Poverty and food choice

A quick note, before I get started: this is by far the most important post I’ve ever written. It’s also quite long, since it’s a summary of most of my thinking about poverty and food choices from the past year or so. This stuff is incredibly important to me, so I hope you’ll take the time to read the whole thing and let me know what you think. Thanks :)

Why do poor people eat unhealthy food?

This question has been analyzed to no end by a variety of people, most of whom are rich, privileged and white (for an excellent take on privilege in the food movement, see Racialicious). I am all of the above, to be sure, but I still want to share my insights on this topic. I spent an hour or two every week from age 5 to 13 volunteering at a food bank. I’ve worked at a major grocery store for the past two years. I volunteer at the Walla Walla co-op. Food and food politics, whether consciously or unconsciously, has been what much of my life is about. I’m pretty set on writing my thesis about some of these issues, but I want to take a stab at addressing it all now, based on my current understanding.

This post has been a long time coming. I’m aware that there are problems inherent with people in my position addressing this question, and with the question itself. Framing the issue this way essentially comes off as “why do poor people make bad choices?”, which places blame on people who have virtually no control over the food system. When I talked to my advisor (Aaron Bobrow-Strain, a Whitman politics professor who focuses on food politics) about doing my thesis on this topic, he suggested that I focus more on the food industry and larger systems. He felt, and rightly so, that by framing the question as an individual choice, I was reinforcing ideas about deservingness in social policy (eg. poor people aren’t “worthy” of food stamps if they’re going to make these unhealthy choices) and further scrutinizing the choices of poor people in a way rich people are never subjected to. But it’s precisely because the issue is so often framed as a choice low income people make that I want to address it. As I talk about these issues, I’m invariably going to display my own privilege, bias and ignorance. I’ve tried to be open about the assumptions I’m making, my background and my experiences, so feel free to call me out on anything you think is wrong or incomplete.

I should clarify that I’m not talking about food deserts (if you’ve unfamiliar with the concept, see here for a personal take and here for a NYT article). Obviously, in situations where people have no access to healthy foods, they’re not going to eat them. I could write another post entirely about why food deserts exist and how we should go about fixing them, but I’ll save that for later. Food deserts are clearly an issue of access, not individual choice. I’m fairly certain that my life will be spent working to eliminate them, but for now, I want to talk about supermarkets.

In the store where I work, we sell fresh produce and other healthy foods—beans, lentils, cheese, etc. So access (in the sense of geographical proximity) to healthy foods isn’t the issue. After two years behind the checkstand, I’ve become convinced that what many people eat, regardless of income, is not very healthy. However, I’ve also noticed a definite correlation between income and food choices. There are some items that primarily seem to be purchased by people receiving food stamps, such that I will frequently look at a shopping cart and think, “This customer is probably on food stamps.” Nine times out of ten, I’m right.

Some of this is no doubt due to my own imperfections and biases. I’m much more likely to remember the carts piled high with junk food that are paid for with food stamps and to forget the less frequent instances when people who are not visibly low-income buy the same things. Equating food stamps with class misses a lot of low income people anyway, since not everyone is on food stamps, and not everyone who is pays with food stamps every time they go to the grocery store. And I’m absolutely biased. Walla Walla is about 20% Latino, and many Latinos in the area are farmworkers, a job which rarely pays well. That, combined with the fact that many (but not all) of my regular Latino customers are on food stamps and many (but not all) buy a lot of junk food, leads me to lump most of my Latino customers into the low income group, which is probably not a wholly accurate assumption. This is the clearest example I can think of, but I’m sure there are other instances where I’ve been biased in my assumptions.

However, I’m fairly sure I’m not wrong about my underlying point. It’s been well-documented that low income people and people of color have higher rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease, and that much of this has to do with food. There have been enough laments by well-meaning foodies to the effect of “How do we get poor people to make better choices?” that I feel ok saying that my experiences behind the checkstand confirm a larger societal trend, albeit one that’s often addressed in insufficient, paternalistic ways which rely on stereotypes of the poor (something I’ll get to in a minute).

So back to the original question: why do poor people eat the way they do?

Many of the social factors that create food deserts shape the “choices” low-income people make in supermarkets. Grocery stores assume poor people don’t have the money to buy their products, so they avoid low income areas; meanwhile, in areas where poor people do have access to grocery stores, they often can’t afford produce and other healthy foods. Before I went into the grocery business, I thought cost was the entire issue. For sheer caloric value, it’s hard to beat ground beef that costs 99 cents a pound, or $1 bargain frozen entrees. You can buy white bread for less than a dollar a loaf; meanwhile, good loaves of whole grain bread are $4.19 when they’re not on sale. Cost is a huge issue. The US subsidizes corn and wheat such that processed carbohydrates, sugar and factory farmed meat are almost always the cheapest ways to get full.

