Why do the poor become fat?

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My mother cant boil an egg. I grew up living with my german grandmother. I was raised cooking things very european. I have since learnt lots of central american, asian and african cooking.

I love trying foods from different places, but the kids nor the husband will eat it. Have you seen the Frugal Gormet's book "Recipes Your Grandmother Should Have Taught You"? It's a collection of lots of them from all over the world. Things immagrents cooked when they first got here, with our food in the US that was available. I love trying recipes from there but I have to make sure I cook other dishes in case nobody eats it.

My kids wouldn't touch southern american food. Differant strokes and all that.

I didn't say all Americans threw out their food, but still no average person throws away more food than the average American. The fact that some Americans stock up on food they don't eat leads to higher prices.

america is a big, spread-out place, with many residents living out in the middle of isolated areas ["out in the sticks"], and when it snows, it is entirely possible to be trapped out in the middle of nowhere for a week or more, until the snow melts or is plowed. so there is a method to the madness when it comes to stockpiling food.

Although it would be a complete generalization on my part to say this, I'd have to say that overweight/out of shape, and poor financial condition would be related indeed. If you're active and driven, you probably are doing something all the time, which leaves less time to sit around and eat, and probably that same active personality would lead to doing more work/earning more money. Also common sense and thinking toward the future has a lot to do with both of those things... People who feel fine today, might eat a burger and fries because it tastes good right now, although they aren't thinking about becoming overweight 10 years from now. In the same way, they're buying that new big screen TV because they have enough money today to buy it, but they aren't thinking about what that money could do for them 10 years from now, if invested today.

Charles

Yeah, or rising global food insecurity as caused by ecological-related food production disasters.

But whatever.

I never said it was the exclusive reason. It's a contributing factor, though, when 50% of all food that's bought is fed to the trash can.

And you think that figure is evenly-distributed among all socioeconomic classes because...?

I never said it was. ON AVERAGE accounts for everyone within a given confidnce interval.

Let's say that the American middle class buys a lot of something that's available, but far less so than bread, fruit or eggs (salmon is a good example). This will cause the demand to expand beyond the supply and the prices will increase.

In poorer countries (lets be frank here: Americans have it pretty damn well regarding food), food prices are increasing because of natural disasters, political corruption, pollution, and because upper-class socialists (your typical movie star leftists) in Europe, Canada and the US fill their Hummers up with biofuel.

But these food supplies aren't actually fixed. They can expand and contract based on demand (although the expanded version will be less healthy). Take your example of salmon. Because of increased demand, fish farming was invented. Not that I think anybody was stockpiling or discarding salmon, but even if they were, fish farming came into existence to meet the increased demand. Farmed salmon is less healthy (has less omega 3's) than wild caught salmon but you can't blame salmon prices on Americans stockpiling or discarding it.

Sudden scarcity (such as natural disasters) does drive the price up. But that has nothing to do with stickpiling or discarding. In the U.S. right now there is a drought which is badly damaging the corn crops, leading to corn shortages (below what was expected and budgeted for) and therefore food that relies on corn (such as processed food and corn-fed meat) will go up in price this Fall. This will happen. But it has nothing to do with stockpiling or wasting.

I don't think stockpiling has any affect on food prices at all because it is not common. A lot of food does go to waste, as any American dumpster diver will tell you, but it is mainly food purchased by restaurants, not individuals. It is cheap because it is over produced and its' loss won't have any affect on international food prices. Food that is expensive and rare doesn't get discarded because it is eaten. If I am wrong about that and Americans discarding food really is driving up prices, I want to see stats. The obesity epidemic was brought to us by the over production of certain foods (such as corn, ironically) so I find it implausible that American food discarding is actually driving up the prices.

I have read (on various health blogs) that the obesity epidemic (where it is occuring) has happened because we became so efficient at producing terrible food. Demand has not outstripped supply (although it may in the future) because we have become so good at making high-calorie, unhealthy simulacra of the food our forefathers ate. This is affordable for poor people and is making them fat. Middle class people are also eating it and also becoming fat.

edited to add: I brought up stockpiling and wasting because you blamed high food prices on Americans doing that in a previous post.

What really makes good food expensive in various places? Beyonf the natural disasters which you cited (and which the U.S. is currently experiencing with the drought), I think it is the cost of transport. It is also the cost of maintaining the health of that food in transport or the cost of creating that food in a more healthy but also more expensive way. Other highly developed parts of the world pay more for food than Americans but also get better food in the bargain. It isn't that Americans are eating all the food and creating scarcity. It's that we're flooding the market with unhealthy trash food and making healthy food into a niche market. We've actually created a fair bit of havoc in Africa by flooding it with cheap American grains and corn, driving local farmers out of business because they can't compete price-wise.

