These days, a lot of small towns don't even have a full-service grocery store and many people who want to live in a small town have to commute a long ways to get basic essential food they need.

Historically, they may also not have had a full-service grocery store, but a lot more people lived and/or worked on farms and a lot more food was sold locally, not far from where it was grown.

There are essential services that have been unraveling in recent years, making it really challenging to baseline survive in a small town in a way that wasn't always true. And it should not be true that you have a gun to your head to own a car in order to have any hope of having an adequate diet. That's just seriously problematic for individuals and even potentially threatens welfare or survival of the human race.

Something has gone very wrong that it's so hard for so many people to get a decent meal when we are awash in so much societal wealth, yet our systems for how it gets distributed and such have gotten so out of whack.