Who should make you eat your brussels sprouts?
The market, responsibility and perfectionism
The New York Times has an article from last week on a duo of internet filmmakers, known as the Internet Celebrities, who use humor and YouTube to spread a unique brand of social criticism. One of their most watched videos has them entering the world of Bronx food bodegas to highlight the diverse, yet disgusting food options available to many New Yorkers.
Beyond the humor – for example, the bodega food pyramid – their video raises important normative questions about the availability of healthy foods in low-income communities.
It is a well documented fact that middle- and upper-income communities have many times more supermarkets than low-income neighborhoods. As a result, people in these communities are forced to purchase food at corner markets, convenience stores and bodegas. And these food providers have little in the way of healthy options. This matters because a diet short on healthy foods increases the risk of diabetes, heart disease, cancer, obesity and other illnesses. So if healthy foods have such a direct impact on the life of individuals, whose responsibility is it to ensure that everyone, including those in low-income communities has access to them?
Many will argue that there is no issue here. Technically, everyone has “access” to healthy foods. For one, even if your community has no grocery store, the middle-income one next door probably does. And no one is stopping you from shopping there. But more importantly, the dearth of healthy food options in low-income neighborhoods exists not because anyone is preventing a supermarket from opening. Nor is it because healthy foods are unaffordable – many are not. The reason bodegas filled with pork rinds and iced honey buns crowd out supermarkets is because there is a lack of demand for the food supermarkets provide. If the reverse were true – if people wanted healthy food options – the free market would bring more grocery stores to the Bronx to meet this demand.
There are two common responses to the above “laissez faire” claim: one having to do with the good life; the other with responsibility. A perfectionist might look at the health situation in low-income communities and see people living a life that is unquestionably bad. It is clearly better to be healthy than to be sick. And if unhealthy eating habits lead to poor health (while healthy eating habits cause the opposite), then healthy eating is better than unhealthy eating. And for the perfectionist, if one way of living is better than another, then morality says we should promote the better way of living. Thus, the state may encourage grocery stores to open in low-income communities (through tax breaks, subsidies, etc.) simply because shopping at grocery stores as opposed to bodegas will leave to better lifestyles.
A second argument has to do with responsibility or, more precisely, the lack of responsibility of individuals in low-income communities for their food preferences. According to this argument, people choose iced honey buns over bananas and multi-grain bread because they either don’t know these foods are bad for them or because as children they developed preferences for these foods that are now very difficult to overcome. In either case, it can be argued that as a result, they are not morally responsible for their preferences – it is not clearly a free choice. Since their preferences will lead to greatly unequal lives (as compared to those who eat healthy foods), and since they are not responsible for these preferences, there is an unjust situation. This unjust can be remedied either by compensating our unhealthy eaters after the fact (with health care for the illnesses they develop) or by acting to change their preferences – by promoting grocery stores and the healthy options they provide.
-Marc
Photo by Flickr user trawin used under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
Related posts:
- Is eating healthy a choice?
- Can government ban fast food?
- The taxes I pay keeps the doctor away
- Does health reform treat the obese unfairly?
- Should government undo residential segregation?
ShareComments
One Response to “Who should make you eat your brussels sprouts?”
Leave a Reply
Good post and thanks for linking to our video. Another topic worth considering on the question of free market vs policy vs individual responsibility is that junk food tends to be much cheaper than healthy food. Sure the individual can travel to a different neighborhood to do their food shopping but the cost is not just time and convenience but a big money difference as well. These factors are obviously of a higher premium in low income areas. Going over to the next neighborhood isn’t so easy when you don’t have a working car, etc.
Like the food itself the lower-than-low prices on junk food are artificial in nature. Corn is highly subsidized by the government (so much for the free market) and healthy naturally grown foods cannot compete on price with industrialized food-like products.