Magazine

Chips, orange drink and Laffy Taffy beckon to people in the same way that Las Vegas does. Sitting on the shelf of a city’s bodega, the products are too brightly colored to be natural or healthy, but they’re also too tasty and cheap to pass up. “You get a [fruit drink] for a quarter, you get chips for a quarter, and you got a lunch for fifty cents,” Rafi Kam says.

Last year, Kam and his friend Dallas Penn made a searing, popular YouTube skit about the lack of healthy food choices in the Bronx’s bodegas. (The above quote is from the video.) In it, the comedians sarcastically laud the bodega’s food pyramid: A free-radical triangle made up of 40-ounces, quarter-water, chips and snack cakes. For the finale, they thank New York’s politicians for always letting poor people have their Tastykake, and eat it too.