I like Aldi for this reason. There are FEWER choices! They have wonderful seasonal produce, their meat is just fine and they have healthy alternatives for almost everything. They certainly offer crap too, but just because of the size of the store it's a whole lot less.

I'm in Ohio and there's crap in abundance. But there's good stuff too, including some great farmer's markets. We are in farm country, after all.

My biggest irk here is about transportation. A car is a must throughout most of Ohio, unless you're lucky to live in a historic type downtown area, like I did growing up. Where I am now we're landlocked and have no sidewalks. If we walk out of our small neighborhood we're suddenly on a street too busy for pedestrians. I think that's an absolute crime. It makes me angry, actually! If they would just put in a sidewalk I could walk to two grocery stores and every shopping area you could name! It's right there, all of it within a two mile strip, but it's too dangerous to get there by foot. I can't even walk to the walking path across the street from my neighborhood!! I can't cross that road. So I have to DRIVE to a WALKING path .1 miles from my house. That's POINT ONE miles.

I feel your pain! Where my family lives they do have sidewalks (most of the time) but it's so freaking cold here that walking is pretty unrealistic at the moment. However, I remember growing up that we did walk places and to friend's houses but I just see that less and less around here and it really makes me sad.

At the moment DH and I don't even have a car and it's really nice. Sure, it'd be great to have one for weekend trips and the such but it's really a big hassle once you have to pay for insurance and upkeep!

Yes, I feel lucky in my location, as well.

When I visit my mother in Upstate NY, I do a lot of cooking at home. The grocery stores are good, and at least one of them, Wegman's, is excellent & has to be one of the best chains in the Northeast.

But oh, the restaurants. That is another story.

While there are some good & ambitious ones, the majority simply do not compare to all the healthy choices one can make, nearly effortlessly, when eating out in Manhattan, Westchester and Fairfield County, Connecticut.

And if you leave the vicinity of larger cities, like Rochester and Syracuse, or even a smaller college town, like Ithaca, the restaurant scene is difficult to navigate.

Can you say "home cooking"? Or the most hidebound, traditional red-sauce Italian-American stuff, where they put too much sugar in the sauce?

What I dread is shopping excursions with my mother. She rejoices with me in the clothes that I can fit into. But when it comes time for lunch, while we're out, the choices seem designed to sabotage my ability to wear those clothes.

As for walking, I'm spoiled on that count, too, and I just won't go into it, because it would be too cruel.

It's very possible to live here & live well without a car.

In the apartment where I lived before buying my own place, the parking situation was so annoying that I avoided using my car, particularly in winter, when snow piled up and the already heated competition for spaces became cut throat. I discovered that it was easy to go three straight days without driving, while still going to a small fine arts cinema, getting my hair cut quite decently, going grocery shopping, visiting the laundromat & the dry cleaners, eating out at six or seven nice restaurants, getting to the ATM at my bank and going to the post office.

To be in a walkable neighborhood, you have to look for an old neighborhood, by which I mean one built before World War II. The rate of car ownership was much lower then and most families just had one, if they had one at all. Often the husband drove it to work & the wife had to run the household without it. That means stores & services in easy walking distance from homes.

Wow, I know how you feel. We moved to Ohio about a year ago and I am suffering big time. I am a vegetarian and cook all our meals from scratch. In NY we went to the farmers markets and bought the freshest fruit and vegetables, here the are no framers markets! The closest Whole Foods or Trader Joe's is about 50 min away.
To add to my frustration I cannot eat any packaged salads because I have IBS and something in it kills me. I have to eat frozen veggies for the most part. I have put all my veggie recipes away and pray for the day we can move away for here!
It is hard for people to eat healthy here because its cheaper and easier to just go to a drive through. I think they promote fast food so much that people forget to cook and don't care.
It makes me very sad to see such a lack of interest in fresh fruit and vegetables. But what can we do?

Yes! This is the type of neighborhood I grew up in! It was wonderful! We walked absolutely everywhere and there wasn't anything I couldn't walk to at the ripe old age of EIGHT! The park, post office, school playground, junior high, high school, stadium, river levy, fountains, diner, candy shop, shoe store, JCPenny's, craft stores, etc. It was amazing. I miss it tremendously. Of course my brother still lives there and doesn't walk anywhere. I would!

I'm from CA too, but live in the midwest now for grad school. I'm actually completely shocked at how much better the food situation is than I expected - The Walmart less than a mile away has a huge produce section! The freshness is decent. Other food items are also significantly cheaper in no small part to the 7% sales tax. (CA is up to what? 10% now? I don't miss that.) Another good grocery store here is Marsh, they have a good meat counter (I get lamb chops when I can afford them!)

