Soup Kitchen Reflection

After you have served at the Soup Kitchen, you'll be ready to reflect on your experience.  As I said in class, you're encouraged to connect your experience with any of the readings so far, but especially those from the past week (Fitchen, Heflin et al., McCurdy et al. and Olson et al.).  In addition, I want to pose again one of the questions I asked you to think about for the midterm exam.  It is: Think about whether some of the social category differences that have emerged in studies of food-related behavior (gender, class, ethnic or cultural background, etc.) might have to do with power, access and cultural scripts.  Or, to rephrase here, what are some of the points of intersection between gender, class, ethnic or cultural background, power, access and cultural scripts?  If you can apply at least one of the theoretical models we've discussed to show how this might operate, even better.

Supermarket Reflection #2

Upon completion of this exercise, I most definitely have an even stronger appreciation for mothers/fathers/primary care givers who dedicate their time and efforts to grocery shopping and grocery list planning. Furthermore, I have an even deeper appreciation for my parents, who have provided me with everything I have ever needed, and then some. Planning a weeklong menu for a family was hard enough; but the tediousness of having meal variety, searching for organic products, and looking for healthier, cheaper options as substitutes are aspects I found to be the hardest and most stressful.
Throughout this entire process, the Devine articles and their concepts replayed in my head. The ideas of dedicating serious time and effort to planning meals and searching through stores for food items were completely exploited in this assignment. It took me roughly an hour to plan the menu, and hours to find the food items needed to make my menu a reality. I kept asking myself...who has time for this?? It's quite sad, I know-- especially because I am a college student and have more free time than, say, a parent who works 40+ hours a week. After I questioned who had time for this, I then thought..who has the patience to do this? The work-family spillover model came to life, actually, while completing this project. If it took me so long to simply plan the menu then find food items, how is a parent (working low wage, high demand jobs with children at home) supposed to complete a task such as this one? The answer seemed to be..prioritize, which is what the spillover model shows. However, prioritizing isn't a beneficial answer. No matter what a parent in this situation chooses to do, they risk some kind of loss in other aspects of life: personal time, family time, work obligations, etc. It's depressing, to be honest (poverty, that is). Those of low SES, who work (and work hard and diligently) are under an amount of stress that, if the average person were to take on suddenly, would wreak havoc. The work-family spillover model of low-income families is a vicious, saddening cycle.

In total, my original menu came to $157.61. This cost included 32 food items, most organic. Going back and trying to find substitutions for the most expensive, organic products, I realized that my menu is a complete reflection of my privileges; of a high social class and of education. Taking myself out of my own position, and trying to take on the mindset of a poor, hardworking parent, I searched and searched for healthy, cheap substitutions. Unfortunately, I feel as if I searched so long to no avail. I was able to save $25 total; however, I experienced loss in other very important areas. If I focused only on price, I almost always had to forgo brand names. This meant forgoing healthy nutrition, too. In some cases I found cheaper organic products than my original one, so I substituted those instead. However, in almost all of the cases I could have substituted items for Giant Eagle brand products and saved much more. Even though I chose to substitute original organic products for cheaper organic ones, I realize that a low income parent would probably go straight for the generic item. Part of me used to think this happened due to a lack of education; but I have quickly learned that, even if a low income parent is fully aware of a food's nutritional value, they have to make choices and, essentially, take risks in order to eat this way. Cost outweighs nutrition for a person living in poverty. In the off chance that nutrition did outweigh cost, this person would then experience a serious lack of choice, and would have to give up certain items-- there seems to be no way to feed a family completely organically while living in poverty.

Alligator & Frog Legs: The Face of Hunger

Here are some reflections from Linda Stout, a social activist who grew up poor:

A couple weeks ago, I got fooled into eating some alligator at a festival (I thought it was a super-sized chicken finger) and also frog legs (which I thought were chicken wings).  The taste is different, although does resemble some taste of chicken in the mix; but they are certainly not something I would choose to eat.

Interestingly enough, I grew up eating these foods, in addition to turtle, rabbit, squirrel, snake, and occasionally, bear.  I ate these foods because we were very poor and this was what “poor” people ate when they couldn’t afford to buy foods like chicken or beef.

Today these items are sold as a delicacy in some fancy restaurants, or at festivals, and are very expensive.  My stomach still turns at the idea of having had to eat these things, especially bear!  But when we were hungry, and it was one of our only sources of protein, we welcomed it into our hungry bellies.

