Eating preferences and customs are cultural and learned. Healthy eating is a matter of acquired tastes (takes some effort to acquire them, often thanks to parents' pressure) and delayed gratification. Junk food, like all sort of mass products, gives immediate gratification to simple, innate preferences: fat, salty, sugary, high-calories and strongly flavoured.
People with low impulse control and less strict education from their families are naturally drawn to junk food, and the effects compound through the generations.
Link to the related blog post by the author: <a href="https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/food-deserts-are-not-real" rel="nofollow">https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/food-deserts-are-not-real</a><p>The paper referenced in the x-tweet is "Food Deserts and the Causes of Nutritional Inequality", which can be found eg here[1].<p>[1]: <a href="https://web.stanford.edu/~diamondr/FoodDeserts.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://web.stanford.edu/~diamondr/FoodDeserts.pdf</a>
How much of it is stress-induced eating when low-income households barely live paycheck-to-paycheck. That in itself can lead to learned eating preferences inherited from parent to children. I'd assume a healthy diet is the last thing on your mind when you worry tomorrow is eviction day.
One reason may be that proper grocery shops are too far from the places where they live, and they can't afford time driving there and then cooking, working two jobs?