After a few months behind the checkstand, most of the evidence I had observed supported the cost theory. When produce goes on a huge sale (like 50 cent mangos or $1 bell peppers), everyone buys more of it, including low income people. And the produce items I see bought with food stamps tend to be whatever’s cheapest at the time (often bananas). So there’s a clear price elasticity of demand with produce and other healthy foods.

But cost isn’t the full story. It’s a nice, simple explanation, and I wanted it to work for everything, but it clearly doesn’t. A glaring piece of evidence contradicting my cost theory, at least in my eyes, was soda. People drink a ton of soda. Across all income levels (as far as I can tell), many, many people buy way more soda than I thought was possible. And people buy more when it’s cheaper, to be sure. Soda is often disgustingly cheap. Two liters of generic brand soda are frequently on sale for 69 cents. You can get four twelve packs of Coke for $13.98 when they’re on sale, and when not on sale, generic soda twelve packs cost $3 or $4. Soda is frequently cheaper than bottled water, which defies all logic I know of (except capitalist logic, in that people are willing to pay more for bottled water, I suppose).

Even controlling for all these factors, buying large quantities of soda is a pretty good predictor of whether someone is on food stamps, at least in my experience. When I first noticed this, it seemed incredibly illogical to me, largely because of my background. I was raised in a family where soda was never in the house, and the only time I had a can was at special occasions (like family reunions, where I could usually avoid Mom’s watchful eyes long enough to get into the cooler), or on airplanes. Soda was simply not a part of my life in any significant way, so I viewed it as a non-essential item. It’s not addictive, like cigarettes, and it’s incredibly unhealthy when consumed in the quantities that people seem to purchase it in. Buying it at all made no sense to me, but buying it when you couldn’t afford to feed your family seemed like throwing money away.

I’ve talked about the soda issue with a few friends, and seeing people’s reactions has been really interesting. Several friends of mine (liberal, pro-social welfare people) have expressed shock that soda is covered on food stamps at all. I’ve heard things to the effect of, “If they want to buy that crap, fine, but we shouldn’t be paying for it.” Underlying this belief, I think, is the idea that by excluding soda from food stamps, we can make a statement that we, as a society, don’t believe that this food is good for you, the recipients of social welfare. In short, we will educate the ill-informed poor people about making healthy nutritional choices.

I waffled on this for a while. I know from talking to friends and coworkers on food stamps that they don’t cover anyone’s actual food for the entire month. Almost all of the time, people and families on food stamps end up paying for some of their food out of pocket. Given that, it seemed like excluding soda wouldn’t actually damage anyone’s finances much, since they’d be paying for some food anyway, and it might encourage them to switch to healthier beverage options. But if you ban soda, where do you draw the line? Are juices with tons of added sugar ok? What about energy drinks (also currently allowed)? Vitamin Water? Otter Pops? Chocolate milk with high fructose corn syrup added (aka virtually all chocolate milk)? The slippery slope argument seemed like a good reason to avoid bans, not to mention the fact that food lobby groups would never let a soda ban go through in the first place.

Beyond the logistics of banning soda, though, I began to think about the assumptions made when people talk about a ban on certain types of food. No one was talking about programs forcing rich people to reduce their soda consumption, so health couldn’t be the only reason. The idea behind the food stamp program is consumer choice—people whose incomes are low enough that they can’t afford to feed themselves and their families receive help from the government in order to make up the difference. Yet in practice, we’re deeply uncomfortable with extending the poor the same level of choice we give the rich. If a rich person wants to spend their money on soda, lottery tickets, or cigarettes, that’s their choice because they’ve earned the money. But if a poor person takes government money, we still see that money as “ours”. Because it came from our taxes, we feel entitled to dictate policy. And while food stamps is, in theory, an income support program, it provides well-meaning people the opportunity to tell the uneducated poor what they should and shouldn’t be eating.

[[Somewhat tangential, but still interesting: This paternalistic approach underlies the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program, the other large government food assistance initiative. Food stamps provides people with a fixed amount each month which can be spent on any food items (alcohol is not a food, but just about anything else you can eat or drink is fair game). In contrast, WIC aims to provide nutritious foods to low-income mothers and their children, ages 0-5. This is accomplished via a series of vouchers, which specify certain quantities and types of food which may be purchased. A standard WIC check lists the following things: 2 gallons of milk (organic not allowed), 36 oz. breakfast cereal, one dozen white eggs, one 64 oz. plastic bottle of juice and one pound of domestic cheese. Other checks provide for fresh produce, baby food or formula, peanut butter, dried lentils or beans and whole grain breads. This list, of course, is as much a produce of agribusiness lobbying as it is a true reflection of healthy foods for mothers and young children.]]