In the United States, the richest country in the world, one in five children goes to bed every night hungry or malnourished.  It’s a hard fact to swallow.  I am haunted by the billboard I see as I drive out of my community that says one in four children go to bed hungry in North Carolina.

How can a country this rich and privileged allow that to happen?  

There are many wonderful programs out there trying to address the problem:  school lunch programs, food stamps, soup kitchens, food pantries, etc., but it is not enough!

We have to look at the root of the problem.  Why is our government actually not paying attention to this?  Why is there such a push to cut programs like food stamps, school food programs, and welfare while often blaming poor people as being stupid or lazy?  Or, accusing the fact that so many children are hungry (and homeless) as somehow being their parents’ fault and therefore not their responsibility.

Just to set the record straight: my father was not lazy.  He worked seven days a week as a tenant farmer and picked up other odd jobs.  He worked 12 to 16 hour days.  I started working in tobacco and in the fields when I was 10-years old.

Even though we worked all the time, we often did not have enough to eat in my years growing up and being malnourished for months on end. We were going to bed hungry because after dividing the small pot of food into the plates of two adults and three growing children, it was just not enough to satisfy our hunger. We would often depend for days on end on a staple of pinto beans, which we could grow and store.  For a long time after, I couldn’t eat them, although I have grown to like them again.

Today, our movement refers to this phenomenon as “food insecurity”.  I call it hungry or malnourished.  Growing up, I thought hungry looked like the poor starving children advertised on television with large crying eyes and bloated stomachs.  I had no reason to complain. I don’t want to discount the necessity to addressing starvation as an international crisis as well.  But we also need to understand the impact of hunger and malnourishment in children today.

How do we understand hunger?  How do we look at the fact that the majority of states that have the highest rates of hunger, also have the highest rates of diabetes and obesity in children?


I never went out to a restaurant or actually had a steak until I was 17 and was invited by a friend’s family. I was appalled at spending $10 on a meal.   I never had Chinese food, pizza, or other ethnic food served in restaurants, or even things like broccoli and asparagus, as we didn’t grow those things in the hot South.  I was 27 before I tasted any of these foods.  At the age of 44, my wife and I went out to eat, I became hysterical and ran to the car just because she would dare to not order the cheapest entrée, but also ordered an appetizer, a soda, and a dessert.

My most spectacular memory of food though was when I was a teenager and my father had enough money to go to the gas station on Fridays nights and buy 10 cooked hotdogs with buns for $1.  On special occasions, he also bought a Baby Ruth candy bar which 5 cents and had two small bars in the package.  For dessert, my parents would get one bar cut into two pieces.  And us girls would get a bar cut into three pieces.  Ecstasy!

Some harder memories are the fact we ate dirt as small children.  Why? We craved the nutrients in the red clay dirt of rural piedmont North Carolina.  Poor pregnant women especially craved the clay that I now know is rich in calcium, iron, copper and magnesium. These are essential minerals for the human diet but even more critical during pregnancy.

Yesterday’s local paper carried the headline that 450 local students were homeless and needed food and other items to survive...

Just last week, I visited my baby sister, Jane, in Southern Georgia who has just been diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer. It was also a re-visit to my childhood. She and her family are low-income, and were constantly looking for how to buy food items cheap without regard to quality. They only bought things they called “BOGO.” When I asked what that meant, they laughed at me and said it meant “Buy One, Get One” free. As the five of us ate around the kitchen table in her trailer, which had to be folded out into the kitchen, with only one dining chair and one office chair (we used stools and ottomans to fill in), I was struck by the fact that growing up, we didn’t even have room for a table in our tiny trailer. I realized how easy it is to become too comfortable and to forget how lucky I am today to even own a dining room table!

Another memory my sister and I laughed about as we walked down memory lane, was a time when my family was working in the tomato fields. Jane, toddling behind us at age three would pull off tomatoes one after the other and eat the whole thing like an apple. When the owner of the farm saw her, he yelled at us and said no more of “his” tomatoes could be pulled off the vine and eaten. We had to explain this in detail to a three-year old. After a while, we didn’t see Jane and started looking for her. We found her lying flat on the red clay under a tomato plant, eating the tomato without taking it off the vine.

Today, there are even fewer opportunities – especially in towns and cities with no space, knowledge or ability to grow food– to find access to food. Some people get creative by stealing, dumpster diving, and/or begging to get some money just to get some food to eat.