Ok. Look. I know that Norway is small in comparison to the US size-wise, so this might go right over your head. But, not all locales in the US are the same. Which is why your instances don't stand up at all.

1) It really depends on where this person is.

a) If they live downtown, or in a bad part of town, they're less likely to have a proper grocery store but instead, one that stinks selection-wise and is full of expired crap. Granted, this is getting better with Michelle Obama's direction and people are realizing that there needs to be more when it comes to groceries downtown, but it's still a problem. If anything, downtown, people are more likely to have a smaller grocery like ALDIs, not a walmart anyway.

b) If they live out in the sticks, then granted, there's 2 stores at most, one of them is pretty much guaranteed to be a walmart that chews out any kind of competition out of town. However, keep in minds, for folks like my grandma who lives in areas such as these, it's 17 miles!! to town and 17 miles!! back. There is a ton of the US which is rural area in the middle of no where. It's a much larger country than you can wrap your norway head around. We have states that are actually bigger than the entirety of your country.

which leads me to #2.

2) distribution costs. I don't know about you, but I live in the big city nearest to dead center of 48 continental USofA. Here we pay the most ridiculous grocery prices in the nation (exception Hawaii and Alaska for obvious reasons) as a result (save if you find a good farmers market of course, which requires more transportation to get to). Because anything that does not live or grow in our area costs lots of money to get it to be shipped in, in hundreds and even thousands of miles depending on where it's coming from (you don't WANT to know how much fish costs here, as an example, and non-local fruit too can be expensive depending). This is why too, that anything that is in a chain (like a store or restaurant) comes here last as a result, because we are that insular as a city and they don't want to spend more money shipping food or supplies here (hence why my city has such a focus for local business, aka we have our own local grocery store chains). And that's a city! That's not accounting for the rural communities where there's even less demand-- hence when someone lives in the sticks needs something very specialty, they drive hours to "go to the city!" to go get it. Because it doesn't exist in the local store (in addition to a lot of rural people not having access to good quality doctors where they live too, hence why my grandma goes to the doctor appointments in kansas city even though she lives 2 1/2 hours out).

Oh! you mention public transportation?

3) some cities have that and others do not. Some cities like mine have sub-par public transportation. We don't have a subway nor a tram here in Kansas City. There will be light rail again, but, that's not even done yet and it'll be no where near my part of town (did I mention that the city is expansive in length? This is why a lot of people have traditionally fought things like light rail, because it won't apply to their part of town a lot of times). At best, we have KCATA, aka our old bus system. This bus system, not only is experiencing lots of ridership lately, so not only would you be restricted to picking up groceries on a few-items basis, BUT, one thing you didn't obviously account for: This bus system is slow as a snail. Aka, add extra hours (i.e. two hours+) of riding time to your life, which is a problem if you work a lot to make time to take the bus, on top of, how are you going to keep your groceries cool on the bus if it takes that long? That's extra money invested in a cooler with ice, and that's even expecting that there's going to be room on the bus for the thing. That and in comparison to where you live does the bus system hit on all the right places? There are not a lot of places that it comes to in my part of town.

Which brings me to another point.

4) a lot of American cities are designed more for car transportation, unlike anywhere in Europe, where cities have existed long before car transportation did. Obviously, this does not help either. People have been trying to make my hometown more bike friendly, and if you live close to the plaza (where everything like housing is overpriced due to gentrification), then you are in luck. But, I live no where close to the plaza, and the only bike lanes near my part of town go past a residential area and to a fried chicken fast food restaurant, not a supermarket. To be honest, I wish the market was closer. We had one closer, but it went out of business since this is a particularly blighted part of town. Which when you have to go farther, translates into paying more for fuel. Which already happens when we have to shop elsewhere for anything else that no longer exists in this part of town already (basically anything that is not a grocery, drug store, fast food, or a hair salon, is something that you'd have to go to another part of town or a suburb for).

5) another person mentioned the record drought that we're having right now too. So far away you may only hear small mention of it on the news. At most. Here, it's very very real. In fact most of the stout right winger climate deniers I know have since shut the hell up (it only took a drought this massive, armadillos that aren't native finding their way here from texas, a very mild winter, failing crops, and a giant string of days that are over 100°F, especially the 105°F+ days to knock any sense into them) . Much of the corn and soybean crops here are rated poor and very poor. My neighbor, who has a veggie garden out back, you can see it written all over his crops (which he waters daily and still are wilted wanting more water from being exposed to high temperatures) and especially his corn looks awful. He said, out of 20 corn plants, he only got a grand total of 3 ears this year. His corn looks like yellow shriveled death, actually. Our grass looks very similar too (it crunches below your feet as well). In addition to breaking temperature records that have been long held since the dust bowl in the great depression, people who have been farming here for 50 years have said that they have never seen it this bad. We need about 2 weeks straight of steady rain (that we're obviously NOT getting) to make things right again (our house's foundation could use it too as bricks are moving apart and doors are catching again). It's going to be nuts when the new prices hit the stores within this next month.

