Eat Well = $$$?

Why does crap, processed food cost less than good, from-the-earth food?

Really, it does.  Go into any neighborhood store - especially in a neighborhood in the middle of a food desert - and try to eat decently for $2.  You can find biggie bags of chips and gallons of soda for 70¢ each.  But if there's any fruit, it'll be spotty, sketchy, probably less-than-fresh, and more expensive.

It shouldn't be more expensive to eat in a healthy way.  I don't necessarily mean even organic or fair trade or sustainable.  It seems amazingly crazy from a public health standpoint that it's hard to get healthy food in the hands of people that need it.

People often wonder why poor folks are fat.  But as income goes up, people typically spend a lower percentage of their overall income on food.  Thus, richer folks can shop at Whole Foods without doing the percentage damage to their wallets that poorer folks do just trying to buy at Aldi.  Add in the fact that various factors combine to make processed food cheaper (can you say corn subsidies?) than actual whole foods, and you have the triple wallop of poor + malnourished + obesity.

Yes, there is a lot of personal agency and choice involved in what we put on our plates, but it's not right that the most vulnerable among us - kids living in poverty - have the deck sooo stacked against them from the start.