So true, and at least one local chain is working hard to serve some of the S and SW areas of Cook County and Chicago.
I’ve lived in Detroit the past 4 years. What the author misses, IMO, is that ghetto outcomes are as much about social (ghetto) norms as they are about opportunities. Opportunities of every stripe that are shoehorned in with all the good intentions in the world won’t change generations of societal molding.
Example: Fresh produce is no longer hard to find in Detroit. And indeed, some people here are buying it – presumably to eat. But some (maybe half?) are not. Even those who pick up collard greens are also buying cases of soda, bags of chips, cans of “Vienna sausages” and mountains of meat for the weekend BBQ. I know this because I stand in line at local grocery markets 2-3 times/week. I’m literally always the only person buying mostly produce. My grocery selection stands out like a sore thumb as white person’s food.
Detroit also has upscale stores in its downtown area and in the less downtrodden neighborhoods. Do people shop there? Sure, a few do. But something like 80% go to their favorite dollar store instead for everything except power tools and car parts.
The most heavily trafficked shops throughout Detroit are not those with gleaming supplies of plumbing and bath fixtures. Nope. Liquor stores are where you’ll find people shopping in numbers.
Because that’s where they’ve always shopped. And that’s what they’ve always eaten. And that’s what their friends, their parents, and they’re neighbors do. That’s what they choose because – like all humans – they’ve learned what is normative from those around them.
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I don’t live in a food desert . What I see at my upscale supermarket are more and more high-calorie packaged foods being bought by my ever-fattening neighbors.
Just about everyone is overweight now to the point that it’s become accepted as the norm and we normal weight people are thought to be too skinny.
This problem needs to be addressed as much as getting good food to poor people. People are harming their health by overeating bad foods.
Only 40%?!?!?
What is a balanced diet? Is it keto, or paleo, or low carb, or low fat? Why do you think someone would believe that the specific balanced diet you’re promoting is better than the diet companies are spending millions to convince them to adopt? What have you done to make that diet more accessible? McDonalds has setup shop right next door with a 24/7 drive through and lowered prices to the point you can get a hamburger for less than an Apple.
Where should one exercise? The government tore down walkable and livable streets to build highways and expressways through your community which means you need to drive to get anywhere. They aren’t building parks in your area, and if they did, the parks are not maintained or safe.
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I’m convinced that the physical health of a population is almost 100% a result of 2 things:
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Your built environment. Does your environment promote taking a car for everything or does it encouraging walking to neighborhood stores, taking public transport and/or biking to get to places.
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Mental health. Way too underrated. Stress can destroy any physical improvements. And who is more stressed than those struggling to find food to put on the table.
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What I understand the author to be saying is “I was wrong before, but that’s because I didn’t go far enough. Please double down and spend millions more dollars on my ideas.” This is a failed solution (by the author’s own account) in search of more resources.
This is ignorance masquerading as science to redeem white guilt for the racist past. Didn’t work before, won’t work in the future.
The author is saying that they were missing the forest for the trees. He’s saying they were so focused on saving the one “tree” of healthy food, they missed the forest of trees, including local retail trees, community support trees, local investment trees. So they could commit all the infrastructure they wanted to nurturing their one tree they were focused on and the tree would still struggle to thrive because the whole forest isn’t being supported.
He’s not saying he was wrong before, so much as he was myopic, drawing broad conclusions after only examining a slice of the problem. After having taken a step back and looked at the bigger picture he’s drawing new inferences and such. That is how science is supposed to work. We don’t always get things right the first time. And sometimes that’s because we aren’t looking at the whole picture or we are baking in an erroneous assumption without acknowledging that fact.
Once we examine the data, see that our earlier conjectures and hypotheses were inaccurate, we reevaluate and gather new data to draw new conclusions. Taking a step in a new direction when your original path wasn’t the correct one seems like something to be applauded. Do you have a different theory that contradicts the author’s?
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Good point, but aside from Texas and Florida, the urban areas of concern are largely in “blue” states where structural racism is still a respectable topic.
Heh, My neighbors and us…we built our own little pocket park across the street from where we live. The city commended us for our initiative. It looks nice too, complete with a bus stop and a bike rack for locking ones bike and an area to park the car too.
I don]t eat for everyone else, I eat for me. At 73 I don’t exercise as much as I used to but I do have a stationary bike I can work with. So all is not lost. Not yet anyway.
Oh, don’t be a tease! Cut to the chase; cut to the part where you proudly announce how what you are doing is such a tangible good for the poor that you’re considered a living saint in the 'hood.
I know you mean this to be deep, but…the basics are a Known Thing. How you get there can be debated, but the basics are clear.
At home? In the living room? Aerobic dance is also a Known Thing. Buy some quality training shoes and scroll through Youtube to find a routine you think might work.
Oh, wait. How are the poors going to buy pricey shoes?! Who here is fighting to bring down the price of quality workout shoes, huh?!? What about quality exercise bras for the ladiez, right?
OoOo, what about the air that they breathe? The poors often live in zones with the worst air, so what are people going to do about that? Or crime? I don’t want to be out and about if there’s a chance I could be mugged going for a run!
This is fun! Got any more “What abouts” in ya?