6) Unless people are those doomsday preppers (who deserve a good laugh) the only time I see people stocking up is if a bad winter storm is coming. Which, aside from the incredibly mild winter we got last time, is very real here. It's one thing when you're far enough north, that snow stays snow, but here, in the day it warms up enough to melt some snow, and then it becomes a sheet of ice. A couple of winters ago, a bunch of people were pushing their cars out of ditches to go to christmas because of the snow and ice (some people even postponed it to a different day), and occasionally we'll get slapped with something like an ice storm (where sleet, freezing rain, or very wet snow collects on tree branches and brings them crashing down, breaking onto power lines, blowing up transformers, blocking roads and such). A perfect example of this was the 2002 ice storm (which caused at least thousands, maybe even millions of dollars of damage), where most humans I know had to make the best of their stock, were out of power somewhere between several days to some unfortunate individuals two weeks, and it go to the point where to keep things cool some people were putting their foods on their back porch since they were out of power for so long and it was cold enough outside. That and you're not going to be going to the store when there is a tree blocking your way in the road that is 50 years old and too big to move by yourself. Those who simply didn't have enough food tended to bum off of neighbors until they were able to get out to the store. This is why the grocery store shelves are bare and there are no shovels and flashlights in sight every time the words "bad winter storm" appear on the news. Because people have seen this insanity before and inevitably had to learn the hard way.

With that said, I try to eat as healthy as I can. I am well-informed about how lobbying affects the food supply here (and how it's laughingly labeled-- at least, what people can figure out about it lol), and will pretty much attempt to dissect the cryptic things on food labels the best I can to avoid things that are questionable-- anything from trans fat/hygrogenated oils (which will gladly give you heart disease), to hfcs (which puts your blood sugar on a roller coaster and makes my bowels hurt and fart), to enriched crap (which leaves you feeling less full). I'm not great at cooking, but I am learning. If you eat more filling foods that are naturally healthy, your food (within reason) lasts your tummy longer. It also makes my tummy less upset as I feel like I have some kind of intolerance to some things they put in the more processed weird stuff. That's the main reason I eat healthy. That and it makes me feel less sluggish, which leads to a better quality of life. As bad as it sounds, I don't want to be like my parents, who I've seen, from the time they were my age, they started putting whatever in their mouths and packing on pounds, are obese now, and dad had a heart attack at 50 and my mom had a blood clot at 54. And seeing how out of breath he is doing normal everyday things like picking something off the floor, and how she struggles in getting around and how her weight makes her joints feel much worse. That's just not the life for me, and they are most unwilling to change, which makes me think what will things be like when they're too bad-off to care for themselves? It scares me. I'm glad my bf has joined me in my mission too-- he had his change of heart after he had to have his gallbladder out at 25.

I'm talking about American stores. There's no Wal-Mart where you can get gallons of egg whites for next to nothing in Norway.



Just like it does in every other country.



First of all, you're free to ride your bike, your car or take the bus to a richer part of town and buy food there. Secondly, a lot of food can be eaten after it expires. If kept in the fridge, eggs can be eaten as late as 8 weeks past their expiration date.



17 miles is not an awful lot. I know a lot of people here in Norway who commute 50 miles to work and 50 miles back home again, at gas prices that are more than twice as high as yours, at roads that are far below your standards and in a tax system that makes a VW Golf as expensive to us as a Chevrolet Corvette is to you (~50,000 $). I'm well aware of the fact that my country is small, but it's not particularly densely populated, so there aren't many grocery stores here.



70% of an average Norwegian's salary goes to the government in the form of taxes, toll booths and fees--and with a college degree, we do not earn more money than you do. With our fuel prices and roads that wear out the running gear and the chassis of the trucks very quickly, I can almost guarantee that our transport costs are higher.



This is perfectly normal in Norway or the rest of Europe as well... except that our food is taxed heavier and is generally more expensive. No country in the world where you earn a decent amount of money has cheaper food than the US.

Come to Norway, Great Britain, France or Finland if you want expensive food and expensive transport.



