Woman perfectly breaks down the problem with shaming people for eating junk food

Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has long campaigned on the importance of healthy eating for young children and has rightly been applauded for his crusade - but one aspect of this complex issue is too often overlooked.

As Twitter user @sibylpain (who appears to go by the eccentric nom de web "cara delevigne's sex bench") pointed out in a poignant and often harrowing autobiographical thread that went viral, low-income families' decisions to opt for convenience foods over fresh fruit and vegetables is often a matter of economic necessity.

As she explains, "quinoa and couscous was out of the question" when she was growing up as her father was forced to raise her and her brother alone while holding down a job and battling severe depression after his wife left him.

The writer's mother was in need of psychiatric care, she says, and was often "violent and dangerous", leaving her ex-husband "150 threatening voicemails a day and... violating her restraining order", threatening to abduct the children and forcing the father to sleep on the couch in case she tried to break in to their house at night.

The author goes on:

We usually lived on whatever​ was in the reduced section. Even fruit and veg was too expensive, so my brother and I had to take multivitamins in order to get a lot of the things we needed.

The answer, she argues, is to tackle the root causes of poverty, not junk food itself, which is merely a symptom of wider social deprivation.

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