Do people still say that it's cheaper to eat crap than fruits and veg? not true...

In My Humble Opinion
81

Bolding mine, but I’m quoting myself, so who cares? :slight_smile:

I guess I need to clarify that I was giving three separate examples. I meant 1) McDonald’s burgers OR 2) chicken nuggets (some other brand) OR 3)soda.

They are separate and unrelated to each other. I didn’t mean chicken nuggets from McDonald’s specifically.

And by “bulk filler” was thinking specifically of texturized soy protein and cornstarch. I suppose I should have said “binder” instead of “filler” but the intent was the same. Looking at the quote from Pollan’s book, I see that corn-based binder is the SECOND ingredient.

82

:confused::confused: Why? I’m so confused. Cows don’t naturally eat grain at all. Well, they’re fully domesticated, so before I start another nitpick storm let me amend that to say: Cow’s ancestors didn’t eat any grain at all.

83

There’s something weird about this pepper pricing thing because here in England, not a region renowned for its pepper crop, they cost about $1 all year round. That’s in mid-range supermarkets. I haven’t bothered to comparison-shop, perhaps you can get them cheaper elsewhere. The “traffic light” 3-packs cost about £1.60 which is about $2.40.
I don’t think we grow them here, so they have to travel across land and/or sea from Spain or Morocco or wherever they come from.

84

There’s a lot of mixing of ideas going on in this thread, which is the nature of conversation. But as the OP, I’d like to define MY terms:

crap = food which provides nothing of value apart from calories = snack food, soda, fast food $1 pizza (which, for the record, if i had the choice of eating a pot of boiled cabbage vs. a $1 pizza, I’d go for the cabbage EVERY time… “pizza” that is made cheaply enough to be sold for $1 is, in my experience, completely revolting in every imaginable way. Lightly steamed cabbage, or, better yet, stirfried cabbage with a splash of soy sauce and sesame oil - serviceable brands are available at the 99 cents store and last through dozens if not hundreds of meals - is light years more edible than one of those gross goodisks with red goo labeled “pizza”), etc.

Also, “fruits and veg” very much includes FROZEN fruits and veg, which, especially if you live in a an area where fresh is expensive and hard to come by, meaning it’s been trucked long distances, is MORE healthful than fresh. My freezer is stacked pretty deep with vegetables and fruit, as well as protein that I bought on sale/bulk and divided.

I think there’s a lot of validity to the idea that lack of time can make it much harder to eat more nutritiously on a severely restricted budget, because eating nutritiously does generally mean a little more time and effort. But I would argue strenuously that I could buy 5 meals brimming with vitamins, minerals, calories, and fiber for the same money you would spend taking your family to McDonalds and scarfing burgers, fries and soda. The only nutritionally valuable thing in eating at mcd’s is the protein, which is the one thing even thr poorest americans can usually acquire plenty of.

85

Grain feedin really started with the big cattle drives resulting from the development of feedlots at the railheads. After being moved from the pasturage to the lots they fed the steers with grain to fatten them back up. Anybody who really knows beef will go for grassfed and dry aged beef.

86

:rolleyes:

a. dried beans aren’t leeks or spinach, for god’s sake. one rinse is plenty.
b. anyone not capable of boiling beans with a couple of chopped onions, a couple of chopped carrots and some salt and pepper is someone who shouldn’t be let out of the house without supervision.

And this is a whole other topic that could go on for pages… until they are capable of earning the money to buy their own food, using a child’s whinyness as an excuse for why you have to keep shoveling hot dogs in their face is…<IMHO Bleep>

87

Careful with that broad brush there, Crafter_Man - you wouldn’t want to make a mess all over -

Darn! Too late, I guess.

Look - are there people who’re poor because they’re lazy? Absolutely. But the fact of the matter is that if your parents are poor, it’s a lot harder to enter the middle class than it is for children of the middle class. If your parents are poor, you probably can’t afford to live in the neighborhoods with the best schools. If your parents are poor and not well-educated, they are going to have to really work to make sure that you develop the appreciation of reading and education that constitutes your ticket out of the middle class. And if your parents are poor, you’ll often have a very different balancing act between work and school, even in high school, than your middle-class comrades.

You’d probably say that, with enough hard work, most people can escape poverty. And that’s true - but it’s very hard. Poverty makes everything harder, from going to school to getting a license to going to the doctor. So it isn’t really fair to dismiss people who fail to make it out as “lazy” - many of us safely unsconced in the middle class from the day we were born might not have made it out either. We just won the lottery.

88

But that’s you. Not everyone agrees. My SO, who is a tremendous cook and introduced me to cabbage as a vegetable (yum), also loves cheap frozen pizza.

