More food for thought

Today's Post has an excellent piece on the cost of being poor, with a particular focus on the monetary and health costs of urban "grocery" options:

"Like food: You don't have a car to get to a supermarket, much less to Costco or Trader Joe's, where the middle class goes to save money. You don't have three hours to take the bus. So you buy groceries at the corner store, where a gallon of milk costs an extra dollar.

A loaf of bread there costs you $2.99 for white. For wheat, it's $3.79. The clerk behind the counter tells you the gallon of leaking milk in the bottom of the back cooler is $4.99. She holds up four fingers to clarify. The milk is beneath the shelf that holds beef bologna for $3.79. A pound of butter sells for $4.49. In the back of the store are fruits and vegetables. The green peppers are shriveled, the bananas are more brown than yellow, the oranges are picked over."

News to no one (Occidental's Center for Food and Justice, for one, has been doing work on on this for years), but it always bears repeating that being poor is expensive. And specifically that high prices and miserable produce offerings in urban stores aren't the result of greedy owners, and that consumer choice when it comes to locally-grown, sustainably-farmed, organic produce, is a myth for a lot of Washingtonians.