I was part of a grad school b-school marketing project whose goal was to find out about these "food deserts," you hear about from liberal types. We put together 50 or so pages of prior academic justification and data, then constructed our own survey who aim was to find out if people wanted, and knew how to get reasonably healthy food. Of course, the running theory at the time was that poor neighborhoods were being "historically deprived" or "systemically under-served" or whatever.
So we hand off this work to the prof, who teaches both grad and undergrad. She tells us she'll handle the next stage. We get some early survey data back, which indicates largely that yeah, of course people know where to get fruit and greens (this is a lot like the "black people don't know how to get ID thing" of today), and that of course people know that shit food is bad for them, and of course they're going to keep eating it anyway if they feel like it.
The other interesting thing that happens, is there's some hullabaloo that's being kept on the hush-hush, but of course leaks: One of the survey teams is a bunch of undergraduate girls, who head off into the ghetto to ask survey questions and are almost immediately molested. Like, the whole team, half a dozen of them, working in pairs, all going to different neighborhoods. The prof's amazing plan was to hand clipboards to under-20 girls and send them off to the demilitarized zone to ask if people knew where to buy carrots. Thinking somehow that by doing this in the middle of the day served as protection. They run into packs of dudes hanging around sidewalks, who paw at them and slobber over them, until they manage to cry their way back to their Jettas and high-tail it home.
Anyway. Bodegas. Yeah, they're the informal logistical infrastructure that provides (fairly) fresh foods to poor people. And this "food desert" thing is so much bullshit. It exists because academic liberals can't find them without going all Heart of Darkness.
I was part of a grad school b-school marketing project whose goal was to find out about these "food deserts," you hear about from liberal types. We put together 50 or so pages of prior academic justification and data, then constructed our own survey who aim was to find out if people wanted, and knew how to get reasonably healthy food. Of course, the running theory at the time was that poor neighborhoods were being "historically deprived" or "systemically under-served" or whatever.
So we hand off this work to the prof, who teaches both grad and undergrad. She tells us she'll handle the next stage. We get some early survey data back, which indicates largely that yeah, of course people know where to get fruit and greens (this is a lot like the "black people don't know how to get ID thing" of today), and that of course people know that shit food is bad for them, and of course they're going to keep eating it anyway if they feel like it.
The other interesting thing that happens, is there's some hullabaloo that's being kept on the hush-hush, but of course leaks: One of the survey teams is a bunch of undergraduate girls, who head off into the ghetto to ask survey questions and are almost immediately molested. Like, the whole team, half a dozen of them, working in pairs, all going to different neighborhoods. The prof's amazing plan was to hand clipboards to under-20 girls and send them off to the demilitarized zone to ask if people knew where to buy carrots. Thinking somehow that by doing this in the middle of the day served as protection. They run into packs of dudes hanging around sidewalks, who paw at them and slobber over them, until they manage to cry their way back to their Jettas and high-tail it home.
Anyway. Bodegas. Yeah, they're the informal logistical infrastructure that provides (fairly) fresh foods to poor people. And this "food desert" thing is so much bullshit. It exists because academic liberals can't find them without going all Heart of Darkness.
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