If he’s left alone for dinner, chances are pretty high that he’ll be having pizza. One specific brand that we used to be able to buy for something like 4 for $1 on sale. (I think they’ve gone up a bit these days.) Not even expensive frozen pizza, nope - he wants the cheap ones.

I couldn’t tell you the number of kids that GirlChild knew who had only ever eaten Mickey D and Munchables and frozen chicken nuggets and all that kind of crap. And these are kids from nice, middle-class families with college-educated parents, many of whom had an at-home parent for at least part of the time.

Is it those kids’ faults that they not only don’t know how to buy food, much less cook it, but don’t even really know that the option exists?

89

Oh please. This argument has been debunked going all the way back to George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier but by all means don’t let facts get in the way of your upstanding American values.

90

I rinse my beans for about ten minutes or they taste like dirt.

I know many people who cannot boil water. Seriously.

These things sound simple to those of us who can whip up soup without a recipe or can their own applesauce (I do both). Looking at dried beans is overwhelming for a lot of people. I know…silly. And yet - think of the average person. Half of them are dumber than that.

91

Poor people eat cheap high carb foods. They grew up on them and many don’t know how to cook. I volunteer at a couple of food pantries and they won’t take fresh produce. We had to stop giving out Turkeys at Thanksgiving and issue grocery store vouchersd because the landf ill was complaining of the stench of all the uncooked rotten turkeys. Now they can buy frozen food or what ever they want and the turkeys go to charities. many women do not know how to cook a Turkey so they throw it away. It is hard to understand but girls do not take home economics anymore or learn at home. We give the mac and cheese dinners, pasta and spaghetti sauce, canned goods, tuna fish and cereal and left over bread and pastry. They like chicken nuggets so we give the frozen ones out and other frozen prepared meats.

Our main objective is to give them food that they will eat. We have boxes of produce and fruit and the volunteers usually end up taking it home or chucking it.

Sad but true.

92

The OP’s prices are insane. Yes, I’ve paid $3.99 for a single off-season bell pepper, and that was at the cheap farmer’s market I used to live near. Currently I live within 10 miles of five different supermarkets (four major chains and an independent), which I rotate through. I haven’t bought fresh strawberries in a couple of months, because until this week I haven’t been able to find them for any less than $5.99 for the small container, and they were crap ones at that price. Blueberries were running about the same, only the containers were smaller. Don’t get me started on the pineapple or cherry prices. I love canned fruit and eat it often, but you can’t really put it on cereal or yogurt.

And waste is a problem. As a single person, I end up throwing away roughly a third of my normal half gallon of milk a week, on average. I can’t usually get through a large onion in a week either, and you can put that in just about anything. A pound of ground turkey (which is usually the only size you can buy) gets half of it frozen, but that still leaves a lot of taco meat or chili for just one person. And so on.

93

looking at my grocery bill I just paid $1.68 for a large red pepper (don’t remember the per lb price). Sadly, I wanted something pretty for my lo-mien or I would have gotten a green pepper. Should spend my money better.

94

I agree that waste is a problem when you’re talking about fresh produce! Much of the time, I’m here by myself with just my 10YO daughter and my sister who is in chemotherapy. So, even though a lot of people may not know better, here’s a tip: buy frozen! Frozen fruits and veggies are equivalent to fresh in just about every way! (Including the ability to put some lightly thawed frozen berries on cereal or in yogurt!) And most, these days, come in a zip-top bag. So you take out just what you need and put the rest back in the freezer. I even buy frozen diced onion, because I love to cook with onions, but my eyes are very sensitive, and water and sting badly no matter what method I use. So the ones that are in a poly bag, pre-diced and frozen, are great for me. I get to add a few cents’ worth of chopped onion to the dinner I’m cooking, get that great onion flavor, without the tears!

If you live by yourself and use canned tomato products, you can buy a big can (cheaper per ounce) and freeze the leftovers in small portions. That way, you can use them as you need them.

No, it’s not as cheap as buying ‘fresh’ (if fresh is in season!) but it’s a lot cheaper than throwing away high-priced produce!

95

It’s not just poor people. I didn’t have much of a culinary background when I left home and for years I worked/went to school cooking only the most basic of foods. I didn’t have the time, experience or cooking tools to prepare meals. My earlier attempts were expensive failures so I ate a lot of the major brands of prepared dinners (Lean Cuisine, Smart Ones etc…). I bought the more nutritious items but they were right next to cheaper less nutritious ones.

What is sad is that we teach children to eat garbage. It’s not just bad parenting, we actively teach children to eat pizza and fried bits-of-formerly-living-things. I don’t know if anyone has watched the program “Jamie Oliver s Food Revolution” but it’s just sad what we serve kids at school.

I have actively encouraged my nephews to learn how to cook real food and they know more now than I did at age 40. It should be a mandatory course in school along with personal finance.

96

You are fully aware that this makes no sense at all, aren’t you? You sound like a Chewlie’s Gum representative, but for McDonald’s.

