I can drive about 200km for the cost of a combo meal at a fast food restaurant. My average weekly grocery bill for one person is maybe $100, up 50% from five years ago, while my hourly wage is $17.50 and nobody is hiring. Especially in the American West where things are as spread out as like the Mongolian steppes, it’s wild how driving 80km+ is a normal commute from towns where you can’t buy healthy food.
I fully believe all the people doing it are doing insanely optimized cost calculations because otherwise they’d probably be dead (soon). But it is so insane. Like even from a robber baron standpoint where you figure the peons whole lives may as well be commuting and toiling they still need at least some sort of sustenance
What really fucks things up is that I’m next to some of the most fertile agricultural land on the planet. You can dig 3m down and still have beautiful black topsoil that grows anything you throw in it. These grasslands used to be 2m tall and so thick that missionary convoys looked back and couldn’t see the footprints of their hundreds of members. All of that land is used to grow corn and soybeans for cattle. The people driving four hours from food deserts to pick through the scraps of our grocers are doing so from land I would kill to farm on. I could provide those entire communities with countless healthy calories if I could afford the land that currently feeds cows whose beef I can no longer afford.
The Grapes of Wrath should be required yearly reading for adults. The only difference between its 1930s setting and now is that everything is Oklahoma. I can’t flee to anywhere better than the place I can’t afford to live in anymore.
edit: Required reading and they get a free gun after completing a short essay about the themes.
looking from the outside in “being able to afford multi hour drives to get food, but not food” is such a certified american moment
I can drive about 200km for the cost of a combo meal at a fast food restaurant. My average weekly grocery bill for one person is maybe $100, up 50% from five years ago, while my hourly wage is $17.50 and nobody is hiring. Especially in the American West where things are as spread out as like the Mongolian steppes, it’s wild how driving 80km+ is a normal commute from towns where you can’t buy healthy food.
I fully believe all the people doing it are doing insanely optimized cost calculations because otherwise they’d probably be dead (soon). But it is so insane. Like even from a robber baron standpoint where you figure the peons whole lives may as well be commuting and toiling they still need at least some sort of sustenance
What really fucks things up is that I’m next to some of the most fertile agricultural land on the planet. You can dig 3m down and still have beautiful black topsoil that grows anything you throw in it. These grasslands used to be 2m tall and so thick that missionary convoys looked back and couldn’t see the footprints of their hundreds of members. All of that land is used to grow corn and soybeans for cattle. The people driving four hours from food deserts to pick through the scraps of our grocers are doing so from land I would kill to farm on. I could provide those entire communities with countless healthy calories if I could afford the land that currently feeds cows whose beef I can no longer afford.
The Grapes of Wrath should be required yearly reading for adults. The only difference between its 1930s setting and now is that everything is Oklahoma. I can’t flee to anywhere better than the place I can’t afford to live in anymore.
edit: Required reading and they get a free gun after completing a short essay about the themes.
Jesus. That was my thought, so weird.