Obviously this is not a long-term solution, or a safe one. I once had an employee in North Carolina who told me when she was unemployed, her children were crying for food, so she took them into the only local grocery store. She had them pick up their choice of fruit and eat it. Then they moved on and picked up a loaf of bread, plastic wear in the deli, and peanut butter and jelly to make sandwiches. She opened milk and let her children drink all they wanted. They also hit the juice aisle. Then to top it off, they went to the cookie aisle, and had their fill of dessert.

After her children were full, she took all the empty (or partially empty) packages up to the customer service and told them what she had done and why. The manager allowed her to keep the leftovers but told her to never come back into the store. As an African-American and poor woman in our racist community, she was lucky she wasn’t arrested and taken to jail on the spot!

It’s hard to imagine being hungry. It’s been at least 43 years since I was last hungry, but I still carry the fear and worry that I grew up with about not having enough to eat. I hate thinking about those days of being hungry. I certainly over-compensate now! I always carry food with me, even if it’s a day trip and I know there are grocery stores and restaurants around. Forget, a plane ride! Even for a two-hour flight, I make sure I have enough food for at least 24 hours. I know this isn’t rational. I try to not act from this place of fear, but it’s ingrained into my very being.

Food insecurity affects our psyche. It affects our long-term health as adults. It affects how we understand (or not) about helping our children make healthy choices.

While you can buy a whole burger or other foods at a fast food restaurant for $1, when it costs much more to buy food to cook a healthy meal in the grocery store, it’s easy to go to what many people would consider “bad choices.”   I remember riding by Hardee’s (a fast food chain) and wishing my parents could afford to spend 15 cents on a hamburger. I got my first taste of fast food at McDonald’s when I was 19 – a Big Mac Meal (with fries & drink) for $1.50!

“According to a report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 49 million people in the United States lived in households struggling to find enough food to eat. Nearly 16 million are children, who are far more likely to have limited access to sufficient food than the general population. While 15.9% of Americans lived in food-insecure households, 21.6% of children had uncertain access to food.

Incidence of diabetes and obesity are especially high in the states with high rates of food-insecurity (25 to 41%). “People who live in homes that are food-insecure have twice the rate of type 2 diabetes,” said Fraser. Five states with the highest food-insecurity among children — Mississippi, Georgia, Arkansas, Texas, and North Carolina — had obesity rates above the national rate of 27.1%”. [USA Today]

I wonder if you can remember ever going hungry. Was it for one day (you hated the liver and your parents refused to give you anything else, or used withholding food as punishment), or was it for hunger that went on for days on end? It might have been like my family, where all you had for weeks at the end of winter were potatoes, as we grew them and buried them under ground to last us through the winter. And of course, biscuits and flour gravy was an added staple.

My stories may make you want to give to “hunger” groups or help out at soup kitchens. This is a wonderful temporary solution and of course, a needed action. But it is far from being the answer. The more soup kitchens, food pantries, and food programs we’ve created – both through government and through individual efforts – the worse the problem has gotten. We have to go beyond these extremely important social services, and address these issues to create the social changes needed to stop this problem in the first place.
As rich people in the United States continue to get richer, working-class and poor people have continued to see a drop in their buying power, especially in the rising cost of food. If you go to a school in a poor community, the food is much less nutritious or healthy than other schools in middle-class communities!

What can YOU do? Get involved! Electing politicians who are not representing the rich, or who truly understand and advocate for poor and working-class people, is a critical first step. Working on changing laws like promoting living wages, protecting laws like food stamps, school food programs, and welfare are also extremely important.

The cost of homemade

My first trip to the grocery store was also when I tracked prices, which means that this portion of the exercise felt a lot like the first part - tedious, stressful, and confusing all words coming to mind.

For the most part, my list was very vegetable heavy, and as a result, there wasn't much in the way of cheaper options. Comparing fresh vegetables to canned vegetables was very interesting though, in the way that we would usually think that canned veggies would be cheaper, but per oz., the fresh ones (at least the ones I purchased) were both cheaper and more useful for my recipes. If I were a family relying on a food pantry, however, that might shift, as the availability of canned vegetables goes up, and my recipes may have to differ.

