One of the memes being bandied about on the boards here seems to be that poor people can’t afford healthy food, so they eat junk food and get fat. I find this very difficult to believe. (I am also in agreement with Crafter_man WRT to the fat==lazy theory, but that is not the point of this general question.)
Any sort of half decent meal at Mcdonalds around here costs upwards of $3 Canadian. That is, with the $1.48 special or whatever it is it would cost me about $3.50 to get 2 cheeseburgers and sustain myself for a few hours. This is almost twice the cost of an equivilant meal of rice, lightly fried vegetables and perhaps an egg. Which seems to be a much healthier meal to me, although I am not anutritionist or anything. Not suprisingly, being a poor young person, I subsist mostly on rice, discounted vegetables, end-of-the-day clearance bread, eggs, and soy milk (I am lactose intolerant) and my food costs generally do not exceed $20/week. They are currently a bit higher than that but it is a relatively prosperous time for me, and I can afford things like the occasional meat or seafood dish, and even fast food once in a while. Of course, I’ve worked fast food so I understand WHY fast food is so expensive (minimum wage laws, high cost of capital investment, industrial farming practices).
I was raised on this kind of food. My parents, being poor immigrants, could never afford much else, and any kind of fast food was a luxury that only came around during holidays. Many of our immigrant friends lived the same way. None of us ever became obese, we were not able to afford a car until all the kids were in High School - we biked, bussed or walked/ran everywhere, and we certainly did not have the benefit of gyms or personal trainers, I had never been to a gym before I joined the army.
So, SDMB, convinve me with some verifiable numbers that “junk food” is cheaper than healthy food. Because by god, I’ve looked everywhere, and if I could afford Mcdonalds every single meal instead of my own often bland cooking, you bet your ass I would do it. It would be like Christmas every day!
Well… for starters, a week’s supply of ramen costs about $2.50 (assuming 12 cents per pack and that you eat three packs a day).
If you live in the inner city, it could be hard getting to a supermarket in the first place. And if I remember correctly there is no tax on fresh food in Canada. This is not the case in many other places, making fresh fruits and vegetables much harder to afford.
Perhaps I should rephrase the question a little: Is fattening junk food cheaper than healthy food.
I suppose one could conceivably live on instant noodles for weeks on end, but I don’t think obesity is at the top of the health issues list for such a person.
A lot of the issue isn’t money (pound for pound, unhealthy stuff is probably more expensive) so much as time. Unhealthy food is often preserved ready-to-eat or can simply be nuked. Healthy food often requires cooking. People who don’t want to bother just don’t bother.
I have seldom seen companies mark down vegetables and bread on a regular basis here. I’ve even worked in a produce department over 2 summers in college, and we never did that. The company would rather throw them away so people have to buy the full-priced stuff, or recycle them into prepared convenience foods.
It would never be cheaper, where I live, to eat meals with a signficant number of fresh vegetables over McDonalds unless you go to the farmer’s market, which isn’t available all year anyway, and is a hassle (getting up early Saturday morning, and many people on low incomes work weekends).
When I am trying to eat healthy and lose weight, my food costs always go way up, not down, mostly due to produce costs.
Ah, but you actually had to cook the rice and vegetables. (I’m not knocking this diet, as I eat similarly) Many people are not motivated to cook or don’t have the time. So, they resort to inexpensive junk food meals or potato chips instead of buying healthy but expensive cooked meals or bothering to shop & do the cooking themselves.
I’ve noticed most of the patrons of McDonalds, Burger King, KFC, or Long John Silvers are actually not the least bit frugal when it comes to their “value” meals. Even if the component burger, fries, and drink are cheaper than the value meal, many people order off the big menu with pictures. I rarely see people order off the discount dollar menu or use coupons.
One lady at Long John Silvers ordered so poorly, she ended up paying $23 for her meal by adding this and that. I paid $5 for the same meal by ordering the buffet.
When I’m ordering at KFC, I pay $2 for the same food that the person ahead of me and behind me pay $4.50 for. This is because I order the special, or because I have a coupon.
Perhaps, but one cannot eat a great volume of the stuff at once, because by the time it is prepared most of the volume is water. In any case, it is an integral part of my budget minded diet, although I always include good amounts of vegetables and protein in any meal composed of instant noodles. Of course, I always buy the actual noodles and the seasoning seperately, in bulk, instead of buying pre-packaged noodles. I am not obese and never have been.
Exactly, and by this reasoning, only the rich should be getting fat. If I only made $5/hr, it would make economical sense for me to spend time preparing meals myself, since the cost of the meal would be a larger portion of my living expenses and my oppurtunity cost was so low, than if I made $50/hr, in which case it would make sense for me to go to Mcdonalds.
I also rarely buy discounted veggies anymore, since I now live far away from the discount veggie store I use to frequent, but even full price veggies are not all that expensive. I’d say out of my weekly budget, $7-$8 of it would go towards easily cooked and preserved veggies like bell peppers, onions, and tomatoes. I live in Canada. From experience, veggies are MUCH cheaper in places like California.
The farmer’s market around here is more expensive than the supermarked, although the produce is generally of higher quality.
I never have much trouble buying end-of-the-day bread, although I don’t actually eat very much of it compared to rice.
Or they don’t know how to cook. That explains why I eat as much junk food as I do. I’m working on being able to cook more, but trying to learn something new takes more time than just doing what you’ve always done.
