bad fatty food cheap
poor people buy cheap easy food
junk food = cheaper food
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2026
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Explain Like I'm Five
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The cigarette companies used everything they learned about making cigarettes more addictive to make junk food more addictive. Fat children are the fallout.
Here's a curious thing: Kids going hungry cannot be explained by the profit motive alone. The food industry wants to be paid to feed those kids. The food industry benefits from SNAP and other food welfare programs, which amount to transfers of money from taxpayers to the food industry with a side-effect of providing food for poor kids.
So, kids going hungry isn't an "economics thing". It is not an economic necessity of mixed-economy capitalism. We can tell because there are other mixed-economy capitalist societies that don't have anywhere near as many kids in food insecurity.
It's a "politics thing".
It's about ensuring the existence of a deprived underclass, because some people's ideology demands one.
It's our legacy of slavery, by creating such an impoverished underclass with no dignity during chattel slavery it made the lowest rung lower even when slavery was over. We never finished reconstruction on a social level so if you have no money you matter even less.
There is more than one child in America. Some can't afford healthy food, so they become obese. Some cannot afford food, so they starve.
In fact, the theory that more than one person exists explains quite a lot of apparent contradictions like "People dislike Apple, but people also keep using iPhones". Well, some people dislike Apple, others keep using iPhones.
That is so complex, it's hard to point at all the contributing causes.
- Unhealthy food cultures
- Profit focused food system
- Distorted preferences
- 'food deserts'
- cost/value didistortions
- oligarchic politics destroying public welfare spending
- oligarchic media destroying public good will
- knock-ons from housing speculation
- Reproductive care obstruction
- subtle conflation between starving and malnourished
There things are both a result of the part of the American body politic that espoused an obnoxiously individualistic idea of "freedom". Because some jerks don't want to pay taxes or care about other people, they argue against government things that help people -- like regulating food and encouraging healthy diets for those with means, or giving the hungry food or money to buy food.
There isn't a good argument for it, just a bad-faith argument made by mean adults who don't mind children starving or adults dying early.
Capitalism.