The few areas where I could cut prices brought up some interesting ideas about the cost of having to penny pinch. For tortillas, pasta, mayonnaise, and curry sauce, the homemade version came out to be cheaper per unit than the store-bought, as well as being healthier (in the sense of non-food additives, at least) and taste a bit better as well. To complicate things though, making these things homemade has a higher initial cost, which might prove to be problematic, as it may just not be within the budget of a low-income family to do this. In addition, some ingredients (for the curry sauce) weren't available at Giant Eagle, meaning I would have to make multiple trips each week to save money (or lose money, depending on distance and gas costs). And the cost of the equipment to make some of these food (blenders, mostly) would also have to be factored in, if my family didn't own one. Add to this the time cost of hand-making tortillas, mayo, pasta, etc. and the cost in savings vs. the drawbacks is actually pretty close for homemade (healthier food).

The only other substitution that saved money was using single slices of "American" cheese (Kraft singles) to make quesadillas, which while I was immediately repulsed, might be a decision that a family tight on money would have to make. While I don't really know how that might feel in reality, thinking about it made me lose all joy that I may have had from making/eating the quesadillas, and would really have an impact on how I felt about life in general.

Overall, though, my cost was relatively low and unsurprising, as it's pretty much what I buy for myself anyways. Still, much was gained from calculating the costs/alternatives.

Supermarket #2

            The first observation was how difficult it was to find healthier, cheaper options.  I tried very hard to find alternatives that were as similar as possible to certain meals that I planned out, but it was unrealistic to think that the average family would be able to choose the healthy options I came up with because they were very bland and probably too boring and unpalatable for the average American.  Most of the options that were cheaper ended up being just to switch to the store brand option.  A ton of thought learning goes into being able to make cheap, tasty meals, as we saw in the fast, good, and cheap cooking session.  It is easy to do once you have a recipe in front of you or once you learn how, but most people do not think creatively or spend time thinking how to make something healthy cheap and tasty.  It takes effort and education of food and is usually not a realistic scenario for a typical family.  There were some cases where the store brand was not cheaper but those were rare.  This adds a sense of mystery to shopping because it is easy to buy the store brand because it is cheaper but it is also harder to know where it came from, etc. because it does not have much information on the labels.  This trip took about the same amount of time as the last one because I already knew the items I was looking for, but I can imagine that the time it takes to scan the aisles looking at what option is cheaper would take a long time.  The deliberation between trying to find the cheapest and then deciding whether it is compromising health/quality too much by then looking at the ingredients is exhausting. 

            Again, as I noted in my last trip, I know my shopping list is a conservative one as I try to imagine the average family.  It lacks things for a complete balanced diet but I tried to be in the mindset of a busy family with children.  The other thing of note is some of the deals/lower prices are only offered to those with a Giant Eagle card, so it has to be assumed that the family does have a card and uses it frequently.  This is also an attempt to get people to buy more store brand items.  The total cost added up to be much more than I thought from a glance at the list ($129.37).  I was able to save $43.70 with the substitutions. 

Heat or Eat: A Real Problem in America

            On trip number two back to Giant Eagle, I noticed facts about cost and available product choices that I hadn’t realized before. First, looking at pricing for most items, Giant Eagle brand has the cheapest options. Where there is a Giant Eagle brand competing with another brand, it will require the least money spent. However, going along with that, Giant Eagle has multiple brand names under its own. Some of these names include Market District and Nature’s Basket brands. This is potentially misleading for consumers who believe that they have a choice of who to buy products from in the grocery store.

While Giant Eagle does currently have some great BOGO deals going on, when these aren’t happening, grocery items get very expensive. My list added up faster than I would’ve imagined it to. To me, $250.00 seems like a lot of money to be spending on groceries for a week. If I compare it with the price of eating out though, it seems like a great money saver. Say the average meal is $10. If a family of four eats out for 3 meals a day, 7 days a week, they will spend $840.00 a week. Typically, meals are more expensive than just $10 when out at a restaurant, so having all three meals at home during the week is definitely a money-saver.

This past summer, I was living in an apartment in Pittsburgh, taking classes and working full time at a pizza shop. I was making $7.50 an hour, which is just above minimum wage, and I was really struggling to support myself. I ended up having to asking my dad to help me cover the costs of my apartment bills, because between rent, utilities (which were way more expensive than I ever expected), and food, I would not have been able to keep up with all the payments on my low salary. It is impossible to live off of Pennsylvania’s minimum wage as a single person, much less as a family of three or more. It is crucial that minimum wage be raised so that families with providers working minimum wage jobs can live with a roof over their heads, not having to decide between “heating or eating.”