I'll also jump on the complaining bandwagon because where I live is extremely pedestrian unfriendly. Yes, the Walmart is less than a mile away, but it's inaccessible by foot. The Marsh is walking distance as well, but you have to cross a busy state highway to get to it and other shopping centers. I do it sometimes anyway and just run like heck!

The proliferation of drive-thrus here is also amazing to me. 24hr grocery stores are neat but 24hr drive thrus? Of every fast food restaurant known to man? If only there was a 24hr liquor store and they'd sell wine to me on Sundays. Sigh.

Being from Northeastern Pennsylvania the Eastern European influence stands out in the food. Everything is fried and buttered.

I'm quite lucky to be living in Colorado now, healthy living is very important out here.

I live in the midwest and we don't seem to have that problem here. We have several Clovers whole foods markets, a thriving farmer's market, a new Co-op, Schnucks and Hyvees. Of course I also live in a liberal leaning college town which probably makes my experience different from most midwesterners. However, Hyvee is a midwestern brand that started in Iowa and they have a great health foods section and awesome produce. If you want good produce you go to Hyvee. Has anyone from the northwest been to one, does it stack up? Maybe I just don't know any better and Hyvee is totally subpar...

Suburban upstate NY (Albany/Schenectady) native here. We don't have Trader Joes or Whole Foods, but our big chain grocery stores - Price Chopper, Hannaford etc - have lots of healthy options and big produce sections. What saef said about the restaurant scene upstate is 100% true for where I grew up, sadly. Few options aside from Ye Olde Chain Restaurant (TGI Fridays, Chili's, Cheesecake Factory), Chinese buffets, Italian-American style places and diners.

They must hate walkers too. Aside from busy main roads, sidewalks are rare as rubies. The subdivision type neighborhoods are great for leisure walking but as far as actually walking to stores and things as a means of transportation, you have to really trust the drivers.

I love my hometown but I think I'm going to end up wanting to move to a real city.

***

In Japan, I live in a car-centric small town. I opted not to buy a bicycle or a car and I walk everywhere: to work, to the train station, to the supermarket, to bars. My town was a coal mining boom town 40 years ago and is supposedly one of the most run-down and dangerous areas of the prefecture, but the sidewalk situation is far better than back home. I call this my "Parisian life" because I buy my groceries fresh a few times a week and rely on my feet to get me from Point A to Point B. I don't want to have to give it up when I move back to America, and I'm really terrified.

This sounds like my college life, except I was in a perfectly safe environment. We weren't allowed a car and it took as long to wait for a bus as to just walk there so I walked everywhere. The dining hall I preferred was at least a 3/4 mile walk, so I had that walk twice a day, at least. (I was into skipping breakfast in those days, or I'd do a Slim Fast or apple). If I wanted to go to Walmart, literally the only shopping center in the town, it was a two mile hike. I had to make that trip for necessities not provided in the dining hall. You know, like deodorant!

I miss that.

It's really nice. All that walking time means thinking time and relaxing time too. And Japan as a whole is pretty darn safe to be honest, the men aren't into harassing women on the streets like back home and I feel safe walking alone at any time of night.

The no sidewalk situation is alarming to me as a Brit. The only roads without sidewalks here are ones you aren't allowed to walk on anyway, like motorways (freeways) and large A roads (state highway). Everything else in towns and cities has a sidewalk (except we call them pavements), everything! It's simply illegal to build without, if someone wants to build houses then they must put in a road to the houses and a sidewalk meeting criteria about the expected amount of foot traffic and safe crossing points designated by the speed and width of the road. There are some rural roads without, but in general you can just walk along the roadside on those and people will have their eyes peeled for walkers, hikers, cycles and horses. There are very few places it would be truly impossible to walk if you wanted to walk, and many town and city centres are walking only.

I find it so odd that we are not culturally accepting of obesity yet are very accepting of all the things that cause it. You don't have to put on a big hat and go out under cover of darkness to the drive-thru, it's perfectly acceptable, just don't get fat doing it. I think of the other cultures I have known and what helped them. When my dad was young it was the height of rudeness to eat outdoors, or indeed outside of a designated eating and drinking area. You've never eat at your desk, at a bus stop, in your car, in the street, it was completely unacceptable. When I was a child snacking was frowned upon as you'd "spoil your appetite" for your meals, yet now there is an ad running on UK TV showing a special snack for kids who come home from school hungry and cannot wait all the way till dinner time before eating!

Media acceptability has created new thought processes: Mum is tired of being pushed around all week so she bought a KFC bargain bucket. There is no revenue gain in saying mum is tired of being pushed around all week so dad cooked. I think we could do some good things with ads for healthy food being shown as being delicious, but it's always shown as specially for diets and getting thin, advertised by a tiny woman in a swimsuit.

