I haven’t done any exact calculations, but your price of USD$6 a day seems awfully high. I could probably sneak by on USD$6/day at Mcdonalds. I would say USD$4-USD$5 per day is about what I can get by on for a reasonably healthy (abiet bland) vegetarian diet, but it won’t include any tilapias or salmon. I would maintain that even pound for pound, healthy food is cheaper than Mcdonalds. Anecdotal, of course.
No clue, we were too poor to ever go to Mcdonalds! 
I think you are making several unwarranted assumptions. Wealthy people may or may not be fat. However, I think research has established the poorer classes tend to be fatter. Here’s why:
A substantial part of the reason, I suspect, is cultural. Wealthy people want to look better and are willing to spend time and energy doing it.
Second, the well-off are more likely to choose more expensive meals and restaurants. While not inherently healthier, this promotes more balanced diets. Even high-calorie selections probably use a good assortment of veggies, meats, and breads.
Lastly, income may not make a difference. A McDonald’s meal may be less relatively expensive to the rich, but the poor may well be able to afford more McDonalds than they need, in which case the difference is irelevant.
I agree; substitute more beans/tofu, and start looking for some cheaper fish. Also, who pays up to a dollar for an apple, and $2.50 for a cantaloupe?
Well here in northern Virginia, the cantalopues at the regular grocery stores have been about $2.50 lately. Yes it is expensive.
As for the apples, yes to be fair, you could buy the bulk apples in bags, etc. and go cheaper. And tofu is cheaper than the meats, it is $2.79/pound at the Safeway. But if you had that for 5 nights for two people, that would be $14.
I keep hearing that a healthy diet includes lean meats/proteins, but when I go to buy fresh chicken breast or grount turkey, it is always the most expensive item on my receipt. And you always hear about how healthy fish is, but damn it is so expensive.
But I don’t think this is a realistic shopping list. Or maybe it is if you sit down and plan the meals, then buy the food no matter what it costs.
Every week there are different specials at the grocery store. You don’t have to buy boneless skinless chicken breasts at $4.99/lb when you can buy whole chickens for $0.99/lb, or whole chicken hindquarters for $0.79/lb. If you’re concerned about fat rip off the skin. I see lean pork sirloin for $1.99/lb all the time. Or lean ground beef for $1.79. But fatty meat isn’t poison, it’s perfectly healthful, as long as you cut out fat from other sources. We’re obsessed with eating lean meat but slather on the butter, the chips, the salad dressing, the fried this and the crisco-soaked that. You’ll eat twice as much hidden fat from your pre-made dinners or your fast-food dinners or your sit-down restaurant dinners.
If you’re poor, boneless skinless chicken breasts are not part of your diet. You could buy a whole chicken, take out the breasts and throw away the rest for the same price.
The one thing that you can’t escape is expensive fish. Fish used to be cheap 20 years ago. It isn’t anymore. You aren’t going to find cheap fish anywhere. So fish is not part of a cheap healthy diet. Yeah, omega-3, yadda yadda yadda. Fact is, while fish is great it is not an essential nutrient. Fish is nice to have, but you don’t need it, and at $8.99/lb there’s no reason for “poor” people to buy it.
And vegetables don’t need to be expensive either…if you buy the loss leaders. Every week some vegetable or other is on sale, some fruit or other is on sale. Frozen brocolli florets might be 2.79/lb every day, but every other week fresh brocolli is .79/lb. Carrots for .99/lb. Cabbage usually .79/lb, but once a month or so marked down to $.33/lb. Yellow onions for 1.00/lb, every other week marked down to .50/lb. Head of lettuce for $1.29/ea. Ten lb sacks of potatoes are often on sale for $1.99, although potatoes aren’t veggies really. Squash for $1.29/lb. Fruit can be more expensive, but 5 lb bags of apples usually sell for $3.99. Eggs for 1.99/dozen, marked down every few weeks to .99/dozen.