P.S. You’re not a fat activist, by chance? They do love to insist that a healthy diet is a lie, and that the fatter you are, the healthier you will be. Also happy. They scream all the time about how happy they are, now if only all the thins would die, because their very existence is oppressive and also traumatizing.
So, no second chances? No do-overs? Or is it an issue of spending a few pennies of your grudgingly-paid taxes on what you see as a hopeless cause?
When you get something wrong, do you expect your future opinions on the topic to be roundly ignored, even sneered at? Because if you were wrong once, there is no way that you can ever redeem yourself, right? If you hit the ground, just stay there and accept that getting up ain’t ever going to happen?
Are you a bootstraps kinda guy, by chance?
What one eats is so tied to money, culture, what one ate growing up etc.
Many, many obese adults and kids where I live in So Calif.
I know some of it is genetics, but when I see those cases of soda and junk food in the shopping cart of someone who does not look remotely affluent, I just gotta wonder. I should add that our local mkts have everything on could want or need.
Problem is they do say they got it “so wrong.” In typical academic fashion complexity and nuance is sacrificed for an attempt to “get it right” which in this case is closer to the actual, but as Tigersharktoo points out, involves an application of CRT for a more complete reckoning.
Thanks, now I’m hearing a Meat Loaf parody…
I’d do a lot of jobs for pay…
I’d do a lot of jobs for paaaay
I’d do a lot of jobs for pay,
But I won’t do that… no I won’t do that.
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I have standards and values the politicians threw in the circular file…
Truth
Honesty
civility
decency
Stuff that makes for very short careers in politics.
As an example look at the grown people who abase themselves to be anointed as “OK” by trump just to be elected… Getting elected is the whole deal. Nothing else matters. Election, reelection, staying in office. That’s the job. Anything else, like actual legislating is always about getting elected
I remember seeing a video on this very topic a while ago, from the perspective of a poor immigrant family. They didn’t have the means or the time for food preparation. They worked long hard hours. They considered broccoli to be too expensive for their budget, and too time consuming to prepare. Not everyone has access to a stove and refrigerator.
So they went to the local fast food restaurant which they considered to be cheaper and more convenient.
In my town there are bodegas that sells food ready to eat, this is food I mainly don’t recognize, but is food that the local population is familiar with. I had had a similar reaction when I went to all you can eat buffet in the south, mac and cheese was considered to be a vegetable, the sweet tea almost put me into diabetic shock.
The invisible hand of the market place will determine what food choices are available, healthy or otherwise.
Chicago, for all its various mistakes including the difficulty of starting small businesses here due to onerous permitting, has been quite effective over the past 30 years at getting popular chains back into the city, even to the point of getting a Whole Foods in the middle of one of the poorest and blackest parts of the city and that Whole Foods doing very well commercially. We don’t really have box retail deserts like there clearly were in the 1980s. But we do need to do much more to make it easier for businesses to start up; there are too many permits with fees that are too regressive needing too many lawyers to guide people through a far-too-complicated process.
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Or rather, the word “tank” is doing a lot more work than the wird “think.”
Here’s a simple question. Why don’t you define that “balanced diet” if it’s so easy?
And are you someone who believes that cardio can help one lose weight 
. If you look at any science or literature around this, the only effect cardio has is, helping your cardiovascular system. It has an indirect benefit in helping one lose weight by reducing stress, improving mental health, and flooding your brain with feel good hormones. In other words, the mental health benefits of cardio play a much stronger role in losing weight than the direct calorie burning effect.
If anything, weight training is far more associated with fat loss than cardio.
And thank you for illustrating the point I’m making. You’ve had all these scammy direct to home DVD sellers and aerobics instructors telling people decades that all they need to do is aerobics at their home and they will be healthy. A full industry built in promoting the lie that weight loss = calorie out - calorie in.
Turns out, none of that is true and actual health and weight loss is far more complicated.
No, I don’t believe people should live unhealthy lives. The difference is that you appear to be promoting the same unscientific diets and exercise techniques that scamsters have been promoting for decades and misleading people for decades (fat is bad! Don’t eat fat…) that have led to much worse health outcomes for everyone. In reality, the science and truth is far more complicated. What does the science appear to show?
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Mental health is key. If you’re not mentally well you will find it very difficult to be physically healthy.
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The setting in which you eat food may be even more important than the food you eat. Downing a cheeseburger while driving to work, or eating dinner in front of the TV will be disastrous. Eating a pasta meal with family at a dinner table will be much better.
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Gut health matters. The bacteria in your gut are more likely to consume calories that will lead to food loss than anything you burn in aerobics.
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Your lived environment matters. An environment that encourages constant activity, vs one that encourages sloth, is much better. Heck, sitting on a chair for hours at end has similar effects on lifespans as smoking packs of cigarettes. And that can’t be countered by simply going to the gym.
There is a lot more and much we are unaware of. What isn’t true is the BS that people have been floating since the 80s about “eat a balanced diet” (no, I wasn’t trying to be deep….a balanced diet is undefined. The USDA defined it…it was an f’ing disaster which primarily told people to eat refined carbs…the USDA has tried definifinf it again….it’s less of a disaster but is almost certainly not correct), just do some exercise, and you’re good.