The other assumption underlying our scrutiny of food stamps is that poor people are ignorant of proper nutrition and simply lack the information to make good choices for themselves. This is no doubt true in some cases, and applies to people who are not poor as well. Many people could stand to make better nutritional choices (myself included), and many people would benefit from education about healthy foods. But to simply write the soda issue off as a lack of education seemed simplistic and patronizing. If a few low income families consistently buy soda and drink it all the time, maybe they could use some education. When (almost) everyone does it, there’s something bigger going on.

I came across a great blog post which provided a very interesting explanation. Sadly, I no longer have the link, but the gist of the argument was that food insecurity is responsible for many of the “unhealthy” choices poor people make. If you’re not sure where your next meal is coming from, you’re going to feel like you’re constantly on the brink of starvation, which means you’re going to eat as much as you can when you can. As a matter of evolutionary survival, you’re going to go after foods which are high in sugar and fat, because that’s what will fill you up quickly and provide the most energy.

I thought this argument made sense, but it seemed a little far-fetched to attribute so much of what I see at work to evolutionary responses to hunger and stress. And then, finals week hit. Finals week, of course, is a very stressful and busy time. I was working constantly, and even when I didn’t have tangible work to do, I was just thinking about all the tests I still had to take and papers I still had to write.

Guess what I ate during finals week? Soda, ginger beer, salt and vinegar chips, cookies, sweet bread and (occasionally) kale or salad greens, because I felt bad about all the sugar and fat. But when I’m at my most stressed, I pile on the unhealthy food. Consistently, throughout the semester, I ate the most and the unhealthiest on Wednesday nights, because Wednesday is production night for Whitman’s newspaper.

Being poor is incredibly stressful. You have to worry about putting food on the table, paying rent and scraping together some money for unexpected problems (a medical bill or a car repair). You’re one paycheck away from being broke, and you have no safety net to fall back on.

It’s also exhausting. In spite of what Reagan and his administration seemed to think, almost all poor people work—often multiple jobs with long hours. Many of my coworkers are on food stamps, because we simply aren’t paid enough to live on. (Starting checker wages are $8.77 an hour, ten cents above minimum wage, which works out to about $8 an hour after Medicare and Social Security come off. If you pay income tax, you get even less. And we have to pay $50 per month in union dues.) Once you factor in unpaid lunch breaks and taking the bus to and from work, a full 8-hour shift can easily eat up ten hours of your day, eight of which are spent standing up in a small, confined space. And when I get home from work after a full day, the last thing I want to do is spend an hour cooking a healthy meal from scratch. So yes, lentils and dried beans may be the cheapest way to feed a family. But they’re not a realistic option for many people working low wage jobs. Add in the fact that knowing how to cook fresh vegetables or dried beans is not self-evident, and might require research, and frozen entrees make a lot of sense.

These generalizations are just that: general. This doesn’t apply to all low income people everywhere, and many low income people are trying to make healthy food choices to the extent that they’re able to do so. But I believe those people are the exception, not the rule.

How, then, can we encourage people to make healthier food choices? Education is important, certainly—people aren’t going to cook something if they have no idea how to do it or don’t know that it might be beneficial. But education won’t solve the problem, or even come close. In order to ensure equality of access of healthy foods, I think we need fundamental changes at a societal, not an individual, level.

First, we need to break the stranglehold that agribusiness has on our political system and provide alternative food options. A variety of people have discussed this issue in depth, and usual solutions include ending or reducing subsidies for corn and other unhealthy foods, subsidizing fresh produce, getting food stamps and WIC accepted at farmer’s markets, increasing access to farmer’s markets and community gardens in low income areas. These are all great ideas. But I think we need to do more.

After two year behind a checkstand, I’ve come to the conclusion that we’re not going to be able to solve the unhealthy foods issue without going after poverty itself. Alternatives are great, but people need to be in a position to take advantage of those alternatives. People need to be able to come home from work and not spend the evening worrying if they’ll be able to feed their children breakfast before school. People need to know that an accident or serious illness in the family won’t cause them to lose their home. Low income people make choices about what to eat, but those choices are made within the context of a system in which few options are really possible. It’s not as simple as getting people to make different choices. It’s about expanding the range of choices people have. It’s not about dictating what the poor should eat through policy. It’s about creating a system where people have agency to truly choose for themselves.