Yes, if you eat like a nutritionist would recommend it (ultralean meats and fish) could get expensive. But most people don’t eat that way, and just grilling/baking regular cheap cuts of meat, steaming/stirfrying regular cheap veggies, with regular cheap rice/tortillas/pasta/whole wheat bread is a huge improvement over frozen pizza, frozen dinners, soda, chips, candy bars, hamburgers, and french fries.
The assumption here seems to be that the poor are all inner city people without access to transportation. Sorry to burst the stereotype, but there are also a lot of poor rural folks and most of them (in fact, most of those living in poverty) own their own cars. Getting to a grocery store is not a real obstacle for most people in poverty. Even when I lived in DC near a very poor part of town there were three grocery stores within walking distance. The best one was, in fact, in the straight up ghetto. I would see plenty of very poor people there (using their EBT cards) and plenty of very fat people there. To blame the obesity of the poor on the excuse that they can’t get to a grocery store may apply to a small segment of those living in poverty, but for most it doesn’t apply.
Where I live now I see plenty of fat people shopping in Wal-Mart. Many are lower-class fat people. If they can make it to Wal-Mart, they can afford to buy inexpensive healthy food. I’m not poor, but I’m cheap, and I know how far you can make your grocery budget stretch. You can easily buy cheap produce (apples for 1.20 a bag, bananas for .50 a pound, chicken cutlets for 3 or so a pound, yogurt for .45 a cup, canned vegetables for $.50, etc.). It’s not the high price of these items that dissuades people from buying them. It’s something else. It’s also not that processed food is any cheaper. But processed food tastes good. Processed food is easy. And, while usually more expensive than vegetables or fruit, processed food is relatively inexpensive.
Poor people, in general, don’t think of the long term. They don’t think of the health problems that will come from years of eating McDonald’s or doughnuts or Dorito’s. It’s not immediately apparent that these things will kill you, but it is immediately apparent that they taste good. The desire to satisfy their immediate wants seems to me to be the reason that poor people are fat. I know it’s politically incorrect, but so what? I simply don’t buy that the poor are out there trying to be healthy but expensive produce and cheap fast food sabotage their best efforts. That simply is not supported by any evidence that I’ve read or seen with my own eyes. Some people make bad choices and some people end up poor and fat. Sometimes this is, indeed, their own fault.
They cooked unhealthy, starchy meals. The science of nutrition - that you need vitamins and minerals and essential fatty acids, but only a little bit of those; and no empty sugars and all that - is at best a century old, maybe even less. Bits and pieces were known before - that lemon juice cures scurvy - but that Vitamin A prevents blindness, or how to apply that vitamin wasn’t widely known. (Scurvy was only researched because of the Royal Navy needed fighting sailors - nobody cared if some peasants or other poor people died from malnutrtioun.)
People 50 years ago knew how to cook, but not how to cook healthy. Basic diet was potatoes or similar, because meat was expensive, and in many areas, veggies were considered not important. Drink was often either tea or beer, because people had learned to distrust water (lack of hygiene made it unsafe, so stick to weak beer). If veggies were served as side dish, they were boiled for hours.
At the beginning of the century, the child of a rich farmer got ricketis although there was more than enough milk and sunshine, because the father didn’t want his son to drink milk. Only babies drank milk.
In Bavaria, meat is the main dish, and potatoes are considered fit to eat only after they have passed through the pig (=used to fatten the pig, which is then slaughtered.) This was the main attitude till recently.
In Austria, there are lots and lots of flour dishes, rich in fat and eggs and sugar (and nice to eat, sure) but without veggies or fruit.
You can find this not only in old, traditional recipes and cookbooks, but also in third-world-countries today: if a worker earns the equivalent of 1 $ a day, that will buy him one bowl of rice from a street vendor, but there’s not enough left for even a veggie sauce, never mind fish or meat sauce.
The farmers are often ignorant on the importance on vegetable gardens - the developmental organisations have to teach them that, because all the family income is spent on the main bread cereal (wheat, maize, durhum, rice, …), which fills the stomach.
