Let's water that baby first, then discuss these unicorn deficit issues.
Frowning takes 68 muscles.
Smiling takes 6.
Pulling this trigger takes 2.
I'm lazy.
Posted on 11/08/2010 4:53:13 AM PST by IbJensen
First Lady Michelle Obama has called on Congress to create a $400 million-a-year program to encourage the establishment of supermarkets in places she calls “food deserts.”
The situation in these “food deserts,” as Mrs. Obama describes it, is quite dire indeed. American children are growing fat because their parents cannot get to a supermarket—to buy fruits and vegetables—without undergoing the hardship of boarding a bus or riding a taxi. As a consequence, food-desert-dwelling children are forced to eat fast food and junk procured at chain restaurants and convenience stores.
In a March 10 speech, the first lady painted a sad picture of their plight. “Right now, 23.5 million Americans, including 6.5 million kids, live in what we call ‘food deserts’—these are areas without a supermarket,” she explained. “And as a result these families wind up buying their groceries at the local gas station or convenience store, places that offer few, if any, healthy options.”
She offered a solution. “Let’s move to ensure that all families have access to healthy, affordable foods in their community,” she said. “(W)e’ve set an ambitious goal here: to eliminate food deserts in America within seven years.
“To do that,” she said, “we’re creating a Healthy Food Financing Initiative that’s going to invest $400 million a year—and leverage hundreds of millions more from the private sector—to bring grocery stores to underserved areas and help places like convenience stores carry healthier options.”
Pushing this $400 million food-desert-eradication plan became a standard part of Mrs. Obama’s stump speech.
In February, she promoted it in a Philadelphia neighborhood she said had just emerged from a 10-year period without a supermarket—thanks to subsidies from the enlightened state government of Pennsylvania.
“For 10 years, folks had to buy their groceries at places like convenience stores and gas stations, where usually they don’t have a whole lot of fresh food, if any, to choose from,” said Mrs. Obama. “So that means if a mom wanted to buy a head of lettuce to make a salad in this community, or have some fresh fruit for their kids’ lunch, that means she would have to get on a bus, navigate public transportation with the big bags of groceries, probably more than one time a week, or, worse yet, pay for a taxicab ride to get some other supermarket in another community, just to feed her kids.”
Congress left town for the November election without having approved any fiscal 2011 spending bill. So, as of yet, it is uncertain whether Mrs. Obama will get her $400 million-per-year to subsidize supermarkets in “food deserts.” The agricultural bill that has been working its way through Congress includes only a $40 million earmark for the program.
But does it deserve a single penny?
In the 2008 farm bill, Congress mandated that the department conduct a $500,000 study of “food deserts.” The study—“Access to Affordable and Nutritious Food: Measuring and Understanding Food Deserts and Their Consequences”—was published in June 2009.
The report demonstrates that Mrs. Obama’s depiction of American “food deserts” is fatuous at best. Lower-income Americans live closer to supermarkets than higher-income Americans.
“Overall, median distance to the nearest supermarket is 0.85 miles,” said the Agriculture Department report. “Median distance for low-income individuals is about 0.1 of a mile less than for those with higher income, and a greater share of low-income individuals (61.8 percent) have high or medium access to supermarkets than those with higher income (56.1 percent).”
There are 23.5 million people who live in “low income” areas that are more than a mile from the nearest supermarket. But more than half of these people are not low-income, and almost everyone in these areas--93.3 percent—drive their cars to the supermarket. On average, they spend 4.5 minutes more than the typical American traveling to the supermarket.
“Area-based measures of access show that 23.5 million people live in low-income areas (areas where more than 40 percent of the population has income at or below 200 percent of federal poverty thresholds) that are more than 1 mile from a supermarket or large grocery store,” said the report. “However, not all of these 23.5 million people have low income.
“If estimates are restricted to consider only low-income people in low-income areas, then 11.5 million people, or 4.1 percent of the total U.S. population, live in low-income areas more than 1 mile from a supermarket or large grocery store,” it says. “Data on time use and travel mode show that people living in low-income areas with limited access spend significantly more time (19.5 minutes) traveling to a grocery store than the national average (15 minutes).
“However,” says the report, “93 percent of those who live in low-income areas with limited access traveled to the grocery store in a vehicle they or another household member drove.”
Only 0.1 percent—one-tenth of one percent—of Americans living in low-income areas more than 1 mile from a supermarket took public transit to the store, the report said.
For them, Mrs. Obama would create a new $400 million entitlement.
The reality is, this is simply some **pork** for democrat ruled, high-crime hellholes.
I don’t think they’ll be dropping any supermarkets next to rural white folks’ homes.
Let’s just cross one bridge at a time. After they figure out these low income momma’s are experiencing too much hardship with the cooking of the food, the next logical step will be to hire a government cook for each low income home.
Let's water that baby first, then discuss these unicorn deficit issues.
For it to have any effect she'll have to. Having actually lived in one of those neighborhoods - and shopped at a supermarket where the older, motherly shoppers warned me that it was dangerous, particularly in the light of my skin color and the nature of the surrounding neighborhood, I can assure you that plenty of people at the supermarket were buying "unhealthy" food. Just like everybody else does, regardless of income, race, national origin, or for that matter any other PC grouping.
