> 1) You have a supermarket and not a shitty dollar tree
Assuming that means "dollar store", fair. I live in a country where supermarkets are within walking distance for most of the population and vastly outnumber random convenience stores that sell mostly candy, so my perspective on this may be skewed.
> 2) You have a fridge to put those spoil prone foods
In a developed country everyone does. If you can afford an expensive weight loss drug, you probably own one too!
The local equivalent of craigslist has used full-sized fridges for 50 bucks and if you really need new, you can buy a crappy model on Amazon for 120 Euro.
From traveling a fair bit I can tell you that refrigeration was ubiquitous even in the poorest places I've visited.
> 3) You have time to prepare those foods
I hate cooking and preparing food. The most I do is eggs, noodles, or throwing some stuff in a store-bought soup base. That takes 15 minutes of cooking and 5 minutes of cleaning.
> 4) You have transportation for the raw foods or can drive them and buy in bulk
I have 4 supermarkets within a 15 minute walking distance. I don't own a car. The aforementioned shopping list feeds me for about a week and I can carry that home just fine. If I couldn't, I could have it delivered - add ten bucks, it's still nothing.
My grandparents live on the country side. They each only have one supermarket in walking distance, but they do own a car to get around anyways, since it's the countryside. They also could have their groceries delivered (and many old people do).
I recognize that there may be situations where you're just screwed and it's physically impossible to have a healthy diet, but that is true for maybe 0.05% of the population?
In any case if you can't have a healthy diet where you live, the solution isn't to start taking expensive drugs to compensate. If you have $1k/month to pay for Ozempic, you have money to move. Or get a car. Or a fridge. Ozempic would just be a band-aid and you're gonna bounce right back once you stop taking it.
So in conclusion, both the environment and the money argument is nonsense as long as we're talking about a stupidly expensive drug.
A dollar tree is sort of the opposite of a bulk discount store. It's a specific brand but it's sort of the modern evolution of the role of a dollar store of decades past. It optimizes to make the absolute price of goods small even if that means the unit price is bad and caters to folks living paycheck to paycheck that need to buy food for the immediate short term. A dollar tree is unlikely to have fresh food, at all.
This story is largely the same with the thought model of fast food. You have no time and very limited money. Fast food is the cheapest immediate option to satisfy immediate needs at a minimum even if it fails hard against longer term ideal goals.
Your 20 minutes of cooking and cleaning is a larger luxury than you seem to acknowledge. It's also not in line with your previous comments about the kinds of food you're buying. Noodles and eggs and a store bought soup base is not nutritious or particularly satisfying. And of course the crushing burden of poverty just sucks. The relief that a fast food meal offers is non trivial. I don't eat at McDonalds, ever, but I'm not going to pretend that a burger and fries isn't going to be infinitely more rewarding than some basic noodles in salty packet broth. Mostly because of the protein and fat that is difficult to get in non fresh foods.
Look into food deserts if you're genuinely interested
> Your 20 minutes of cooking and cleaning is a larger luxury than you seem to acknowledge.
What the fuck. I live in a developed country. Even the poorest most-overworked person I've ever met is perfectly able to find 20 minutes to cook. In fact said overworked people would have to, since that's the cheapest way to feed a family. What sort of unicorns are we talking about here.
> It's also not in line with your previous comments about the kinds of food you're buying. Noodles and eggs and a store bought soup base is not nutritious or particularly satisfying.
> [..] Mostly because of the protein and fat that is difficult to get in non fresh foods.
I don't really follow. The stuff I buy gets me all the nutrients I'd need in a day, as well as >30g of protein (a lot of it from Handkäse, which is ~30% protein, contains near zero fat and carbs, and is dirt cheap).
My selection of foods isn't random. Lacking nutrients or too much of the wrong thing makes you feel awful, and I hate feeling that way. Additionally most of what I buy will stay safe to eat for weeks, weeks, or even years. All that really goes bad quickly is fruit, veggies, or milk/yoghurt (depends). If you are physically unable to keep these three things stocked, you are not living in a developed country or require assisted living.
Also I really only cook maybe once a week. I just happen to enjoy the good old bread with cheeses and sliced meats well enough. If I really want a warm meal, I'll eat at a restaurant (10-20 bucks), but that's a luxury that is not a requirement to completing my diet at all.
> And of course the crushing burden of poverty just sucks.
A bit tangential at this point, but if you're paying $1k/month for Ozempic you are not feeling "the crushing burden of poverty".
> Look into food deserts if you're genuinely interested
I'm intellectually aware they exist, but they still bewilder me. If these things are really a problem for more than 1% of the population, then in my head I will downgrade the country in question from "developed" to "mostly developed" and exclude them from any argument talking about developed countries. Millions of people can't get the nutrients they need and their country is struggling to correct that. Maybe the World Food Program should help out? Get some foreign aid shipments? I'm joking of course, but clearly Ozempic isn't the answer here either.
In any case, let's limit the discussion to areas that can actually be considered developed, because clearly most people in overall developed countries don't live in food deserts and their obesity cannot be explained that way either. Bringing this up as a defense is like defending thieves as a whole because some of them have only stolen food while on the brink of starvation or their name may even be Robin Hood. What about the rest of them?
Assuming that means "dollar store", fair. I live in a country where supermarkets are within walking distance for most of the population and vastly outnumber random convenience stores that sell mostly candy, so my perspective on this may be skewed.
> 2) You have a fridge to put those spoil prone foods
In a developed country everyone does. If you can afford an expensive weight loss drug, you probably own one too!
The local equivalent of craigslist has used full-sized fridges for 50 bucks and if you really need new, you can buy a crappy model on Amazon for 120 Euro.
From traveling a fair bit I can tell you that refrigeration was ubiquitous even in the poorest places I've visited.
> 3) You have time to prepare those foods
I hate cooking and preparing food. The most I do is eggs, noodles, or throwing some stuff in a store-bought soup base. That takes 15 minutes of cooking and 5 minutes of cleaning.
> 4) You have transportation for the raw foods or can drive them and buy in bulk
I have 4 supermarkets within a 15 minute walking distance. I don't own a car. The aforementioned shopping list feeds me for about a week and I can carry that home just fine. If I couldn't, I could have it delivered - add ten bucks, it's still nothing.
My grandparents live on the country side. They each only have one supermarket in walking distance, but they do own a car to get around anyways, since it's the countryside. They also could have their groceries delivered (and many old people do).
I recognize that there may be situations where you're just screwed and it's physically impossible to have a healthy diet, but that is true for maybe 0.05% of the population?
In any case if you can't have a healthy diet where you live, the solution isn't to start taking expensive drugs to compensate. If you have $1k/month to pay for Ozempic, you have money to move. Or get a car. Or a fridge. Ozempic would just be a band-aid and you're gonna bounce right back once you stop taking it.
So in conclusion, both the environment and the money argument is nonsense as long as we're talking about a stupidly expensive drug.