Well, if you’re lazy and really don’t like making your own food, then McDonald’s and Taco Bell are a hell of a lot cheaper than going out to proper restaurants. Not that sit-down restaurants are necessarily any healthier - they can probably be worse. But good food that is also healthy and you do not have to prepare yourself really is expensive.
Also, going to a grocer like Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods is obviously much more expensive. Whether they are overall healthier than say, Food4Less, is something you could debate. But there’s no question that if you are well-off you have more food options, at least.
$3.99 next to a picture of a red pepper is probably the cost of stop-light peppers which is a pack of 3 (1-red, 1-yellow, 1-green).
The idea that it’s cheaper to eat junk food simply means people can buy a $1 frozen pizza or some other stomach filling item and be satisfied. Yes they could buy a $1 bag of mixed frozen vegetables but nobody is going to eat that as a meal.
I just made lo-mien tonight and it involved: spaghetti, various sauces, spices, vegetables and meat. It cost me $16 to make 8 meals. Add in the gas, energy and time to cook it and it’s easy to see why working people on a budget buy $1 pizzas or make taco’s for dinner.
When my parents were dirt poor back in the '70s they lived off things like dried beans, which are healthy and absurdly cheap, even now. These days when I walk into a poor person’s kitchen I see Cheetos, Pepsi, Ho-Hos, . . . people say it’s about money but these things aren’t really cheaper. The kind of people who live off this stuff would still live off of it if they won the lottery because it’s not about money, they’ve just developed a taste for processed sugar and fat, and they don’t care enough about their own health to ever tell themselves “no.” Exceptions to every rule, personal experience may vary, but this is what I saw growing up in the semi-rural south, where it seemed like every other family was poor and overweight.
You might need the internet to be in tune with something like this these days (which is available even to the homeless at today’s libraries), but I buy from a local co-op and get about 50lbs of fresh produce for $15, and there is a lot of variety and it’s different every week.
I’m not suggesting that it can’t be done or that it’s difficult to do but the reality of it is that processed foods are often cheaper. You can buy pot pies or mac & cheese for less than $1.
I think it’s a lot less about money and a lot more about time and planning.
If I had to create one of my dinners from scratch, I’d be spending a lot at the supermarket. However, because I always cook my own dinners, I have a pantry full of ingredients I can call on to supplement the fresh meat and vegetables I buy at the supermarket, and I have a cupboard full of the right pots, pans and utensils I need to cook it.
Fatty meat typically costs less than lean. Sausages and other processed meat products are often cheaper still.
White flour is cheaper than wholemeal.
If you’re making your own food from scratch, and the criteria are: a full-feeling stomach and sufficient calroies to survive, it can quite easily be cheaper to end up eating a meal that is unhealthy and lacking in fresh vegetables.
Unless you grow your own, or buy them direct from the farmer, fresh fruits and vegetables are not usually the cheapest source of calories.
My wife and I have certainly discovered that it’s actually not a lot cheaper to cook at home for every meal than it is to replace a couple of them with a meal out.
For example, stir-fry meat is about $18/kg from the supermarket, and if you buy (say) 300 grammes, ($6) then a couple of onions (There’s another $1), then some capsicum (another $2-3) and then some sliced green beans (another $2), along with some bok choi ($2) and maybe half a bag of broccoli/cauliflower ($1.50 worth, say), along with the sauce ($2.50) and use $1 worth of rice, you’re up to $19 to feed two people, before you factor in the time involved in actually going to the supermarket, buying all this stuff, taking it home, cooking it, and then cleaning up afterwards.
Or we can go to the local Chinese place (which does “proper” Chinese, not the MSG-and-God-knows-what-else filled stuff like you find in malls) for about $23, and have a nice meal cooked for us and someone else takes care of the preparation and cleaning up afterwards (and it tastes nicer than anything I could cook!)
Now, obviously, that’s only an example, but the point is that for a lot of people it really is cheaper to eat “unhealthy” or “fast” food most of the time, instead of buying and cooking their own with fresh produce (which is readily obtainable in Australian supermarkets).
My wife and I cook/make most of our meals at home (a sandwich made at home is far cheaper than one from Subway, for example) but I can completely understand why a lot of people don’t- especially if they’re busy, don’t have a car to get to the supermarket, or simply can’t cook.
I find it odd that so many people are arguing that $3.99 for a pepper is impossible and everyone claiming that price must be mistaken.
No.
I have seen it. It was $3.29, actually, so it’s marginally less ridiculous, but I have no trouble believing that somewhere else it could climb higher. It’s more common to have a per-pound price, and the highest I’ve seen is $4.19/lb (I didn’t eat peppers that week). When you’re in the middle of winter and they’re trucking and flying your vegetables from all over the planet, prices will go up. Especially if there’s been a bad crop. Also, the individual peppers are huge monstrosities weighing a half pound each. I’ll usually only see prices of $1.99/lb in the summer.
No, in places like Minnesota right now, that is the cost of a single red pepper at a mainstream grocery store. Was just at the grocery store day before yesterday scoping produce and noting fresh produce right now is really expensive (I can’t get over the $1.89/lb GREEN BEANS). Green peppers are cheaper (but my husband won’t eat them). Non-organic. Saw $6 organic peppers about this time last year at the co-op. Not many of them.
There are 4 components to the “junk food is cheaper.”