You may want to add time, convenience, and cooking skills into the equation. For example,
1) Time - It takes too long to make a decent meal. Folks would rather stand in line (the equivalent time) and have someone else make their meal for them. I don’t buy it. I can whip up a full traditional weekend breakfast (bacon, eggs, toast, grits or oatmeal, milk, etc.) in less than ten minutes for the both of us. The same goes for a typical dinner, although dinner preparation cold might take 30 minutes. If I split the work into prep in the morning (before work) and actual cooking (after work), the time factor is negligible. A really well prepared meal can be broken down into manageable moments, especially with a crock pot or a decent oven. How hard is it to prepare a chicken (five minutes) pop it into the overn the required time and ten minutes before the timer goes off, rustle up some veggies to accompany it?
2) Convenience - It’s too difficult running around the various food stores trying to find all the ingredients to make a decent, nutritious meal. Doesn’t cut it with mean. I shop by shopping list. You buy what is on the list. You create the list over several days as you use things in the kitichen, or think up as time goes by.
3) Cooking Skills - Too many do not even possess rudimentary cooking skills. One does not have to be born into a gormet cooking family or marry someone who can cook. It does not take much to be taught simple cooking skills that can be applied in various way. However, if you lack some imagination or creativity, or are just afraid to try something new, I can see where cooking will turn you off.
Ultimately I think it comes to thinking beyond the moment and possessing some simple management skills.
It’s a complex equation, with which I have a lot of experience. My income history has fluctuated wildly over time; I have made good money, and I have been unemployed for many months at a time. I am also a very skilled cook.
There’s no question that when I’m in the dough, my kitchen is well stocked with healthy food and I eat better. When I’m broke, my kitchen is stocked–to the extent that it’s stocked at all–with cheap, long-shelf-life staples, which tend to be starchy. I eat a lot of flour, rice, pasta, etc., when I’m poor. And beans and lentils are inedible without a lot of fat in them, fyask me. When I’m broke, I’m not able to make the frequent trips to the store that are required to keep my kitchen stocked with perishables like fresh fruit and vegetables and fresh fish, etc.
When you always have dough, you can stop at the store any time you want and pick up some fresh vegetables. When you’re waiting for that unemployment check, or whatever, and you’re flat broke in between, you take the check and stock up on less perishable carbs. When you’re broke, $8 for a melon, or around a dollar an apple, feels like a luxury.
There’s more to it that of course, but that’s a big part of it.
Unhealthy food is not only fast food, but also the ready-made dinners. I’m glad that you are good at cooking, and can shop with a list. Not everybody is, and not everybody does (shopping without a list is a good way to buy too much and get obese, regardless of budget.)
Being poor often (not always) means not enough education - about basic things like healthy foods, about practical things like cooking, or about managing funds by planning and shopping with a list.
At least in Bavaria, buying normal food (with lots of salt, lots of fat, lots of chemicals) at the cheapest supermarket (Aldi) is way cheaper than buying fresh veggies at the next health food or organic store.
Also, if you aren’t used to a healthy diet (because you already come from a poor, uneducated family - poverty is often hereditary, like wealth), you eat a lot more of the starchy, salty foods. You have to develop a taste for veggies and healthy food, and then your hunger goes down because there’s more appetite in eating good stuff. But if you cook a veggie meal for a person used to a huge plate of potatoes, that person will not appreciate it, and likely feel hungry.
And about the cooking: cooking is only quick when you have:
a reasonably well-stocked kitchen (both with food and implements). If the apartment doesn’t have a good working kitchen, or you can’t afford to buy pans and all the other stuff, you can’t cook.
enough experience to work quick. Somebody who cooks occasionally or has just started needs double or thrice the time for every little thing that you do.
you need to either like cooking, or be convinced that it’s very important to eat healthy. If you don’t like cooking, it’s an addional, complicated and long chore when you finally get home after a long work day, and if you don’t know how bad TV dinners are for you, it’s a lot easier to pop a frozen pizza in the microwave.
Wonderful. So because something worked for you, it should work for everybody else, too, no matter how different their personal situation, their history and character is.
I’m pretty sure that’s the way you’re SUPPOSED to eat. Do you eat nothing but filet mignon and smoked salmon when you have money? In any case, I eat like that and I am not obese, neither is anyone I know who also eats like that.
Eh, so what? This is something else I don’t understand. If something is high in fat, you don’t need to eat as much, because fat is high in energy! Do you guys eat the same volume of butter as rice in every meal or something? I don’t need a biochem degree to know that.
The prices you quote seem a little high. And I DO exactly that: stock up on non-perishables, all the time, most of my carbs at work actually come from non-perishables like rice and pasta and sometimes canned soup. Are those supposed to be bad for you?
I HAVE lived it, I’m still living it right now and have provided examples to illustrate the fact. You’ll forgive me for not understanding still.
I only wish I could afford ready made dinners. Around here those cost as much as fast food does. In fact I never actually buy them because there is no reason to choose them over fast food.
But certainly, one can also buy veggies at the normal supermarket?
In any case, I really don’t want to turn it into a rich vs poor debate, I’m only interested in absolute costs of food, because as someone who enjoys fast food very much, I would LOVE to have it every day if it were reasonably priceds. So it seems to me, from the answers so far, that healthy foods ARE, as I suspected, cheaper than junk foods, there is no magical Mcdonalds land where Big Macs are actually cheaper than rice and veggies, and that enjoying Mcdonalds every day is still a pipe dream for me.
There’s something we need to consider here - namely, what the fuck did “poor people” eat before there was junk food?
Well?
McDonalds hasn’t always existed, prepackaged food hasn’t always existed, and “junk food” hasn’t always existed. People, including those supposedly too poor or under-educated to “know better,” can survive without it.
Ain’t callin’ ya a liar, but I have to wonder. I’ve run into any number of people who think that, because they didn’t have much money in their younger years while they were getting through school and getting their careers off the ground, they’ve “been there” and know all about poverty. Bear in mind that poverty isn’t simply a matter of household income.