Schools have started nutrition education, but IMHO it's rubbish. The kids learn that chocolate and fries are "bad" and fruit and veg are "good" and it stops there. Nothing about reading a nutrition label, substitutions, nothing at all about the role of all foods in between - dairy, meat, nuts, indeed anything at all that might make up a person's majority diet. They also don't learn that "good for you" changes with time, that semi-skimmed milk is jolly good for young children, not so great for older children. Youngsters benefit from cheese, older kids should try to get their calcium from elsewhere. No, fries bad/fruit good, that is the nutrition message in total.

In Europe not only do people have more healthy traditional diets, but there is a wholly different attitude to food and meals. In the UK and US there is food woven in everywhere, because it's a revenue generator. Food in the gas station, food in the cinema, food in the drugstore, food in the office, food in the gym (!), food in the swimming baths... in France this is much, much less so. Gas stations sell gas and only gas. Cinemas are places you go to see a movie, not places you go to shovel nachos and popcorn in while you happen to be in front of a movie. Food is served in food service places, nowhere else. People stop and sit down to a planned lunch then they go back to work where it is almost entirely devoid of food. The vending machine market in France is growing but still virtually non-existent compared to the UK. I've never seen someone eat on a bus in France, not ever. Not to mention they simply will not tolerate bad food just to make it cheaper, even the grottiest of truckstops has a proper sit-down meal cooked on the premises and eaten with metal cutlery, but that cultural thing of keeping food in restaurants and cafes and grocery stores and not letting it spill over into every place we ever go is huge.

^Bump.

This is a really interesting thread. I think you really hit the nail on the head regarding revenue and foodish substances, RoseRodent.

I live in Southeast. Good produce can be gotten in-season from orchards, farmer's markets and roadside stands. Upscale grocery stores and "healthy" stores like EarthFare usually have decent stuff too, although it can be expensive. Some people keep vegetable gardens, of course, so those can be good sources of produce. Most grocery stores don't have a good selection of fresh produce and the selection at Wal-Mart just tends to be depressing.

Sidewalks are relatively rare here, too. I live near the center of the largest city in the state, so I'm good here. I actually picked my current neighborhood because it allows me to walk to work, class, the closest of the grocery stores I frequent, the pharmacy, the gym - almost everywhere I go on a regular basis. I think it's one of the most walkable places in the city (and all I have to do for it is pay my rent and put up with the drunk undergrads who frequent the area ). When I lived at the coast only the tourist area had sidewalks. My hometown only has sidewalks for a few blocks in the more commercial areas and in the mill villages and other older, still intact neighborhoods. I can't walk from my parents' house to anywhere - everything's either too unsafe or too far away. City planning here often doesn't seem to account for the needs of pedestrians (or the fact that long, narrow roads through areas zoned for commerce will, almost inevitably, lead to serious traffic congestion and pollution). A lot of towns have historic squares or pedestrian-friendly downtown (or just "town" ) areas, but it seems like most of them are either so small that there's nowhere to go, or were allowed to move from rural straight to urban (or what passes for urban here) without consideration for the health of the community or the sustainability of the city's design. Cycling is a possibility, but isn't very popular and is (IMO) usually more risky than it's worth. That said, there are organic farms and proponents of the slow food movement. There are cyclists and advocates of sidewalks and bike lanes. These people are bringing about change, and it seems like more people are getting interested every year. Progress is being made, albeit slowly.

This state has so much historical baggage and so many problems it needs to address. There's not much that fresh vegetables and sidewalks can do about the former, but I do think that better city planning and using the government and non-profit groups as tools to improve the food choices available to people and give people knowledge about how to live better could help decrease the economic and creative poverty that affect so many people here.

This is so interesting to hear all of the regional differences! We all feel horrible about having gotten so fat, but look at what we are surrounded with! Look at what food our culture has started to look at as "normal"! I feel like I've got it pretty good living in Seattle. We have the big chains (Whole Foods, TJ's), food coops, farmer's markets, everything you could want.

A few of you have talked about living abroad (outside the US). I noticed such a huge difference in the "food culture" when I lived in Nairobi. Seriously, the only people who were overweight (they were very rare) were the rich people who could afford to buy processed/fast food. Anything processed, any kind of fast food was SO expensive there- we didn't have a ton on money, so we'd eat the local food that was cheap (and delicious). This included a lot of beans, sukuma wiki (like kale), ugali (cooked maize meal) and occasionally meat. Also, my Kenyan brother-in-law would not stand for "silly mzungu suffs" (mzungu=white person). To put it into perspective, I could go to a small restaurant and buy a huge meal of beans, sukuma, cabbage, chapati (kind of like tortillas) and chai for about the same amount I could spend on a small candy bar or a sugary juice. It was normal to eat real food, abnormal to eat processed garbage. It's terrifying that this is becoming so rare in the world as US fast food/processed food spreads around the world.