You don’t have any certifying organsiation for organic in the US??? Even if you don’t have nationally controlled labels like in the EU, what about the private organsations, members of the FOFAM (or whatever the correct abbr. is).? Demeter and the like - you have none of them in the US?
I agree, though, that there are two levels of eating healthy: first, the basic angle of right components for your diet (veggies, less fat, less salt etc.); and the next step, organic food.
But if the supermarket around your corner is the cheap variety, it won’t have fresh veggies at a cheap price, it will have a few veggies that are several days old.
Rice on its own isn’t healthy. That’s why people in the third world suffer from a disease - which I always forget the name of - when they eat only rice, but nothing else (because of lack of money, usually). Their bellies bloat, so they look well-fed, but their body is breaking down, because of lack of vitamins and minerals and stuff. (That’s why the damn genetic companies stepped in with look-how-helpful-we-are “Golden Rice”, which is enriched with Vitamin A. Never mind the problems of GM in itself, this rice is double to three times the price of normal rice, making it once again impossible for the poorest people suffering from the problems in the first place.)
Lissener has already tried to explain that veggies don’t keep for a month, or don’t fill a belly as good as a big bag of pasta or rice, when comparing pounds per dollar.
I think you two may be talking about two different preparations here. Pasta cooked in water and eaten with a fresh made tomatoe sauce is good for you and healthy (esp. if it’s whole grain pasta or similar). Brown rice cooked with veggies is good and healthy.
But the average poor person, with no special cooking skills, will buy noodles like ramen (high fat) and white rice (little value), and pour ketchup or another ready-made sauce on them (lots of sugar and salt). Or fry rice in lots of fat. That is bad for you, esp. if it’s the staple of diet.
So far, the answer that you and the others have provided is that it has nothing to do with the price of food, it’s just that poor people are often ignorant, lazy, and make poor decisions. Is this so?
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I think you two may be talking about two different preparations here. Pasta cooked in water and eaten with a fresh made tomatoe sauce is good for you and healthy (esp. if it’s whole grain pasta or similar). Brown rice cooked with veggies is good and healthy.
But the average poor person, with no special cooking skills, will buy noodles like ramen (high fat) and white rice (little value), and pour ketchup or another ready-made sauce on them (lots of sugar and salt). Or fry rice in lots of fat. That is bad for you, esp. if it’s the staple of diet.
No, that’s not what we are saying. Uneducated isn’t the same as ignorant. Doing the same thing you have learned from your family, or trying to live your life as best as you can when nobody has shown you a better way, isn’t poor decision.
Another point that needs to be reminded again: a young college student at age 20, living alone, is in a very different situation than a woman of 30 working 8 hrs. or more in a physically exhausting job, to come home to her family. Things that may be easy as teen/twen without responsibility are much harder when you are older and try to cope with a lot of things at once.
That means both that you can’t do as many things (like cooking) as before, and that you gain weight easier, than before, not that you are “lazy”.
No, nutrition is not readily available; junk food is cheap. The poor are those who don’t earn enough to meet the baseline demands - while a villa costs more than a modest house, and a 1-room apt. in a run-down-building costs less than a nicely renovated 3-room apt., there is a certain minimum price you have to pay for a room.
Similar, while you can live on rice and pasta instead of veggies and quality meat, there is a certain minimum amount you need each month to buy the food.
And the poor in the US often have no access to affordable health care.
It’s not SUVs they can’t afford, but any type of car, so they have to rely on public transport, which makes commuting to work (or even getting a better job) and shopping more difficult. Or they have a 10-year old rust-bucket, which costs them disproportianlly more in gasoline (bad mpg) and repairs, but is the only one they can afford.
Did you read the example about the bus ticket? If it’s not possible to put aside the 42 $ for a monthly ticket, because each weekly wage is spent on getting by - do you not call that poor?
