap, but this is the food they demand, and are provided. Also available are snack foods 3-4 weeks past their sell-by date. I made the mistake once of buying a bag. The potato chips were chewy. |
12-05-2012, 05:40 PM | #7 | |
Not Suspicious, Merely Canadian
Join Date: Oct 2006
Posts: 3,774
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Quote:
That said, I'm all for local sourcing - fresh, local food through coops, farmer's markets, etc. The more direct farm-to-table, the better. Walking, or the refusal to do it, is another cultural thing. Americans don't generally like to walk. American cities and neighborhoods aren't laid out to encourage walking (to walk to my local grocery is to take your life in your hands). If it isn't dangerous, though, 1/2 to 1 mile is NOT a long distance. My ex-mother in law walked a mile each way to her local grocery well into her eighties. She pulled a little wire grocery cart and bought what she needed that day. She came from a European tradition of daily marketing and never kept food in her fridge more than a day. I have relatives who walk five miles or more daily, in their seventies. When they go sightseeing (in Canada), people think they're nuts to walk 2 miles to see a local attraction. It will take major public health programs to address behaviors like these - encouraging people to choose walking, to choose local, healthy foods to eat, and so on. I think the funding needs to be provided; otherwise we're facing a public health disaster over the next ten to fifteen years. But it'll take time, because people have to internalize new attitudes and choices.
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12-05-2012, 06:12 PM | #8 | |
Doctor Wtf
Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Badelaide, Baustralia
Posts: 12,861
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Ahh, the universal finding, proved in every darn paper there is.
Just once, I'd like to see a study that ends "Yeah we've figured this out, we're done here, let's move on to something else." Seriously, this stuff is important. Before even long-term health, how can kids do well in school if breakfast was mostly a cupful of sugar and artificial chemicals? Quote:
The stores sell this because this is what sells. If it was profitable to be selling veggies in the ghetto, shops would. People just don't buy them. Why not? I cannot believe that poor people are completely ignorant of nutrition. Fine details maybe, but a general veggies-good-coke-bad idea must be around, surely? I guess (having spent many years researching US urban ghettoes ) it is more to do with the primacy of immediate survival: I can get this Burger, fries and coke, now, that will keep me going for another eight hours, within my limited budget; rinse and repeat. Or maybe just not valuing long-term health over a short term sugar-fat-salt fix. As for country areas of food deserts, does this account for the fact that many people there have grow-your-own options?
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12-05-2012, 08:05 PM | #9 | |
I think this line's mostly filler.
Join Date: Jan 2003
Location: DC
Posts: 13,575
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1) Cooking time. If it's a one-parent household, or both parents work, possibly multiple jobs, it is extremely tempting to have a ready-to-eat meal, whether it's a frozen dinner or fast food. 2) Cost. Processed food is extremely high-energy for low cost. It's unhealthy energy, but it gets you more full for less money than many healthier alternatives. 3) Culture. Even in situations where the previous are not as true anymore as they were, you may have grown up raised by parents for which it was true. Your comfort food is often what you had when you were a kid.
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12-05-2012, 05:02 PM | #10 |
To shreds, you say?
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: in the house and on the street-how many, many feet we meet!
Posts: 18,449
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hence the demand for leaded paint chips which retain their crunch. Please follow along, Mr. Tode.
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12-05-2012, 05:25 PM | #11 |
erika
Join Date: Apr 2006
Location: "the high up north"
Posts: 6,127
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you can seriously pick out the poor parts of cities - and the least white parts of them - going off just these maps alone. 'Course, in the west, a lot of that food desert is also actual desert. but there's some important stuff going on in the west, too, if you look for it. reservations are MUCH more likely to be food deserts than other land.
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12-05-2012, 08:25 PM | #12 | |
UNDER CONDITIONAL MITIGATION
Join Date: Mar 2004
Location: Austin, TX
Posts: 20,012
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Quote:
Picture the people who come into UT's pawn shop every day. It's like them, only more widespread. |
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12-05-2012, 10:42 PM | #13 | |
Registered User
Join Date: Jun 2007
Location: Not here
Posts: 2,655
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Quote:
That said, it's one thing to take a mile or two stroll either alone or with another adult when you don't need to carry anything either coming or going. The image that comes to my mind is a single mom trying to cross a busy inner city street with a couple of toddlers and a baby in a stroller. Even if the Mom is a fitness freak who runs 5 miles a day, she might feel daunted by the logistics of making it to a store even a half mile away and then returning home with the additional burden of several bags of groceries. Even someone who could use the city bus for such a trip might feel overwhelmed and justifiably so. Sure, this hypothetical Mom could repeat the expedition every day, so she wouldn’t have to carry as many things, but is it realistic to expect her to do so? In addition, those little grocery cart thingies cost money. Even an expenditure of $20.00 extra may break a budget which can’t even cover the cost of pampers by the last few days of the month. In rural America, the distances involved can prove insurmountable for anyone from 8 to 80 without a car. Even if you have a cute little cart and are spunky and fit, it would take the better part of your day to walk 10 miles to the grocery store and 10 miles back. And that’s if you leave the kids alone at home to amuse themselves by setting fire to the water coming out of the tap in the kitchen sink. Eating the foods produced locally may or may not be a viable alternative. It helps to have a farmer’s market somewhere nearby. If you live in a small town in rural America, the farmer’s market can be 30 or more miles away over in the county seat. In addition, if you actually have a way to get over to the bright lights of Bumfuck City, the farmer’s market probably doesn’t take food stamps. Curses, foiled again. But that’s OK. You are going to grow your own garden to put some decent food on the family table. You also just so happen to have housing that includes a yard big enough for a vegetable garden, the landlord doesn’t care if you tear up the lawn out back to plant some veggies, and you live in a region where the cost of the extra water does not factor into the equation. Good for you, but many low income families in rural areas are not as fortunate. Try growing a garden out West with no access to irrigation, for example. You couldn’t even put in a crop of pinto beans and forget the tomatoes. Nothing is ever simple. |
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12-06-2012, 07:35 AM | #14 | |
™
Join Date: Jul 2003
Location: Arlington, VA
Posts: 27,717
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Quote:
It gets a little worse in the suburbs, because you don't have as many signals and you don't have sidewalks on many streets. Traffic goes around 40 mph, so your time to cross the street is shorter before going splat. Rural areas are the worst. There is never a sidewalk, and often just a ditch at the side of the road. The distances are huge, and even though traffic is light, the cars are going 50 mph or greater. The problem with grocery shopping in the city is that there are no real grocery stores in the city. Just little corner stores. edit: I average about 6-7 miles a day of walking just going through my daily routine. |
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12-05-2012, 09:19 PM | #15 |
Doctor Wtf
Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Badelaide, Baustralia
Posts: 12,861
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Mmmmyeaahhh ... maybe I am kind of insulated ...
[thinks about some of the morons I knew who had gotten into university. Hmmm.]
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Shut up and hug. MoreThanPretty, Nov 5, 2008. Just because I'm nominally polite, does not make me a pussy. Sundae Girl. |
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