The end of the war on fat?
29th October 2008
Megan McArdle is confused.
I confess I still don’t understand why poverty is so increasingly linked with obesity. The common explanation is to blame the paucity of excellent cheap grocery stores in urban neighborhoods. But poverty is not exclusively an inner city phenomenon; poor people in more rural areas share grocery stores with the rich. Besides, while this explains the latitudinal data, it does not account for the longitudinal issue. No one thinks that New York’s grocery stores, even in poor neighborhoods, have gotten worse since the 1970s; the evidence is that they’ve gotten better. But the obesity rate has gotten much worse.
Uh, Megan, perhaps because the word doesn’t mean what you think it means? “Poverty” in the U.S. has come to mean “only one color TV” or “no high-speed broadband Internet”. This is not what people prior to the 1960s understood “poverty” to mean. “Poverty” means not knowing where your next meal is coming from. You don’t get fat on that kind of diet.