4 ideas
Tracie McMillan went undercover in three links of the American food chain: picking produce, including garlic, for piece rates in California's fields, stocking produce at a Walmart in suburban Detroit, and working the kitchen at an Applebee's in Brooklyn. At each stop she tried to eat and pay rent on what the job paid. Her own budget and schedule became the test of why low-income Americans eat the way they do.
Low-income Americans mostly know which foods are healthy. They eat cheap, processed, calorie-dense food because fresh food costs more per calorie, is often far from home, and takes time and energy to shop for and cook, which long or irregular shifts use up. Nutrition education therefore cannot fix diets on its own, because the binding limits are money, time and access.
The people who grow, stock and cook America's food are often among those least able to eat well. Cheap food and poor diets are then outputs of the same labour economics, not separate problems.
Farm workers paid per bucket or bin earn only what their speed allows. A new or slower worker can end the day below the legal minimum wage, and the shortfall often goes unmade-up in practice. The pay system moves the risk of slow harvests, poor crops and inexperience from the grower onto the worker.