Supermarket Excercises

Reflection Exercise #1

            Until I had read the chapters in Marion Nestle’s What to Eat? and done the supermarket exercise, I had never thought about nor looked at the nutritional facts of foods. I just never would have known what to make of them in the past. They were just numbers and words without an important significance to me.

            I did not really put any junk foods on my shopping list except for the orange juice. I picked up an artificial juice that stuck out and I was blown away by the difference in sugars and sodium between this and the other foods I had picked out. It was ridiculous to me that this liquid had more sugar than everything else I had looked at. To top it off, it had artificial flavoring, preservatives, coloring chemicals, and a bunch of other chemicals in it that I did not recognize. There really does seem to be a huge gap between processed and unprocessed foods.

            Something that really surprised me was the difference in price between the whole wheat and the white bread. This is surprising to me considering that the difference between white and whole wheat bread is not that different in terms of obtaining the flour to make them. Not only is it surprising, though, it is also concerning given the fact that white bread is far less healthy.

Reflection Exercise #2

The most noticeable difference between products and their cheaper counterparts is the presentation. Cheaper products are much more plain looking in their packaging. They have less color; they don’t have the same exciting look and ‘health’ claims. It is somehow subtly conveyed that the cheaper items are not as good for you when that is not necessarily true at all. In fact, as I discovered first had, sometimes more expensive are loaded with artificial ingredients that are supposed to add to the taste while their cheaper counterparts may be more natural. Of course, the opposite of this is true more often than not. Whichever the trend, depending on the food, reading the nutritional facts is important.

Symbolically and psychologically, I suppose the more expensive foods represent more desirable foods. This has to do with what I mentioned earlier about the presentation but it also has to do in a way with the price itself. The subtle message is: “if something is more expensive, it’s probably better.”

Supermarket #2

I feel as though the hardest part about this assignment was making substitutions and finding healthier options, even though most of the foods on my list were unhealthy to begin with. In trying to avoid being repetitive with meals, I opted for including more junk food in the diet, allowing more unhealthy foods to creep onto the menu. I distinctly remember switching from Cheerios to Lucky Charms when I realized that I could have almost twice as much cereal for virtually the same price.

One thing that really stood out to me in this exercise was that Giant Eagle brand foods tended to be significantly cheaper than other brands. That ties back into the idea that supermarkets are businesses and are here to make profit, rather than cater to costumers. Despite not knowing anything about Giant Eagle since we don’t have one back home, I was willing to switch in order to save a few dollars, even if I was familiar with the brand I initially chose. Personally, other than milk, I don’t think there would be a significant difference between my original choices and my substitutions. I have a preference for whole milk, but for the sake of saving money, I decided to substitute reduced fat milk.

I think it was relatively easy for me to shop cheaply. I’m used to helping my mother with shopping and having to stay within a budget. It was almost impossible for me to find even better deals than what I’d started out with, which I found interesting and a bit funny while doing this assignment.

Reflections on Price Difference

After tallying the items on my list and their less expensive substitutes, the savings amounted to about 40 dollars per week for a family of four. This is not accounting for additional deals or coupons that I could have used to increase my savings even further. Saving 40 dollars a week led to yearly savings of 2080 dollars. According to the 2015 US poverty guidelines for a family of four of $24,250, the yearly savings are approximately 8.5% of the budget. Living on such a low income while supporting children is difficult enough, but choosing the food that is financially and nutritionally right for your family makes the whole process that much more stressful.

When choosing alternatives, I generally tried to go for quantity instead of quality to stretch my theoretical dollar as far as it could go. Instead of the dozen organic cage-free eggs, I selected the 24 pack of eggs that cost half the price and instead of the fiber enriched cereals, I chose the value bag that would last three times as long. I avoided brand names and tried to go for the generic versions. They sometimes had similar ingredients list but buying generic was often a few cents or a dollar less expensive. For a family of four, I can imagine how difficult it would be to shop every week and want to buy food that is easy to cook, tasty, nutritious, etc. but knowing that there is a limited budget. When I placed myself in the shopping mother's or father's shoes, I wanted to buy expensive food or snacks or treats so the meals were not just for base nutrition, but I felt a little guilt because I knew that with that extra money I could buy a few days worth of rice or pasta. There is a certain pride that is associated with buying the high quality food (whatever your definition of that is) instead of generic, bulk-quantity food. Fitchen also touched upon this issue and I can see how people want to be perceived, either by themselve or by others, as living a "normal" eating lifestyle.