The fact is, there’s an expectation, a null hypothesis if you will, that a chicken mcnugget is a piece of chicken battered and fried. The reality is, this is a damn sight from the truth. The things are full of corn like purplehorseshoe originally said, no matter how it was worded, and that’s completely independent of the price of goat buttholes in Kazakhstan or whether any other foods happen to use subsidized corn or soy too. “Nanner nanner boo boo” is not a legitimate argument.

97

:rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes: Oh come on. I say this as a cabbage lover.

If I have $1 to eat for one meal or one day? I’m not eating fucking cabbage that’ll give me, what, 80 calories? I need to actually eat. And once you start talking about things to add in to the cabbage to increase the calories, you’re also increasing the cost.
And there are tons of poor people who don’t even have a stove top. Yes, I’m serious. If you’re really poor, you’re buttfucked in a lot of ways. You can:

  • not have a car, limiting where you’re even able to go (and don’t bring up the bus unless you’re talking about an actual giant urban area like NYC; I’ve posted before about being in Detroit and just trying to get to St. Clair Shores or Grosse Pointe via bus to get to a Kroger. Not gonna happen)

  • have a limited amount of funds (non food example: you need to do laundry. You have $2. You have to buy the overpriced tiny bottle. People tell you to buy the big jug and you’ll save money! But that one is $8. You do not have $8 you can spend on laundry detergent this week. So what are you going to do, not wash your clothes while you save up for that larger detergent?). Yes, steamed cabbage is delicious. But it’s not filling or really nutritionally dense compared to a pizza. Yes, the pizza is crap foods and has a lot of negatives the cabbage doesn’t have, but I can’t go through a work day having just some steamed cabbage.

  • you may be limited in even what you have to cook on. If you have some shit ass apartment (or are someone who has to live in motels, which is a further suck on your money [see Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed” for a good explanation of why this happens. It ties into the example about laundry detergent above) that doesn’t even have much of a kitchen at all. Who are you gonna complain to? The landlord? You knew the deal when you moved in and you moved in because you needed somewhere to live.

And I’m not trying to turn this into some Precious-style poverty porn, but it’s quite possible to be screwed when it comes to being poor and eating well. It’d take more money, effort or transportation that they literally don’t have or don’t have enough of. Sometimes having to worry about keeping a roof over your head is more important than making sure you have a balanced diet.

98

It’s unfortunate that the OP was phrased toward people in actual poverty as opposed to whether it’s cheaper for the average person to eat crap food. I think that detail’s inclusion skews the discussion too far away from the general population, which makes it harder to bust the perception that healthy eating is expensive.

If an average-person anecdote will do:

I began a diet change in December. I loved carbs, and ate lots of high-calorie quickie pastas and rice mixes and salty potato or corn snacks. I often ate fried, cheesy, buttery foods, and I ate all my lunches and 3-4 dinners a week out. My diet changes consisted of a daily calorie limit, reduced portions, adding breakfast, more frequent meals, cooking everything at home, and, integrating as much as I could stand it, whole grains, fruits, vegetables, and lean meats. No foods were forbidden, but I eliminated things that weren’t worth the calories.

As a result of these changes, I’m down 25lbs in 14 weeks.

As a supplement to my weight loss progress, I tracked my food-related expenses. I’ve long been a receipt saver/shredder, so I was able to chart all my grocery spending from June 2009, with per-week and per-month spending averages.

It’s been consistent over the last four months that although I’m spending more at grocery stores these days, overall, I am spending about the same amount of money on food. This is because I’m no longer buying food from restaurants, which greatly inflates cost-per-meal spending. The $30 per week I used to spend for 5 lunches buys me 10-15 meals instead. I’m actually getting more food for my money now, since my grocery spending includes breakfast, a meal I didn’t eat before.

The trade-offs of time-investment, planning, learning about diet and cooking, etc., have all been minimal and worthwhile. It all sounds more daunting than it is.

99

You may not like it, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. It happens all the time, unfortunately.

:dubious:

Everyone, male AND female, should learn how to cook at a basic level. You only teach the women and you’ll have a crop of young adult men who’ll be eating junk, and married men who can’t be SAHDs because they can’t cook.

100

Well, that’s not entirely true, grass is a grain, and grain is a grass. Corn, Wheat, Oats… all grasses. Common pasture grasses and their seeds are also grains. The natural diet of a cow and their ancestors, are grass, grains/seeds, fruits, and vegetables. Often, free ranging, “grass fed”, foraging livestock have their diets supplemented by the farmer to insure their nutrition on limited grazing lands, regardless of fattening-- purely for their nutritional welfare. That supplement usually includes grain, often times the grain of choice is corn because it is a nutritious supplement that the farmer can grow or buy cheaply.