The low-income Hispanic family that is portrayed not only have to struggle under the weight of balancing 2 jobs for the parents, but the father has type II diabetes and must pay a large part of his monthly salary for medication to help him stay alive. There’s a poignant where the family is in a grocery store and the youngest daughter wants to buy some fruit, but they realize that they can stretch their dollar further if they buy something else.

This family, and there are millions like them across America, deserves our compassion, not criticism. They also deserve to have a food system that makes healthy choices like fruits and vegetables affordable – our current commodity system subsidizes specific crops so products made with them are cheap and ubiquitous. Unfortunately, these are not the same foods that are healthiest nor lead to good nutrition.

As someone who has lived in urban environments, 1 block south of Harlem for a year and now lives in rural Iowa, I can tell you from experience that the food choices that people have available to them in these areas from a realistic and economical perspective is the wrong kind.

Both urban and rural America are known food deserts, were cheap, fast food is abundant and affordable, while healthy food is much more scarce.

The goal of our movement needs to focus on solutions, not blame the victims. I recommend that everyone see this movie and then work towards creating solutions and building a sustainable food future.

And when I was in college (and that was only 6 years ago) when I was at that supermarket I also picked up plenty of TV dinners, Raman noodles and 99 cent boxes of brownie mix as a treat. Very few vegetables, because I thought it was “too expensive”. I bought meals off of the 99 cent menu at Micky D’s or Wendy’s almost every day because it was “cheap.” After I graduated I continued with the same habits because it was what I was used to.

In 2007 I went to the doctor for a physical and was told I was 35 lbs overweight (which I already knew) but I was also told I has high cholesterol, which is not in my family history so its unlikely to have been genetic. They were talking about putting me on Lipitor at **26 YEARS OLD!!!** That’s eff-ed up! I wanted to try to control with diet and exercise instead. I tried all kinds of fad diets and failed on all of them. Exercise helped for the first 10 lbs but then I stalled. I finally told myself I’m going to learn how to cook and shop for good foods even if it was inconvenient. I took the money my uninsured butt would have spent on medication and put it towards less processed food instead. Two years later I’m *40* lbs lighter and my cholesterol is perfectly normal. I’m not psychotic about it, I treat myself to some fries from Micky D’s when I’m craving, but now its a treat instead of a mainstay.

I know I sound like an infomercial, but my point is that while the processed food was cheap upfront it was costing me my health! Never mind the monetary costs for medication in the short term and possible hospitalization for things like bypass surgery in the long term!

I never said I purchased the beef in a 2oz package. I purchased a 2lb package for $5. The zucchini was a rather large half pounder and cost me 1 dollar. It was also an a la carte purchase from a CSA based farm I frequent. I used it to make a heartier sauce, so with was approximately 2 ounces of zucchini to make the sauce heartier. The bulk of the meal was the wheat pasta. And yes, I am fortunate enough to live in an area of the country where obtaining these foods are possible.

Though I don’t know why I’m bothering to try to clarify since I can’t figure out what the point of your post is. You seem to be angry at local food and organic food and industrial food all at the same time. What is your proposed solution? Without a demand for local and/or clean food big agribusiness will continue to exploit EVERYONE, not just the poor or the migrant workers.

No one’s saying that its easy for everyone to find the sort of food I’ve posted about, but it will never GET any easier until people who do have the means to create the demand go out there and use their dollars to purchase local or organic or clean foods that adhere to at least a basic standard of not being complete crap. We may never get it perfect, but we can get it better.

You don’t have to believe me and chances are few will because it’s not comfortable and the reality is so outrageous which ironically allows Agribusiness to continue in such outrageous ways since it all seems so unbelievable. But I’m not just making stuff up like Big Ag does or their sycophants at places like the Hudson Institute or “Center for Consumer Freedom” to name just a couple shilling astroturf groups that get assembled to muddle the facts for the companies without tainting them as much directly.

But really, show me where one can get grass-fed beef in 2 ounce packages for less than $5 a pound. I’d love to see research on that as well. Until then by all means dismiss how poorly people are able to eat based on personally known circumstances and the idea I haven’t provided dozens of links to info which are readily available if one cared enough to find it instead of blaming those with the least. As long as we are ignorant we can continue to consume in bliss.

