Wayfinding in a Food Desert

A comment from a friend has really got me thinking these last few days.  If I really want to be authentic, why am I not eating frozen dinners and pop?  Most subsidy recipients aren’t health-conscious vegetarians, right?  It’s a stereotype that we’re all well aware of, but my buddy isn’t far off: it all too often rings true.

When I lived in Toronto, a dear friend and I shared an apartment across the street from one of the most sizeable housing projects in the country.  Some of my fellow grocery store patrons were likely recipients of social assistance.  I would almost always take note of the stocks in the checkout aisles in front of me.  Sure enough, what I saw was often dominated by frozen dinners, pop or “fruit drink”, cereal, or other packaged or prepared foods.  Speaking now from experience, this food is not cheap, it’s not healthy and it’s certainly not fun.

Why was everyone paying for and then consuming this garbage?  Was it a product of successful marketing?  Short-term thinking?  Exhaustion from low-income life’s daily toils?  Addiction (seriously, there’s science to this)?  Lack of basic cooking skills or desire to make wonderful food?  Was this apathetic consumption a result of the lasting boredom I’m starting to feel?

One additional theory I’ll throw to the mix has everything to do with Food Deserts: landscapes where the acquisition of fresh food is made difficult by the distance, and means of traveling to, the nearest vegetable.  In urban Toronto, a person’s position could be worsened by not owning a car, in Northern BC, aggravated by the sky-high costs of fresh produce trucked in from the south.  For me in Toronto, the only accessible grocery supported sickly produce and stocked few whole foods, focusing their attention and their shelf space on Hungry Mans and Kool-Aid.  Thriftier shoppers turned a blind eye to the gimmicks and bought bags of brutalized chicken pieces, hefty sacks of rice and gigantic (if pale) cabbage, but they weren’t the majority.

Far from concluding this dialogue, I’ll leave only open questions.  What influences are making it difficult to eat well on a few dollars in your community?  Furthermore, beyond actual access limitations or skillsets, what about our culture has created this climate where frozen dinners and pop are considered low cost in any interpretation of the words?  Take that one (or this one) to the dinner table.

For this, I owe Frankie a pack of Twizzlers and a Diet Coke.

-S