alt Hacker News> When people eat non-nutritious food it's not because the conglomerates are pushing it on them. It's because they choose it.
Ah yes, the capitalist trick of blaming the consumer for structural failings.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-access-research-... - food desert map.
Especially in food deserts, sometimes the only places to buy food are from gas stations. Guess what they serve? Toxic shit that somehow identifies as food.
Opening state-run groceries is essential in fixing that many food deserts, but so many would howl of socialism.
Even Adam Smith warned that companies and capitalists would not help with infrastructure. Food access is one such area.
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I'm not against state-run groceries, one of the best grocers in this country is operated by the federal government. Food deserts are a problem, and we already have tools to solve them.
But you're putting far too much weight on food deserts on "why do Americans eat so much junk food". 6% of Americans live in food deserts. I imagine way more than 6% of Americans regularly eat junk food.
Food deserts are a methodologically fraught concept. The inclusion criteria are basically arbitrary; vary the distance or income thresholds by modest amounts, and the maps change drastically. It also buckets everyone living in a census tract to the geometric center of that tract, so that people living five minutes walk from a grocery store still count as living in a food desert. On top of that, they don't account for public (or private) transportation, using straight line distance as a proxy for time traveled.
The store-classification criteria also tends to only count supermarkets and large grocery chains, artificially classifying neighborhoods with local, well-stocked stores as food deserts.
Supposing those methodological problems were resolved, proximity to a grocery store still only accounts for 10% of the variance in nutritious food consumption between groups. The other 90% is driven by buyer demand, as is shown in the cases where different demographics shop at the same store[1].
For the small group for which access is truly limited (further reduced to the 10% of those for which their purchasing decisions would actually change), other solutions — such as reducing grocery store "shrinkage" through better policing, therefore increasing grocery store availability in areas where elevated crime otherwise renders them economically unviable — are noticeably under-discussed in favor of the heavy handed solutions of the type you raised here.
All of which exemplifies the typical failure mode inherent to many "socialist" policies: 1. Misidentify a problem, or solution. 2. Increase government control/regulation. 3. Repeat — indefinitely, as the problem hasn't been fixed — forever tightening the ratchet of government control.
[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w24094