Control group? What the heck are you talking about? The OP question was whether junk food (not only McD, but also cheap supermarket food) is cheaper than healthy food. That originated in a discussion about obesity. If you want to argue the general fact that more poor people (as defined by income both absoluetly below a minimum level and proportinally to the rest of the population, or to the standard of living/consumers index) are overweigth then middle/-upper class people, you will have a hard time, because there have been lots of studies finding the correlation. Since the same group - poor people - are also less educated, it’s not hard to see a connection.
No, nobody said that. I’m talking from the German perspective, because I have read the conclusion of the studies done here, and there is no ethnic factor (we never ask for race and we don’t have that many ethnics here as in the US, anyway).
That disproportinaly many poor people are black or belong to other minorities is a result of an unjust system; but also that poverty - partly because of the strong relation to bad education - is inherited.
Why not?
One apple for breakfast??? Well, I get hungry one hour after eating one apple - no way that is enough breakfast for me! Same for tuna - just tuna, or not a roll and stuff?
Again, another time: please don’t interpolate from your personal experience “well I can cook healthy just fine, why can’t everybody?” Because everybody else is not you.
Do you smoke? Or drink alcohol? Or eat sweets? None of these are healthy for you, but look at the statistics: lots of people do these. Guess what, people are people. And it’s not laziness, it’s human nature.
Very interesting. Most of what you have written seems to be referring to the Western world - would you say that this is also the case in, say, India, China, Japan or the Middle East?
Is the traditional “meat and potatoes” diet, the starchy and unhealthy eating habits, a European/American thing, or are there similar nutritional flaws in other parts of the world?
At least in the US, if you are willing to use coupons and/or order specials, you can eat fast food quite cheaply. Thus, many people do. Most Sunday newspapers have inserts with coupons, and mailers of coupons are often sent to people’s homes. For example, $10-12 can easily get you 4 meals worth of pizza or fried chicken with sides. Is this as cheap as rice, generic frozen veggies and an egg? Not quite, but if you factor in 1/2 hour prep time per day, that adds $10.30 in time costs at the US minimum wage, and the fast food is now cheaper. In terms of eating junk food at home, see the above-referenced 79 cent hotdogs.
TANSTAAFL.
[QUOTE=Argent Towers]
Very interesting. Most of what you have written seems to be referring to the Western world - would you say that this is also the case in, say, India, China, Japan or the Middle East?
I was referring mainly to the western world, because that’s the one I assume most other posters were also talking about (when there’s no fast food around, it’s no comparison), and also because it’s the western nations that have the obesity problem most.
India - I know about the poor people there who can only afford one bowl of rice at best with the wage they earn daily, but nothing else. But the traditional Indian, Chinese, Japanese dishes - if people have enough money to buy the veggies - are said to be far healthier.
For example, in Japan, the generation of the grand-parents and great-grandparents - 80 years and older - who eat the traditional japanse diet of rice, fish, algae (but are not poor) are in much better health then the grandchildren generation - 30 years and below - who eat lots of American fast food (because it’s cool).
But I don’t have any detailed knowledge about traditional cooking customs there compared to todays knowledge to make judgements. I’ve only heard that India, China and Japan don’t have a national way of cooking, but many, many different styles (Japan because each island developed things differently, China and India because of the size).
I don’t know enough to answer this. I know the current problems of bad eating habits in Africa, but that is no longer original tradition, because most of African culture was destroyed with the European invaders. (In a movie about Jared Diamond’s book “Gun, Germs and Steel”, he says that the Africans had adapted to the different climate, and the insect/disease problem, before the colonisation moved them by force to unhealthy, bad farm lands.)
Yes, and it’s the only time when I will treat myself to burgers or pizza, but the opportunities are limited. It is not quite enough to satisfy my demand for fast food, which is every day.
But costanze, no one in America is so poor that they can only afford rice or pasta. Vegetables are not stratospherically priced. Fresh vegetables especially in season are cheap. A dollar a pound. Equivalent to half a euro per kg.
