“Shopping every other day was not practical”
Being practical would help you to shop smarter, so as not to have to buy every other day, even if restricted to two or three bags per trip. I could certain provide for myself for a week on a few days, if I had to.
“factor in things like rain, snow or hreavy winds, and the mile walk becomes worse. Replace me with a little ol’ lady, and it becomes impractical altogether”
No, not altogether. For little old ladies live not as monads, and can be aided by fellow humans. Just as they are aided, no doubt, in myraid other tasks which you and I take for granted.
Look, what you’re speaking to are better termed complications. Or at least, since I don’t want to get tangled in semantics, not “problems” that deserve comment on an organized level above neighborhood gossip (which has its own sort of spontaneous order). Except if it’s by, as you mention, enterprises seeking to exploit a hole in the market. If there is a hole.
Plenty of stuff is complicated; we need not pretend like in this case it’s a matter of starvation or thrival. Because having to plan for trips without cars does not threaten death, assuming it’s not too inflammatory to take it that’s what’s implied by the term “food desert”: i.e., elevated if not immenent threat of death. If it did, the human race would have died out prior to the twentieth century.
“It doesn’t necessarily make one shop healthier”
Nop, but I dopn’t believe I made that claim. Unless you inferred it from the freshness comment, and, indeed, the opportunity to buy fresher does provide an incentive to eat healthier. But, yes, you can just as easily buy the same things in smaller quantities.
By the way, in looking up “thrival” to ensure it was an actual word I discovered to my surprise that it’s become a buzz word. I can’t tell if it’s for hipsters, bored housewives, new agers, enviros, or what, and frankly I don’t want to know. Just saying please don’t take my use to mean I in any way endorse its current popularity.
“At the time I was in this situation, I was in college full time, and also working a couple of jobs”
I was lucky enough to have a store right across the street from my apartment part of the time while I was in college and working full time. Of course, that was in what must fairly be considered a suburb, though it was a metropolis stand-in for the region. It never ceases to surprise me how often libs clamor for suburban conveniences to come to the city by stroke of the state wand, for how darkly they imagine The Suburb: Nightmare of Conformity in Late Capitalist Modernity, or however they dub it.