Inner cities and rural areas don’t often have a lot of good grocery stores. Getting to a grocer can be a big deal. In inner cities, there are often great ethnic markets where there is food for cheap, but for a lot of people their comfort level in an ethnic market isn’t high. Because transportation can be an issue, getting to a grocery store can be time consuming, and you can only haul back what you can take on the bus.
Whole food can be time consuming and relatively complicated to cook - and clean up after. Its EASY to pop in a frozen pizza and eat fifteen minutes later. In a small kitchen without good tools (and a dishwasher), roasting a chicken is a bigger deal than in a nice kitchen with lots of room. If you don’t know how to cook - even the basics - the idea of a pot of soup is overwhelming.
Whole foods - particularly fruit and vegetables - rot quickly. With a limited food budget, throwing away milk or broccoli hurts.
Doritos and pizza taste better than spinach and squash.
In my little town in the far north of Michigan, bell peppers are always per pound, and I’ve never seen more than $4.99/pound. Most of the time - summer and winter - red/yellow/orange bell peppers are around $2.99-$3.99/pound.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen them priced per pepper. Peppers have such a large difference in sizes, it doesn’t seem to make sense to price them per pepper.
I’ve seen them both ways, and I’ve learned to be careful. Peppers don’t weigh much so if you think you are getting $3.99 a pound, you are getting a few peppers - pricey, but not highway robbery. If you get to check out and find out they are $3.99 EACH, you have some expensive peppers. (Done that once or twice).
Yep. I’m a troll, Athena :), and I think that in general the price should be $3.99/lb, but there are shops that will probably take advantage of people just glancing, seeing $3.99, and using “each” instead of “/lb”.
Another component that I’m just starting to think of so I hope I can describe clearly that if I spend $40 on fresh produce I have to serve most of it within a week. $40 spent on prepared, frozen or canned stuff can be used weeks or even months after the shopping is done.
My family is fortunate enough to live in an area with several major grocery chains with multiple locations within 5 miles of our home.
Also, we do a lot of grocery saving with coupons. There are very rarely coupons for fresh produce. Specials, sure but not coupons.
When I buy a bunch (head?) of fresh broccoli for .99/lb how much of it gets peeled, trimmed and composted away? When frozen vegetables go on sale I get a 1lb bag for a dollar and get to use all of it.
Add me to the list of people who aren’t surprised at the idea of $3.99 for a red bell pepper. I lived in LA for a few years. My sister came to visit from New York and was practically giddy at the produce prices. She bought enough avocados and mangoes to have one every day of her visit just 'cause she could.
I’ve seen it both ways, even at different times of year in the same store. I see a per piece price more often with red, yellow, and “specialty” peppers than green bell.
This made a huge difference to me before I moved in with the SO. When I wasn’t splitting groceries with someone else I couldn’t buy a whole chicken at 50 cents a pound because at least 1/3 of it would go bad before I could eat it and that was a waste of my limited budget. I couldn’t buy a week worth of fruit because it would be rotting before I finished it. Macaroni and cheese is 3 boxes for a dollar and waited in the pantry as long as I needed it to without going bad. I’ve always eaten a lot of carrots but has only been in the last year that my thoughts have changed from, “Carrots won’t go bad for at least 2 weeks” to “Mmm, carrots” while shopping. My cart used to be full of boxes and cans but now it is full of fruits, vegetables, and lean meats simply because I won’t have to throw a third of it away at the end of the week.
I would have put that as “Pizza and spinach taste better than Doritos and squash”
I lived in a poor neighborhood in Syracuse NY for a while, and had a decent grocery store only a block and a half from my house. The thin people had good stuff in their carts, the fat ones had junk. Many of both sizes of people were paying with food stamps, so it certainly wasn’t about not having the time to prepare the good stuff. The obvious conclusion is that the fat ones like junk, the thin ones like good stuff.
I’m so used to $3.99 bell peppers that it doesn’t even raise an eyebrow with me anymore. I just accept that as the price.
There’s a lot more to it than just price and laziness. When I first moved into my current apartment, I had nothing near me except 7-eleven, and that’s not exactly a fresh fruit mecca. I wouldn’t touch the produce there with a ten foot pole. The only semi-nearby supermarket has crappy selection and smells like rotting fish, and is still pretty far from me.
For a couple of years I was ordering groceries online. The minimum order was $50, so even with inflated produce prices, it was hard to buy enough to meet the minimum and still eat everything before it went bad. I ended up buying more steaks than broccoli.
And then there’s my kitchen. I have MAYBE 3 square feet of counter space, and half of that is taken up by oil, salt shakers, and whetever else. Why not put that stuff in the cabinets? My cabinets are a joke. My fridge isn’t much better.
Things are better now, though. There is a supermarket near where I work. I can stock up on $3.99 peppers, then carry my groceries for a half mile walk, then squeeze on the train, then another half mile walk. Uphill. Both ways.
Crappy food is cheap. Deal with it. Poor people buy food that will fill their stomach up. A full stomach makes one feel better. Sometimes that’s all there is when home isn’t a secure long term place, you can’t count on the people around you, and you’re the last line of defence against those who have fallen through the cracks of the mental health safety net.
An interesting experiment if you are interested in this sort of thing beyond your arm chair opinion, is to Take $600 in cash, and leave your home for a month. No id, no car, only what you can carry and go live on that. Food, shelter, everything for $600. When you get to the last week of the month, let us know how you feel about 6 pounds of cabbage for a buck.