Olson et al & McCurdy et al

McCurdy et al and Olson et al both focus on poverty associated food insecurity in children and obesity trends. Food insecurity is defined as limited or uncertain access to sufficient and nutritious food as a result from financial or social constraints that prevent the attainment of adequate food in socially acceptable ways.  Whereas approximately 11% of U.S. households report household food insecurity, 40% of poor households with young children (under age 6) had experienced food insecurity during the previous 12-month period. Meanwhile, studies report that between 31% and 33% of low-income preschool-aged children are overweight or obese, with sex-specific BMI-for-age at or above the 85th percentile, as compared to 24% of U.S. preschoolers in the general population.  However, correlation does not imply causation, so the direct link between low socioeconomic class and obesity mentioned in McCurdy et al is “iffy” at best. Olson et al combats this by suggesting that children living in poverty are more susceptible to obesity in adulthood.  Many studies have shown that socioeconomic disadvantage in childhood is positively associated with increased risk of obesity in adulthood. The three mechanisms identified that justify this association are: class-biased health care delivery during the early years that set up long-standing health inequalities; social class-related differences in parenting practices; and social class-related stressors in early life that alter biological systems to produce long-lasting health differences. While Olson et al has a phenomenal approach to understanding the effects of childhood poverty and subsequent adult obesity, the study was only able to recruit 30 women and their families to participate in the study. Olson et al goes on to state, “growing up poor was not significantly associated with current food insecurity. In addition, current food insecurity was not associated with increased risk of overweight or obesity. We did some additional analysis with obesity as the outcome and it also was not associated with food insecurity. Our findings are not consistent with the literatures that show a positive association between food insecurity and overweight and obesity.” While rising poverty levels and obesity rates reaching epidemic proportions are certainly problems we need to face as a nation, the connection that one causes the other simply is not there. How, though, can we combat both at the same time on a fiscal level? Could we raise the minimum wage and subsidize healthier foods to lower costs and raise demand? 

Supermarket Exercise #2

Shopping for a week’s worth of meals was exhausting enough for me to not even finish my list in around 2 hours (I had never been in Giant Eagle before though). I oftentimes get bogged down in cooking for myself and feeding just one person but feeding a family of four would be really difficult. The ingredients I did grab cost approximately $150 for the week and with everything would have probably been around $250. That’s a lot of money! That’s around $7,800 or $13,000 respectively for the whole year! That’s much more than many families even make – it’s around the poverty line even. This exercise made me start to realize how much privilege I have growing up middle class and being able to have food on the table every day.

I started to realize that I would need to buy less brand names and practically nothing local or organic. If my weekly meals cost around what some people make in a year I was going to have to find some ways to cut back. Cutting back from these products would reduce the quality of my meals but it would also lessen the burden on my wallet. With 26 substitutions I found nearly $42 in savings per week or about $6/day. This works out to almost $2,200/year for my items with around $3,700 in savings equated for a $250 week. That brings our total down to $5,600/year on food which is a bit more reasonable but still shocking if some families bring only $15,000 total (over 1/3 of their total).

Prices were an interesting thing because I never really thought I was prone to “sale deals” or to “one-time” offers but as I started to shop for cheaper items I realized that they had a much bigger impact on me. I also realized that the most products on sale were Giant Eagle ones. Driving me to look at their options more and more – probably increasing their likelihood that I’d buy them. Placement was big here too because if something I needed was placed next to something else that I needed and they were both cheap I was much more likely to just grab them both and forget about the choice. There are also so many choices that oftentimes you go for what you’re familiar with (for college kids that’s what our parents bought) and if were worried about money we’d look for whatever’s cheapest and not worry about the actual product. The current system of choices creates a system to confuse people so that they’ll do what you want them to do, buy the cheapest – if they’re struggling.

The system we have in place pushes people with less many (often the majority) to buying major grocery stores, like Walmart and Giant Eagle’s, products because on the surface they are less expensive. But it’s a negative feedback loop – if you buy items that aren’t produced locally but are bought in bulk from mass producing farms and industrial factories then sent to a packaging and distributing hub such as Pittsburgh with Giant then you rack up the miles it takes your food to get to your door. All those “middlemen” take a toll and are why our food system pushes poor people in particular into buying products that are lower quality and are from farther away. This system probably started due to capitalism and United States citizens wanting products that aren’t in season all the time such as tomatoes or oranges.