Food for thought

Consider a hypothetical situation: Circumstances have caused people to be marooned on an island, unable to leave it.  This is no comedy, nor is time travel involved; the only native oddity is that the only trees that grow on the island are full of fat and bear few nutrients.  While it is possible to live for years and even generations on the island on a diet of this fruit, it is obviously unhealthy. The islanders already know the food is unhealthy, but also that it's all there is.

Given a chance to help those who live on the island, what feasible options come to mind?  Perhaps aid to help the islanders move to another island, either permanently or to visit in order to gather better food?  Perhaps better equipment to create healthier meals from the fruit? 

Would eliminating the fruit trees and leaving the islanders to fend for themselves sound like a good idea?  If not, replace the trees with fast food chains and change the hypothetical island to a real one, where the boundaries are possibility, time, and money instead of water.  Suddenly eliminating the only source of food sounds like a great idea, despite it being the same thing.

Education is not the problem with may people, but resources.  Housing where owning a fridge goes against the lease is not unheard of in poorer districts.  Many are forced to eat out when they have been given monetary aid and told o spent it on beans and rice--fat and starchy carbs--because they do not own a working stove.  People who work taxing jobs and have long commutes don't have the time or energy--or even transport or money--to make long visits to stores with healthier foods.

Some people, in fact, have no job, no income save for what they beg from others, and no home.  It is easy to point and say they are bad people and stupid for buying something cheap and mostly fat, but it doesn't make us good people or intelligent at all for thinking things are as simple as our lives all over the world for everyone. 

We can only expect such after we've made sure it is such.

Education will indeed lead to fixing the obesity epidemic, but educating those who already do eat right will help more than those who don't.  Until knowing the benefits of clean water makes the water that way, we can't expect the same with food.   Just as a pasture does not replace a cut forest, the same can be said for healthier stores replacing fast food; yet the latter is said to be obvious and intelligent, while the former silly and uneducated.

You can't just boil things down to blaming others.  Even if that's hard to swallow.