The myth of food desserts

Yesterday I blogged about dollar stores and how the woke blokes are sounding the alarm that they target poor and minorities (Google/FB blocked my link when I tried to post it to Facebook). But while watching the show on Cheddar, I noticed again how often the food nannies complain and alarm us about "food desserts." That was disproven about a decade ago, when it was a common myth. I think it was a hobby horse ridden by Michelle Obama. Too many fast food and convenience store businesses was the complaint. Here's a recap by Rod Dreher, from 2012.

"But two new studies have found something unexpected. Such neighborhoods not only have more fast food restaurants and convenience stores than more affluent ones, but more grocery stores, supermarkets and full-service restaurants, too. And there is no relationship between the type of food being sold in a neighborhood and obesity among its children and adolescents.

Within a couple of miles of almost any urban neighborhood, “you can get basically any type of food,” said Roland Sturm of the RAND Corporation, lead author of one of the studies. “Maybe we should call it a food swamp rather than a desert,” he said."

Obesity is a growing (no pun) problem for all Americans, but particularly in "underserved neighborhoods." Thousands of academics have earned promotion and tenure by siphoning off our tax supported grants from the federal government to try to change the food culture of minorities. They develop exercise programs, food plans and diets. We get fatter and they get richer. Meanwhile they want more and more women to leave their homes and children, and sit behind a desk with a computer. Go figure. I know several of my inches belong to Blogger (Google) and Facebook.

The good news is I passed the 11,000 mile mark on my exercycle (since January 2015).  The bad news is that it makes little difference in how my clothes fit, so I'm hoping its good for the heart and lungs.

Liberal protestants and Catholic bishops--where are you?

Churches have always been involved in helping the poor, sick, hungry and imprisoned. It's part of Jesus' command and promise.  See Matthew 25.   It's why the Granthams of British television fame lived in an Abbey (former monastery taken by Henry VIII from the Catholics--payback to the Lords who supported him). Before the huge government intrusion into social welfare programs in the 20th century, churches were the social safety net. The Roman Catholic church is still the largest humanitarian and educational institution in the world. However, in order to decrease the size of the official bureaucracy, a lot of that responsibility that the government had assumed with the War on Poverty, was shifted to non-profits, mainly churches, under GHW Bush, thousand points of light. Now many churches are financially dependent on government grants for housing renewal, job training programs, prison reforms, food pantries, etc. It's very useful in keeping the churches silent.