If Processed Food is Slowly Killing Us Why Is It All That's Available?
We’ve been on the road for 9 days now and have driven through and stayed in over 10 states!…
(From Royersford, Pennsylvania to the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee to the Ozarks, through Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and now, Nevada).
…and I’ve noticed a common theme for all of them:
Access to good, healthy food is hard to come by.
And it’s not just these states—this is the norm across the country, especially in the central and southern states.
I’m sure you’ve dealt with this before…
You’re driving to work, a friend’s house, an event, or a weekend getaway and you want to make a pit stop for a bite to eat. So, you pull off the highway at the nearest food exit.
What are your options?
McDonald's? Burger King? Gas station convenience store? Popeyes? Dunkin? Taco Bell? KFC? Maybe there’s a grocery store a few miles away with better options, but in rural parts of the country, that’s hard to come by.
Fast-food restaurants rule the highways. Billboards and sky-high signs topple over towns and by the time you lock eyes with one, BOOM! Your mouth is already watering.
Temptatious advertising combined with a lack of education and awareness of how these foods impact our long-term health and the choice is simple.
Convenience. Always. And there’s nothing more convenient than fast food and drive-thrus.
And it just so happens that convenience pleasures our taste buds, too — not because it’s what our bodies want, but because it’s been bioengineered to make us addicted —so when the cravings show up, they feel impossible to ignore.
Because of the way the system is set up, 70% of the average American’s diet is made up of ultra-processed foods. And 10% of their disposable income is spent on fast food. In many cases, fast food and processed food are all that’s available. So, can we really blame the people for making the food choices that they do?
So far on our road trip, I’ve noticed that we can drive 25+ miles through rural areas without seeing a single grocery store. This leaves the local people to live off ultra-processed junk food from gas station shops, dollar stores, and fast food chains.
The reason fresh food is less accessible in these areas is due to challenges with fresh produce transportation and traveling long distances. So the priority for these areas is shelf life, not nutrition.
In my opinion, this is a form of geographical discrimination. And geographical discrimination is strongly linked to socioeconomic status.
Black, White, Mexican, Latino—it doesn’t matter. Food insecurity affects minorities more, but when it comes to location, lack of access to fresh foods does not discriminate.
Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri, and Oklahoma are some of the most obese and unhealthiest states in the country. They’re also some of the poorest.
Interestingly, in these states, there’s no shortage of farmland. We drove past endless farms. None with visible fruits and vegetables growing. Just grazing cattle. This makes me wonder why this land isn’t being used to grow crops.
Well, the government would argue that it is, just not the right ones.
Over 98 percent of farmland in the U.S. is used to grow GMO corn, wheat, and soy used to make oil, flour, and high fructose corn syrup (the staple ingredients for ultra-processed foods). That means a mere 2 percent of U.S. farmland is being used to grow fresh fruits and vegetables.
Government subsidies make growing commodity crops impossible for farmers to pass up. The result? Fruit and vegetables have to travel long distances to reach these parts of the country.
That means they’re bred for starch, sugar, and shelf-life, resulting in far less nutritious produce by the time it reaches their grocery stores.
As we drive across the country, finding a place with relatively healthy options is like finding a needle in a haystack.
Snacks that don’t contain processed ingredients, a mile-long ingredient list, vegetable oils, added sugar, food coloring, and preservatives are out-of-the-ordinary anomalies.
What’s happened during our lifetime, during this post-industrial era, that’s phased out real, whole food and replaced it with toxic, disease-causing garbage? How do we begin to shift this paradigm?
How do we shift the collective mindset to desire foods that are good for us AND taste good?
How do we make healthy food more accessible to people? More desirable?
It starts with education, awareness, and waking people up to the consequences that come from eating these foods long-term.
People don’t want to be sick or feel like crap.
The disconnection from our bodies and what we’re feeding them has been normalized. The USDA’s “calories in calories out” mantra is the scapegoat for fast and processed food conglomerations to continue making their nefarious “food” products.
We’re the ones who have to pay the price—in medical bills, lackluster living, mental illness, cancer, diabetes, and chronic disease—as these companies get rich and control political and agricultural agenda with their lobbying.
We need to wake up.
Everyone’s so woke about politics, gender identity, equality, and political correctness—why not nutrition?
We need to wake up.
It starts with demanding better options, accessibility to healthy food, better leadership to facilitate buying food from local farms and incentivizing farmers to grow more biodiverse crops.
It starts with education on how food impacts our health for people to start seeing how our food system is destroying our health and taking our power away.
No more processed foods. No more fried foods, antibiotic-treated, hormone-jacked chicken and beef, no more artificial colors, flavors, or preservatives. No more GMO corn and soy mono-crops. No more nonsense.
We deserve better. Our bodies deserve better.
We have to start demanding access to the good shit (healthy, nutrient-dense whole food) and boycotting the bullshit.
The food that’s the most accessible to us is a reflection of what Big Food thinks we want to eat: cheap, processed, packaged crap—the foods that makes us sick.
We need to invest our dollars in the food that’s going to truly support our health. This will motivate manufacturers to start making more of what we want and will eventually drive down the price to make healthy food more accessible.
Let’s show them what we want by educating ourselves about nutrition, and shifting towards making healthier food choices.
I want a future where we can pull off to a rest stop and feel excited about the many healthy food choices that are available.
Until then, I’m boycotting the bull shit (and I hope you do too).
Sending love and kindness,
Taylor