Your point being? In rural areas in Norway, the bus goes twice a day at the worst; sometimes the busses are cancelled without warning and outside regular work hours, you're lucky if you'll find a bus that goes more than once every hour in the cities.

Groceries aren't ruined if they're in a little high temperatures for two hours.



You also have the cheapest cars in the world. Cash for Clunkers pushed the prices up on used cars, but your transport system still kicks pretty much any European system's ass.



A typical middle-class house in Norway is 700,000 dollars and people here remain in debt to the bank until a couple of years after they retire.

Still, after houses that are three times as expensive as yours, cars that are anywhere between three and six times as expensive as yours (depending on the horsepowers), gas that's twice as expensive as yours and food that's twice as expensive, our obesity rates are lower than yours.



At least your climate allows you to grow vegetables and many kinds of fruit in the first place. Very few plants that bear edible fruits or vegetables are able to survive in the Norwegian climate; pretty much everything is imported.

It depends on the walmart too. Not all walmart selections are the same. If you ask in rural areas if they have specialty items like that, they look at you like you have 5 eyes, because it really depends on how they distribute.

You don't understand. I would ride my bike more often, of there was the option to support it. Here we have hardly any bike lanes, and the ones we have are isolated and not connected together. There are stories of bicyclists getting hit by cars all the time here because lots of areas are unsafe to bike in. It's not like we're a city like Seattle by a longshot. On the contrary, my hometown has the most looping highway infrastructure in the US, and the most boulevard type streets, but this doesn't really help when it comes to bicycling, as it's not as safe on those types of roads. There is a rule as of 5 years ago where people are supposed to "share the road", but most people don't take that into account until they see a sign for it on a more scenic road, and even still they share the road very begrudgingly, rolling their eyes at the bicyclist that they're driving around.

p.s. not all expired food is created the same. Not all things keep like eggs, and unlike other countries, supermarket food here in the US (like eggs, milk, and so on anyway) is refrigerated before hand, thereby made to require refrigeration or cold temps to sustain its freshness. Meaning it's not going keep well on a 4 hour bus ride (yes, because you'd have to take multiple transfers to get to my part of town from most parts of town) without something to sustain its temperature.

Sure, you pay more in taxes and costs, but "With a college degree,.." lolwut? you're a assuming americans with college degrees get easily hired. Our education systems are so corrupt that college is more about people making money off of others debt instead of actual job placement. Especially lately with the economy the way it is. Not a fair comparison.

Define what you mean by "cheaper food"-- do you mean cheaper food as in reasonably priced healthy food? or cheaper food such as artificially low-priced low-nutrition bullcrap that americans delude themselves with to make themselves obese on (even if it claims to be healthy)? Because there is a HUGE difference. Do YOU have to read nutrition labels, to decipher cryptic ingredients that sound like science projects gone wrong like we do? Even when things brag they are healthy they really are not? I'm to the point that I'm pretty much suspect of most packaged food that claims to be healthy. There's a catch somewhere, whether they say 0g trans fat* (*per serving), basically meaning, they used a loophole in law to where if it has barely under 1g of transfat per serving they can call it 0g trans fat, and on top of it, they further attempt to disguise it by artificially dialing down the serving size. They also do this trick when they load a food full of sugar or sodium. Sometimes they rename things funny. They're coming up with new names for high fructose corn syrup every week (which is banned in many countries, btw). I'm suspect of anything with the word "invert" "crystalline" or syrup in general now. And god only knows wtf "natural flavor" really means. Most of the time it means things like MSG (which is also is labeled as such through a loophole in law). They sneak things like artificial sweeteners in things right and left, even things that don't give indication of it on the package at all until you read it in the ingredients list. I'm not even going to get into preservatives, dyes, and all that other crap (it made me laugh, that since mom's co-worker is from the Philippines, she visited her homeland, and came back with fruit candy that she gave to mom that wasn't dyed and my parents balked at it because OMG a country doesn't care to dye things to death like we do in favor of its natural brown color). And substitution of things, like casein for milk in things like pizzas. I've seen ingredient lists that are so convoluted and long that they're as long as my forearm.

There are so many loopholes in our laws here from lobbyists, they might as well be swiss cheese. Hence our congress voting to include PIZZA as a vegetable because they refuse to clean up the contents of what is being put in low-quality school-provided lunches to make them healthier, so that the school doesn't have to include a side vegetable when offering slimy sub-par pizza. Lobbyists, Lobbyists, and more Lobbyists, it's the true essense of what goes on in america. And before you can say "kids should bring their own lunches", I actually did in high school (only took one mouse falling out of the lights onto the lunch line to know I didn't want to eat there). But the reality is, that many kids where I Iive come from very impoverished families, so they get the free or reduced lunch at school, in addition to breakfast as well because the money is not there at home, in fact there are a lot of kids who are even homeless in this area of town now. It must be nice to live in a country that has quality food, a country where the economy doesn't suck. A country that if you get sick that it won't bankrupt you. A country where lobbyists don't inject themselves into every facet of your life. A country where the middle class isn't crumbling quick.