Lets face it, people don't buy eat frozen pizza because they can't get to the market to buy a salad, they buy frozen pizza because they like it. That's why when you put salads or fruit on sale in the convenience store, or like they do here at the gas stations, they don't sell very well.
My grandfather was in Italy in WWII but he said working for Safeway in Watts in 1968 was about as scary as it got. He said the rioters came in through the front and all the employees went out the back. The store was looted and burned to the ground.
Michelle 0bama is ignorant.
The people need to use the same conveyances to get to the fast food and convenience stores that they must use to get to the supermarkets. It’s a matter of ... CHOICE!
When my relatives and friends come to visit from overseas, they marvel at the number of supermarkets and the vast variety of foods available there. In and around Boston, there’s a supermarket on just about every major intersection.
I was born before the age of supermarkets. My mother used to walk with me and my siblings all over the North and West ends of Boston to shop. There was the butcher, the fish store, the grocery store. There was Filene’s basement, right there at a subway stop. There was Raymonds (Uncle Eph). Jordans was a bit too upscale for us. :)
She took the trolleys and subways to do all her shopping.
When my dad was able to purchase a car, we discovered Star Market in Belmont. WOW!! One stop shopping. Nevertheless, my mom still enjoyed going into the North End by subway to go to Giufrida’s fish market. That’s where you needed to go to get bacala, polpi, scungilli, and calamari.
Listen, I wouldn’t mind being preached at by someone that walks the walk and talks the talk, but this behemoth telling us what and how to eat should heed her own advice. Seeing that “figure” of hers moving on the dance floor yesterday screams junky fatty food. Please keep your mouth shut Michelle, I know how to eat and what to eat, and I don’t need the likes of this creature lecturing me.
“These are the SAME KIDS that already get all their meals FREE in school so this makes absolutely no sense.”
Ask any teacher about the thousands of pounds of fruit and vegetables thrown into the garbage cans at schools across America. These fat kids, who burn no calories because they are sitting in school all day and then sitting in front of TV or computers at home until almost midnight, have been reared eating fast food because their parents do not cook decent food at home. They eat sweetened cereal or honeybuns for breakfast and hamburgers or pizza washed down with chocolate milk for lunch. This is what taxpayers are buying with the free school lunch program.
Traditionally the incumbent party was coded as blue and the challenger party was red. In 2000 Gore and the Rats were the incumbents so they were blue. The red-blue battle lines garnered so much attention that now the colors have been locked in to the respective parties.
Go to cities like Detroit and Chicago where these food deserts exist and you can see all the old grocery stores boarded up and rotting. The big chains pulled out of there years ago because (a)it wasn’t safe (b)people were stealing more than they were buying which leads to (c)loss of money. If there is a demand for something then people will move businesses there to fill that need, but not if it isn’t safe or profitable.
““For 10 years, folks had to buy their groceries at places like convenience stores and gas stations, where usually they don’t have a whole lot of fresh food, if any, to choose from,” said Mrs. Obama.”
Using this logic wouldn’t it be easier to require convenience stores and gas stations in urban areas carry fresh foods in including vegetables?
Too bad there probably once WERE grocery stores in these areas she’s talking about. . .but due to CRIME, they had to close their doors.
bingo...
Darwin would dictate they starve or learn. Of course, Darwin wasn’t a politician.
Food deserts are the unintended consequence of generations raised without the social skills to survive outside of their government plantations.
This is a serious problem for Barry too.
Obama and the Price of Arugula
by Sean Hackbarth
Sen. Barack Obama sure has a way of connecting to his audience. On a farm in Iowa he commented on high prices in grocery stores, just not ones most Iowans go to:
“Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula?” the senator said. “I mean, they’re charging a lot of money for this stuff.”
The state of Iowa, for all of its vast food production, does not have a Whole Foods, a leading natural and organic foods market. The closest? Omaha, Minneapolis or Kansas City.
The empty suit strikes again. This guy should wait until a Whole Foods actually opens in Iowa before running for President.
They just loved having their dessert served in a coffee cup. They still do it today and they're 11 & 15.
I also made sure they were taking a vitamin every day. Some people say not necessary....I say baloney..They'll pee out what they don't need.
I have volunteered in a food ministry where people were given FREE bags of food (all organic, btw, provided by a couple who ran a CSA). The recipients were too lazy to walk a block to pick it up. I even delivered food to their doorsteps, after them saying they were home. Didn’t answer the door, left food on doorstep. Drove by two days later and bag still sitting there. This happens repeatedly.
31 posts still the truth was outed.
Newark had no supermarket for decades. Finally with the help of the church a market was built. No big windows for obvious reasons.
Yes, it was pretty sad to see elderly women boarding a bus to one of the Oranges to buy groceries. They could only carry one bag home. A terrible legacy of the riots that exists to this day.
There were solutions but people depending on the gummint to do everything meant that nothing was done at all.
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