[wadetandy]

It's not so much poor food selection as poor access to quality and affordable food. You can eat for a lot longer on $10 if you're buying things on the McDonald's dollar menu than if you're buying fresh produce at Safeway or giant.

[matwood]

As maxericson alludes to below, it is not about money, but time. McDs is not really that cheap, even when buying a cheap combo or something from the dollar menu. For a single person you're looking at $5-$7.

Meanwhile, my local grocery store has 2lbs of chicken thighs for $5. You can add some potatoes and onions for another couple bucks. So for roughly the same price a single person could get 2-4 meals. The difference is that for the second meal the person needs time to prepare.

[maxerickson]

Pasta costs $1 a pound (if you price watch just a little).

Potatoes often cost less than $0.50 a pound.

I think those are very valid comparisons, potatoes are even more nutritious than anything McDonald's sells.

Sure, you have to cook them both for 10 or 15 minutes, which means you have to have a working stove top, but McDonald's is not more affordable than the grocery store, especially if you are buying things that are only comparably nutritious (rather than for flavor or better nutrition or whatever).

[steveax]

Assuming of course that you have a grocery store in your neighborhood.

[maxerickson]

It would be an interesting map, to see how many people lived substantially closer to a McDonald's than to a place that sold pasta for reasonable prices. I guess you might have to toss in Subway.

Here, the decent groceries are a bit over a mile away, two are a bit closer than the McDonald's, one is a bit further. 2 Subways beat them all.

I guess such a map would have uninteresting regions where it was more of a choice (rural residential lots).