Amusing? Sad? Aggravating?

[mlentzner]

If you think of obesity as the result of food addiction (I do) then it makes sense. If you spend all your meager income on your addiction (junk food) you can see how these people could be fat and at the same time trapped.

[51M0n]

We subsidize corn to the extent that a large part of the crop goes toward ethanol production, making the rest of it more expensive. But, that is not the issue. Are they starving, or not? Are they broke, or not? Maybe they're just stupid.

The main difficulty with eating well while homeless isn't the price of good food (although that is an issue), it's the lack if ability to prepair or keep good food. No kitchen means that if you are honeless you end must live on take away, and health (cheap) take away isn't always easy to find.

[Scrofula]

Homeless people in US cities generally don't starve. There are lots of places to get food if you aren't picky. I doubt it's a pleasant life, but it's not comparable to the kind of poverty that some people face elsewhere in the world. I sometimes see ads saying things like '1 in 9 New Yorkers is starving', and I wonder if they are using the same definition of 'starving' that I use.

[jheald1]

Ethanol subsidies might result in corn prices rising, just like any corn subsidy, but the reality is that actual vegetables are considered a "specialty crop", and therefore not privy to the majority of agricultural subsidies, which go to cash-crops like corn, soy, and wheat. If lettuce was cheaper, then maybe people would be more likely to buy a side salad more often.

Very interesting article. Thanks for sharing.

[gman]

They are broke, but certainly not starving. I don't think most people in this country knows what it is like to be hungry. Whether or not they are stupid is debatable. We do have the richest poor people in the entire world here. Who else could claim to be poor, but own a new cell phone, have expensive tattoos, nice Nikes and be eating Mickey D's for lunch?

[Mark Rippetoe]

Maybe they're mentally ill.

Usually.

[gape]

Isn't it possible that they were obese prior to being homeless?

[yorick]

Maybe they happen to be fundamentalist Christians:

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/...tcmp=obnetwork

A 2006 Purdue study found that the fundamental Christians are by far the heaviest of all religious groups led by the Baptists with a 30% obesity rate...

[apparatus]

This is interesting because I read this from an article against the free market earlier today (http://socialistworker.org/2012/04/2...rket-efficient):

Are people homeless in America because there’s a shortage of homes? And if that’s the case, is there a shortage of homes because we don’t have the concrete, the wood and the steel to build them?
The truth is that under capitalism, there’s no incentive to build low-cost housing for the homeless—because it isn’t profitable to do so.

The same goes for the more than 800 million people in the world who go hungry. It isn’t profitable to feed them. So food is stockpiled or destroyed rather than distributed to them.

That article sure is something.

[Mark Rippetoe]

Yes, some silly motherfuckers:

While it's true that capitalist competition acts as a spur to increase production, it's also an extremely wasteful system. One need only think of the multibillion-dollar advertising industry or the military-industrial complex to see how much labor is wasted on essentially worthless enterprises.