>>>Jake,
>>>I think you missed my point entirely.
>>
>>Perhaps.
>>
>>>I never said the government should dictate food choices. I said eating healthy is expensive and eating processed food-crap is cheap. A lot of families eat poorly not because they want to, but because it's cheaper to do so.
>>
>>I disagree with this. People eat "crap" because they want to. Be it taste or habit or whatever, when given healthy choices, even at greater convienience and cheaper (or free) they will go out of their way to spend more on "crap".
>
>One of the big issues is that in many poorer neighborhoods, there are no supermarkets, only "corner stores," which tend to be more expensive to start with, and often have little or no selection of fresh produce.
>
>I haven't read all of this (in fact, only skimmed some of it), but it seems to address this issue fairly thoroughly:
>
>http://www.rwjf.org/files/research/foodenvironment.pdf
>
>Tamar

There were a series of stories a couple years back (I may have posted them but don't have time to track them down) regarding attempting to get people to eat healthy food by making it cheaper and more convienient. One was offering free fruit at a nearby stand, and more people went out of their way to a fast food joint rather than accept the free food. Another involved forcing convienience stores to carry fruit and how they were throwing the vast majority of it away because people would not buy it even though it was cheaper than junk food and in the same location. The third was in NYC where it was mandated that fast food restaurants display calories on the menus. The result was that after the calorie counts went up, the higher calorie food sold even more.

People will eat what tastes good to them and they will go out of their way for it.