The cheaper food gets the harder it is to afford for those with the least who are the ones with even less when food is made cheaply.

It’s cheap food for a reason too. They can’t make it cheap enough to be worth the price no matter how low they sell it.

Speaking of research, I’d love Syd to provide some. I don’t like reading blanket statements w/o backup evidence.
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And that must have been one big-a** zucchini to feed two people a decent serving of vegetable matter in just 1/4th its totality. The zucchini at the market last weekend was going for $3.50 a pound and they were tiny. A good amount of veggies for two people would be a pound of spinach and pound of zucchini.

Part of the problem is that calorie for calorie a burger of questionable origin is going to provide much more calories for less than a buck than a similarly priced cucumber. Just the other day on Oprah Doctor Oz was showing people who ate 11 pounds of vegetables each day for 14 days and still lost weight (and 25% of their cholesterol levels). Think about it, 11 pounds at an average $3 per pound is $33 a day for someone who’s not all that active like a field worker is likely to be. A pint of strawberries is $3 and lasts about 5 minutes among two people.

Yes, the burger is subsidized by the taxpayer from the corn in the oil and HFCS to the corn fed to the factory-farmed feedlot beef (or expired dairy cow). That’s the only reason it’s affordable and all the more reason to tax it not because it’s junk but to pay for the environmental and social costs of the food which get externalized. But a burger, no matter how many calories get stuffed into it will never have the nutrients the body needs that come from the plants.

As to industrial organic (which is still a small percentage of the total food sold) such as that available in Wal-Mart, it’s hard to say where it might come from originally but one could play the odds and guess China correctly most of the time. Almost all juices these days are apple-based and that base is from China. Have something with tomatoes? China produces more tomatoes than any other country (nearly 3 times as much as the US which is second) and most are for production and export. Honey? Full of illegal pesticides and laundered via Australia and other countries to be sold in the United States. That’s just scratching the surface.

Maybe the phrase “dirt-poor” came from places such as Haiti where they really are eating dirt just to fill their empty tummies. Why? Because the way the system works in the US is that we dump subsidized “Miami Rice” on them as well as the chicken bits such as backs, innards and feet we picky Americans won’t eat which has caused the collapse of their farms and food systems. Pretty nifty, eh? Pure agribusiness politics!

But we haven’t even gone into the reality that the cheap that’s being pushed on the Hispanic here is the same industrial crap that’s caused so many to be that poor.

And the dissing on the poor here in the comments is in really nasty form. Fine to make your own food if you actually have a kitchen, refrigerator, pots, pans, dishes and oh yes, a freaking market to buy all this stuff from as well as a way to get there and back. We haven’t even discussed storage issues or spices (as well as those things that require a bit more investment such as oils). Go live in an over-priced one room hotel unit with 6 others in the middle of a ghetto where the only options are the fast food outlets such as South Central LA. It’s called a “Food Desert” for a reason.

I don’t think people really understand what dirt poor is until they actually live it and that includes having to move every few weeks if not more often. When that’s happening you don’t often worry about hauling kitchen supplies from point to unknown next point. And yes, lots of people end up in by-the-week hotels because renting an apartment requires first/last, deposits, and credit checks if not also a fee to a realtor.

Seriously, read about the migrant workers woes (in another post here on this site) and take a look at the kitchens they have to work with. Imagine trying to get groceries back and forth each day after working in fields for 10+ hours (there are no laws for farm work protecting overtime, strikes, or other work protections most others in the US enjoy and rely on). Worse, talk about the company store syndrome where the workers are charged high prices for accommodations on-site which they have to work off making them indentured (in Florida there is actually slave conditions to bring us all out-of-season tomatoes and orange juice). So yes, when in town a 99¢ burger becomes a heck of deal. It’s not enough nor is it really a bargain but it sure is marketed that way.

Not to mention how obnoxiously insensitive is it to shove Americanized Italian food and customs down a Latino throat. When’s the last time you were comfortable making food from scratch you’d never prepared before, perhaps reading the recipe in Chinese? Truly, walk two moons in another’s moccasins. Then maybe you can hop on the judgmental pulpit and preach some workable solutions. Probably will find the best solutions are top-down rather than blame the victim though. Good gosh, a CSA for someone with insecure housing? Get real! It’s so much easier to save money when you actually have a little of it to play around with.