Poor people don't eat much fresh produce unless they grow it themselves. Frozen vegetables are preferred because they are cheaper and often higher quality because they weren't sitting around for days and weeks. I grew up quite poor in a few different regions of the US, it works like this everywhere. In more rural areas, there are a lot personal gardens and barter. You aren't going to convince a poor person to spend more money on a worse product. Insisting that grocers in poor areas carry large stocks of fresh produce isn't helpful, it just demonstrates a naive lack of familiarity with how poor people optimize their food spending. They have plenty of access to quality vegetables.
I know a wealthy person with impeccable culinary taste whose guilty pleasure is eating certain frozen/canned vegetables. She grew up very poor and loves the taste/texture of them even though she can easily afford the most bougie fresh vegetables available. It isn't nearly as bad to get your produce this way as I think some upper-middle class people assume it is.
I don't mean to offend the honor of frozen vegetables, which often are fresher even in the fancy grocery store, are equally nutritious (maybe less true of canned ones), and are perfectly suitable for many uses. Nor do I mean to pretend to have some kind of deep understanding of how the other half lives. My point is just that if the grocer had nutritious options and the dollar store just sells garbage then there are some negatives to the latter replacing the former for people's health.
Back in the day we used to have a butcher, a baker, maybe a local fisherman, and fresh eggs & vegetables in a farmer's market. All of that was supplanted by supermarkets & grocery stores. With those options gone, an array of services will be unavailable to poor people, and they'll grow up on canned food and candy. That leads to poor decisions about food, which leads to poor health, which leads to all sorts of problems. And then of course there's the death of human culture. It's not uncommon today for poor households to not even know how to boil rice. It's not all the Dollar Store's fault, but at some point we do need to push back on the slow decline of our civilization.
That is a rather extreme and inaccurate caricature of the food situation for poor people. You can choose to believe it but it doesn't make it true. Sure, there are some poor people that nothing but junk food but that doesn't reflect on the food that is typically available to them.
Yep. I've lived in many large cities with huge food deserts where the only access to food within a 1hr bus ride were liquor stores, fried chicken, and gas stations (not even a 7-11).
I knew some kids growing up whose parents did not know how (and did not want to learn) to cook even the essentials. If it couldn't be microwaved, warmed up in an oven, eaten cold, or bought from McDonalds, they didn't eat it.
