[Applejinx]

There's an opportunity cost and a time cost (and an attention cost) to making food properly and eating right.

Opportunity: if your area cannot give you produce (raw materials to cook with) that's pretty direct. Time: I'm fortunate enough that I can blow at least an hour a day just cutting up meat for stir-fry or preparing my omelet and oatmeal, and a lot of this is really time-optimized but it's still way more than the microwave-box lifestyle. That hour (at least, and distributed among all my meals for the day) is also an attention sink that I can't skip, even though I make the same stuff over and over. If I couldn't do that, I'd have to not only be getting different foodstuffs, but also figuring out different recipes every time I got bored.

You can let corporate America do that stuff for you and just pick different enticing boxes of microwaveable stuff, but you will get bombed with combinations of sugar and salt because competing in the supermarket aisle is serious business and those who fail are lost. They'd be putting fentanyl in the Hot Pockets if they dared. Anything to make the sale, it's that or perish.

Then, that's what you eat, if you're poor and can't spend hours doing it yourself and doing it right. And if you're poor enough… the selection at Cumberland Farms is going to be strictly kept to whatever the other poor people in your neighborhood are addicted to, because that's what will sell.