By Jennifer Ng'andu, Deputy Director, Health Policy Project
“Healthy eating is privilege of the rich,” proclaimed a recent Associated Press headline. The University of Washington study behind the article shows that what’s best for you is often what’s worst for your pocketbook. Researchers found that increasing just one of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) four recommended nutrients to meet the standards of the Thrifty Food Plan would cost more than $380 per year. Meanwhile, a grocery cart filled with the equivalent calories of unhealthy foods was likely to cost less than average. This evidence would come as no surprise to families interviewed by NCLR who reveal that it will take far more investment to keep excess sugar and fat out of the American diet.
Take Emily, a native of San Antonio, Texas. A mother caring for three children, Emily believes that healthy eating is essential. In her interview with NCLR, Emily noted that it’s “not very easy” to find the food in her neighborhood that she’d like to prepare. The grocery store near her home doesn’t stock high-quality vegetables and fruits, and what’s for sale is more expensive than in other areas of town. Emily treks across her city for hours at a time to fill her kitchen cabinet.
Imagine Emily’s predicament. It takes up to five hours of her day—her weekend—to get the shopping done: up to one hour to wait for the bus, an hour’s ride with several transfers to get to the store, time for purchasing goods, and time for the same route back. Once she returns home, there can be hours of preparation to get a meal on the table.
At the store, Emily diligently compares prices and makes tradeoffs for quality and taste.
“I always look at the price first. If it’s [a food] better looking, or whatever, I still look at the price. A lot of the stuff that my kids do like, like the raspberries, are kind of expensive for me, so I would skip that and just get bananas, oranges, and apples, just the basics…My kids, they told me that they liked the broccoli, the one that’s in the produce [section], and I would get frozen one because it’s cheaper. And they just told me, like, it tasted different…and I would still get it because it’s cheaper than in the produce section.”
On weeks when her paychecks are especially low, she makes extra sacrifices.
“That’s when I don’t look for the fruits and vegetables. I just get the meats and the stuff that [the children] need.”
Situations like this make it easy to understand why convenience foods can become a natural choice—they are accessible and seem like less of an expense when accounting for the extra time and resources needed to get food on the table. There’s not one store within a mile of Emily that offers healthy fruits and vegetables, but she counts six or seven fast foods outlets on her street. Emily places a premium on serving healthy foods to her children, but harkens back to a time when it was easier not to:
“I didn’t have time to cook at home and [fast food] was just there. And sometimes it was cheap. I would buy a burger for my kids, and they wouldn’t eat all of it, so I’d halve it and buy some fries and it would be two dollars for their meal.”
Two dollars for a meal? I can’t remember the last time I paid two dollars for a meal.
Emily’s sacrifices for a healthy diet have come with major successes, including significant weight loss within her family, but she is constantly searching for a solution that doesn’t take time away from caring for her kids or force her to choose food over bills. With the right investments, this nation can craft measures that make healthy choices easier.
When making policy, we have to remember that it is not enough to build a grocery store; we must address the community that surrounds it. Emily was just one of the parents interviewed by NCLR who noted that unhealthy food is in your face while healthy foods are much harder to obtain. Mirroring Emily’s experience, one study in Rhode Island found that the vast majority of grocery stores in Hispanic neighborhoods didn’t even carry the foods recommended by the USDA. The ones that did have all of the recommended items priced them 40% higher than the national average for the same foods.
National initiatives to address food deserts are commendable, but these efforts must ensure that outlets have healthy food that is affordable and accessible for the residents of their community. Policies must also acknowledge that “food swamps,” or places saturated with poor food options often create another barrier to a nourishing diet. Stimulating the development of and investment in neighborhoods where the total environment promotes healthy eating is essential in the everyday fight for the Emilys around the country to put wholesome meals on the table.
For more news and resources about Latino families and nutrition, please visit NCLR’s Healthy Foods, Healthy Families web page at www.nclr.org/nutrition. Help us advocate for good food policy by sharing NCLR’s other blogs and stories of comer bien.