But this is not rural I am talking about, this is the city. rural? There ARE no public transport buses in rural communities here. Here in the city, the bus schedule is more divided than that. It doesn't run that frequently. Sure they're not going to be cancelled, but it'll be running a million years late, which thereby makes all the other routes run a million years late. And you need to transfer multiple times to go anywhere from this part of town because of the location of this part of town. Which narrows down the time slots you're able to do and hope that it doesn't conflict with your work schedule.



Assuming that you aren't going be stuck on a bus for more than two hours. Assuming these groceries were not previously refrigerated as intended to keep at cold temperatures.



Transport systems are very different from city to city. You are assuming a lot. A lot of people I know cannot afford a used car now because of the prices of used cars being driven up like that. And the used car they have now, if they would like a different car, is not worth very much, as it's a $1000 car that needs $2500 in repairs that they cannot afford at this given time. If you're lucky, you'll know someone, who knows someone, who knows someone, who knows someone, who knows someone who can hook you up with buying off of them a dented up toyota corolla that's several years old that needs minor repair. But other than that, a lot of people are either dropping out of middle class or on the verge of doing so quick and finding that stuff just isn't there. I have never known so many people to have financial trouble like they are right now. Money is tight. I laughed recently at the notion one exec had, that since many cars on the road right now are 11 years old, that he said that people are just going to run out and buy a brand spankin new car. Like they can afford that right now. You talk about how expensive things are, but take pride in the fact that your country still does have a middle class.

Remain in debt... until after they retire... hm, that sounds strangely like america. As for housing being 3 times expensive, your country too didn't go through a housing bubble like we did? Our housing prices are deflated. So is our economy. Obviously this is not a fair comparison.



Because you have more abundance of quality food in your country. And better education about what foods are healthy, in addition to not having an overabundance of lobbyist-ridden BS food like what is found here.


hahahahaha. Sad you have to have everything imported, but If they continue with this drill baby drill burn baby burn BS, there won't be something that can support these veggies and fruit on at the rate they're going (a lot of the cattle have been already sent to the slaughter, as they do not have enough feed this year). This was by far, the worst hottest summer I've ever seen here in my whole life. These extreme temperatures are reminding my 82 year old grandma of the great depression when her family had to sell the farm in foreclosure and move because of the dust bowl because we're breaking many records from that time frame. This is not supposed to be like this. I'm not meant to be a desert rat, and it used to be that 100°F were just a few scattered days in august, with much of the summer highs in the 90's, not a string of 100's in june, 105°F+ all over in july, and still hardly any rain at all even if things are starting to cool down in august.

I actually live pretty close to the bus line now but even then I'd have to take 2 buses to get to Walmart to get my groceries and it costs $4 to take the bus every time I go there. I don't know about the other bus but one of those two only runs once an hour. Some people live further away from the bus line and that could add a half hour or longer hike each way to every grocery trip. That means you want to go less often and get more things you know will last a while without spoiling. You also have to hope the bus isn't crowded so that people don't get pissed at you for bringing a full cart on the bus. I can't even imagine doing this if you are a single parent and have a full time job and have to bring small children with you while spending hours on buses and waiting for buses and struggling with a full cart full of thawing frozen food.

I'm poor. I can't afford a car, don't have a license, and don't know how to drive. I can't ride a bike either because I'm so uncoordinated and I don't see how people could balance a week's worth of groceries on a bike anyways.

I miss when there used to be a grocery store nearby within walking distance but they closed a long time ago. People with cars don't realize how good they have it. They can just hop in and go but if you take the bus it can turn quickly picking up a few things into a multi hour ordeal.

For now we have a relative that drives us to the grocery store once a week but when he moves away we'll have to rely on buses and cabs.

Getting to the nearest city from here (0.5 miles) is 54 kr (which translates to roughly 9 dollars).



Eggs last very long without spoiling. As do oats and many types of vegetables. Canned tuna can last for more than a year.



It's like that in many countries. Admittably, the mass transport systems in Spain, Italy, Portugal or the rest of Southern Europe is far superior to that of the US, though.



I know plenty who manage it.



I don't own a car and yes, this is pretty sh!tty. With that being said, healthy foods like vegetables or tuna take up far less space than hamburgers and pizzas.