by Pavel Podolyak

Created on: May 06, 2009

Popularity of McDonalds, and the ghastly pride the nation takes in it, has done a lot to help create an insurmountable nutritional gap between the wealthier and poorer citizens of United States. This gap is bound to grow wider in years ahead and it has a mutually influential relationship with the similarly widening educational gap.

Basic food sustenance, along with basic literacy, has mostly been achieved in United States. One can almost say there aren't starving Americans in a superpower that is building infrastructure abroad for conquered societies. Obviously that isn't exactly the case, as seen by dramatic numbers of people who fall through the cracks. However, even the homeless can scrape enough to get mass produced rice and bread. Starvation is not a problem as seen by the obesity rates of the poor ( and corresponding drains on health infrastructure as well as stagnating life spans). Mission accomplished?

Not exactly. Try going to a gas station in rural areas of United States and finding anything that is healthy. Healthy is a rather vague term but lets work with a definition of a food that at least doesn't do harm. You might find some milk and low fat cheese or even eggs occasionally. Vast majority of what you'll find is tightly sealed in plastic and resembles military MRE ration packs. We're talking about food so full of preservatives, salts, and fats that it can survive indefinitely. When this type of food hits a ravenous stomach, the result is a lot of energy expanded by the body to just break it down and separate the molecules. We're all familiar at this point with the side effects of too much corn starch, sodium, sugars, salts, and de facto saturated fats (recent regulatory efforts against blatantly detrimental transfats just touch upon the tip of the iceberg). We're also familiar with nutrient deprived white bread, pasta, and rice that fills the hunger gaps in a lot of American population. Sure rice and pasta cartons can say they are enriched with vitamins but one doesn't have to be a rocket scientist to see it's not the same vitamin level one would get from chickpeas, pricier grains, and fish.

A person determined to find non-detrimental food will run into a brick wall if he goes into a gas station, bus station, or an urban corner store. This brick wall would be humorous and surreal if one wasn't feeling weakness and bits of pain from hunger. You might argue that those places are designed for snacks and beer rather than food. That disregards

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