Fast In A Food Desert

Surrounded by nutritional nothingness?

In the corner of America where convenient stores are the major source of anything edible - is sustenance possible?

Putting a meal together in a place where sugar, salt and saturated fats are the rule is like trying to make literature out of tabloids. Peanut candy bars and peanut butter could be the only actual protein, while the sole produce choice might be a can of tomato juice.

If you live in the poorest places in America, you can no longer pick an apple, or grapefruit off a tree. There are no victory gardens, there are no collard greens and turnips. Being poor used to mean you ate less food, maybe less expensive food, but the food you ate was still real food. Potatoes might have been all your budget could bear but the potatoes were organic, they were not sprayed with pesticides, nor infused with saturated fat like and stuffed like a pack of pencils into a dioxin bleached paper bag.

Being poor used to mean you ate the cheapest cuts of meat - but the meat you ate was not injected with hormones and antibiotics. It was just organ meat - which was perfectly safe to eat - free from the contaminants that keep modern day diners from daring to ingest liver from modern day livestock.

Today's impoverished Americans are left to survive in conditions worse than the potato famine. Liquor stores and fast food restaurants make up basic food group choices. Does one count whiskey as a grain? Or wine as a serving of fruit?

People are so disconnected from knowledge of food sources that even though they are being virtually starved to death for adequate nutrition, no one digs up the blacktop in search of a place to plant a single seed that might one day grow into an actual vegetable. Instead, people continue to go unnourished and unnoticed in broad daylight in the food deserts claiming the lives of so many of America's poor.