Sure, if you want fresh asparagus out of season you’ll pay 4.99/lb for it. But zuchinni today was .99/lb.
And vegetables don’t go bad in one day, what kind of vegetables do that? Cabbage and winter squash can last for a month, broccoli and carrots and celery can last for weeks. Sure, bean sprouts and mushrooms and such are perishable and have to be eaten in a few days, but come on.
Poor people in America don’t get fat because they eat only cheap pasta and rice and can’t afford vegetables. They get fat because they eat mountains of cheese, tablespoons of salt, buckets of oil, bags of sugar, logs of butter, tubs of deep-fried potatoes, and gallons of soda. They aren’t getting fat because they can only afford a meager helping of rice and nothing else!
I know Europeans like you often have odd ideas about America, but trust me, no one is starving to death here. Free food is everwhere, you just have to ask for it.
Free Food?
I think we have been answering and discussing two different aspects, or two related questions.
Question 1 is: Is it - IF the skill and time and opportunity (working kitchen) to COOK is availaible - cheaper to buy veggies and (whole-grain) pasta to eat healthy (by cooking yourself a nutritous meal)?
The answer is YES in most cases BUT varying wildly depending on where you live. Obviously, oranges will be much more expensive near the arctic circle than in California, compared to staple foods. Not all neighborhoods have supermarkets with cheap and fresh veggies (wilted veggies aren’t very useful anymore). Not all shops mark down stuff, or have specials. And so on.
Question 2 is: IF cooking isn’t possible - for some of the reasons already given (lack of skill, of time, no working kitchen) - is fast food and junk food cheaper?
The answer is YES - cheaper than the alternatives, again depending on location. If you work in uptown city in a good office, you might have a mess that serves food to the employees. You might have sandwich stores which offer salad for lunch. But in most cases, McD will be cheaper than a restaurant (esp. if people use coupons and special offers), and a frozen dinner is cheaper or equal to that.
Question 3 (the three strenghts of the Spanish inquisition are …) is: WHY do more (nobdoy sensible says “all” = 100%; but statistics show more than in other income groups) poor people (as defined by income class, not by ethnicity; but low income overlaps certain ethnic groups, not 100% - there are always exceptions, but to a major percentage) eat junk food and fast food (and therefore become overweight)?
The answer to that are (as have already been explained)
-lack of skill, time and opportunity to cook themselves (which is not equal to being lazy)
Now, personal anecdotes of how you manage to cook yourself on a tight budget are nice and interesting to answer Question 1. But they have no impact on question 2 and 3, esp. 3, because when talking about large groups of people (again, not a 100% - there are groups with low income who can cook healthy and do so, for various reasons: traditional ethnic cuisine, knowledge about healthy eating, simply likes cooking…; but statistics and research shows that the causes lissener and others gave apply to many people) - personal anecdotes DON’T invalidate the reasons and causes.
It’s like asking “I don’t smoke, why does everybody else? They must be lazy to not stop” - because not 100% of other people smoke; some people have managed to quit; but the group of people that still smokes has several reasons for doing so. All my personal anecdotes don’t negate these reasons for some other people.
In a way, it’s ironic that I’ve come across as defending junk food and fast food; because the arguments given for cooking healthy yourself are the same arguments I myself use when trying to convince people to switch from the traditional meat diet to a veggie-oriented, healthy, organic style, and the argument is “Well, I can’t afford organic”, I counter with “cooking is healthier then ready-made food; buy special offers; buy smaller portions, things taste better, so you need less”. However, these are personal discussions, and often I can’t persuade people, because cooking is too much of a bother/ not enough time for a single mother to shop for specials and cook.
Besides, although I know about healthy food, and buy organic, I don’t cook myself, so I can understand when people don’t like to, even if it would be better.
No, the question posed here is if junk food is cheaper than healthy food. The answer is clearly no. There are many reasons people choose to eat junk food, but cost is not one of them.