Articles about the food system's contribution to climate change: Americans are affluent and want to eat too much meat, but we can fix it by switching to a plant based diet.
Articles about poverty in America: A troubling percentage of Americans are food insecure and have no access to a grocery store or farmer's market near home.
Articles about public health in America: Since America is such a wealthy country, Americans eat too much food and are obese.
WHICH IS IT.
But seriously, we will never fix the problems with our food system until we kill diet culture.
Food that tastes good and satisfies hunger is a fundamental human need.
Does this statement seem radical, foolish, or even infuriating to you? Many people believe everyone should have enough food to survive, but few openly argue that it is important to enjoy eating or to not be hungry. In fact, many public policy-makers and even researches argue that people eating food that tastes good, and eating to the point where they are not hungry anymore, is a problem and the cause of obesity. I have read many a scientific paper arguing that heavily processed foods are "hyperpalatable" which causes people to eat too much.
The three schools of thought I listed at the top do not seem to talk to each other. Specifically, the first and the third ("plant based" and "america is wealthy so we're fat") emphasize making better choices, while the second provides overwhelming, disturbing evidence that this is cruel and impossible for many, many people, necessitating much more systemic change.
The proposals to fix our problems seem to flagrantly deny basic foundational facts ABOUT the problems.
Being fat in America is strongly linked to being poor. Poor people are way more likely to be fat; we KNOW this.
We also know that the areas where the most poor people live are the most likely to be "food deserts:" places where the people can't easily reach a grocery store where there's fresh vegetables and fruits and the like.
Many poor Americans primarily shop for food at small convenience stores like Dollar General, or even gas stations. These places often do not sell fresh fruits and vegetables, and their selections of whole food ingredients are minimal. In many areas, a store that actually sells produce is over an hour's drive away. Even in areas with grocery stores, the quality of fresh fruits and vegetables is often horrible.
To consistently eat fresh fruits and vegetables, you have to be willing to eat them underripe, overripe, on the verge of spoiling, watery, and sour, because that's what produce from Walmart is generally like. It seems more common to me to eat canned vegetables (but this unfortunately makes most vegetables sort of repulsive).
I could go on forever about the ins and outs of how the food system is fucked up, but basically food production and distribution is centralized under huge companies that control everything, which means a long time and distance passes between production of the food and the food being eaten. This is a pretty strong selective force against fresh fruits and vegetables, making them inaccessible to multitudes of smaller locations, and also making them disgusting when they do reach the consumer.
Even if they weren't disgusting, fresh produce is high risk (spoils quickly) for low reward (low density of calories for the price)
Now, things made from fruits and vegetables that are processed into a shelf-stable form DO exist, but they are RIDICULOUSLY EXPENSIVE. Especially relative to the amount of calories they provide, a measurement I wish was used more often. In college, when I was forever trying in vain to feed myself, the "healthy" options for food were often twice as expensive as Pop Tarts or chips and literally half the amount of calories. Even worse, the lack of nutrition in these "healthy" options was advertised as a positive!
And okay, I have to get into the folly of capitalism here a little bit—as far as marketing is concerned, there are unhealthy foods that nourish you and healthy foods that don't, so if you wish to avoid straight chugging high fructose corn syrup and palm oil, your shelf stable options are populated by many "fat free" "sugar free" faerie foods that exchange nutritive substances for flavorings that don't actually nourish you. My school's on campus mini-store sold a whole shelf's worth of beverages that were pointless to buy because they contained less than 20 calories. If you don't have grocery store access or the ability to cook much, you're either eating ramen and microwave macaroni and cheese, or you're eating some kind of 3 dollar granola bar that won't even give you enough energy to get through the morning
On top of it, food ingredients that are good candidates to be part of a healthy diet tend to be marketed as faddish "specialty" or "health" foods, pricing poorer people out of them.
All this to say, there are super obvious systemic reasons why Americans eat the way that they do, and everyone seems allergic to admitting that.
