(I have no idea why I am suddenly drawn back to this platform, but here we are again.)
A lot of time in one place has me wondering about a way to quantify a concept I will call "Grocery Miles," b/c "Bougie Food Desert Index" sounds bad. Some places are relatively expensive to live; others are less so. I feel weird invoking the wisdom of the market like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had a scaly baby and named it The Gurgling Cod, but I think sometimes we forget that some places are more expensive than others because more people want to live there, because there is more stuff there. (This formulation dramatically understates employment/gentrification, which I am still trying to figure out how to account for.) In some cases, a place is less expensive to live because it is further from stuff people want to be close to. I am very lucky to have a comfortable and affordable place to live, but I do bark my shins, frequently, against wanting to cook stuff, and not having access to the ingredients. I recognize that this is a bougie issue, and I do live within an easy drive/reasonable bike/long walk of a full service supermarket, but there's lots of stuff they don't have. I guess one problem w/ this as a metric is that the list would be different for everyone, but I am curious about the idea of grocery miles, or how far you have to go to get certain items that are an important part of your cooking. My list might be something like good bread (90 minutes), gochujang (2 hours), Gruyere (45 minutes). If my time is worth something (debatable), the time it takes to make bi bim bap or French onion soup, compared to living in a city, is arguably like a tax that offsets the lower cost of living in the sticks. I can (and usually do) make do with what I can find locally, but it is something that I wonder about. Again, fortunate to have enough to eat, and a place to live, but I am trying to think about the way we talk about "cost of living" vs quality of life.
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