Why is eating healthy so damn expensive? Don’t the producers of this food know that there is a dynamic thriving epidemic of diabetes of the 2nd type ravaging this great country?
Obama wants to better America? He needs to tax the ever loving shit out of “fast food” producers that poison the general populace on a daily basis. Hell, that would probably give him enough money for health care reform if we could ever decide what needs doing.
Bottom line is, eating healthy shouldn’t be nigh impossible for the majority of Americans.
Exercise is another topic I’d love to tackle, but I suppose I can’t make people out there run their asses off (literally)
I don’t honestly believe it is nigh impossible for the vast majority of Americans. It is difficult to eat healthy for a significant portion of Americans though. Particularly those who live in areas without major supermarkets.
What are you defining as “health food”? Assuming that one *does *have access to a supermarket, most produce is pretty reasonably priced, provided you’re willing to forego the “chopped and bagged for your convenience” stuff. Rice, pasta, and beans are dirt cheap. Something’s always on sale at the meat and seafood counters.
If, on the other hand, you’re talking about potato chips now fried in “Heart Healthy” oils, well… you’re right, they are too expensive. They’re also NOT good for you. Skip 'em.
It might be because non-healthy food is heavily subsidized, AND has “economy of scale” working in its favor. “Healthy” food is produced and sold in much smaller quantities (ok, it’s completely dwarfed by “conventional” agribusiness), denying it economy of scale, and it lacks the decades of government price support.
The “real” proper price of food is probably somewhere between these two extremes.
Go see “Food, Inc.” and you’ll learn exactly why healthy food costs more.
Hint: It’s not the health food producers you should be pitting. It’s the fast food producers you should be pitting. let me know when you start that thread!
I really don’t think that eating healthy is excessively expensive. As others have pointed out, healthy foods like rice, beans, lentils, pasta, etc. can all be had cheaply, and fresh produce (fruit and veges) are also available for very reasonable prices if you don’t feel the need to buy organic, and especially if you are willing to eat food that is local and that is in season.
I’d love to be able to buy all organic fruits and vegetables, but most of the time we just can’t afford it. Our local farmers’ market has organic tomatoes at $5 a pound. If i want to make a fresh tomato sauce for my pasta, there’s no way i’m spending $20-25 on tomatoes. So we generally get non-organic stuff. But, as i said, if you’re willing to be a bit flexible and to eat what it is season, you can save some money.
Even decent meat can be had relatively cheaply, and you can save money if you buy less meat and if you’re willing to cook in such a way that the meat is there to add flavor to the other ingredients, rather than be the huge centerpiece of the dish.
Admittedly, it certainly seems to be easier to eat healthy in some areas than in others. We’ve noticed, since moving to southern California, that it is easier and cheaper to buy good quality, cheap fruit and veges here than it ever was in Baltimore. There are excellent Mexican and Chinese supermarkets that stock awesome, cheap produce, and there are small local supermarkets that often have great specials.
I think the main barrier to healthy eating is not so much money as time and effort. It takes time to put together a meal from scratch using fresh ingredients, it takes effort to buy what’s in season and to use ingredients that you might not be familiar with, and it takes some time and imagination to make new and interesting dishes so that you’re not eating the same thing over and over.
Another voice for “it depends on what you think is healthy.”
To me, healthy food is fresh produce, chicken, fish, whole gains, rice, beans, some pasta. Real food, not packaged food that’s “50% less fat potato chips” or “Organic microwave dinner”.
Eating healthy is, in my experience, actually cheaper then eating crap.
My biggest problem is that healthy food doesn’t have much of a shelf life. If I buy a bunch of bananas with 4 bananas to the bunch by the 4th day that banana has gotten so overripe it is attracting fruit flies. The solution would be to either buy fewer bananas (which isn’t possible here because they bag the bananas so people don’t pull the bunches apart and leave single bananas strewn about like abandoned fruit corpses in a grocery store battlefield) or to eat more than one banana a day and spend your evening shitting out your colon.
It is the same thing with most fruits and vegetables, really. Celery lasts for a long time and so does citrus fruit but other than that if I buy vegetables or fruit I have to expect to throw half of it out after I find it rotting in my fridge 4 days later. Triscuits can sit on the shelf for a month and still be just as good as when I bought them. If I only have 1 day a week to go shopping I have to take into account what will stay good and what won’t when I am planning my menus for the week.
Not just the fast food producers, but the whole industrial food production system (ADM, etc) and the government policies that skew our diets toward unhealthy food.
Maybe I should have specified “health food” as “food that is healthier than it’s unhealthy counterpart”
Just in general, making meals is usually more healthy than eating out. But even making meals gets more costly when you try to make things low in fat etc
The 80/20 ground beef is less expensive than its 95/5 counterpart. The “heart healthy” chips or butter is more expensive than it’s counterpart.
Organic produce vs it’s “less healthy” counterpart that contains stuff to make it keep longer
That is actually an interesting take. Some countries, take Japan for example, buy food from the market to cook that evening. I think this is getting less and less to be the case though.
Here’s a tip on ground beef to make it a bit healthier.
Don’t brown it by itself, use a little vegetable oil. When it’s done and you’ve drained it, put it in a bowl and fill to cover with hot water. Refrigerate it. When it’s cool you should be able to skim the fat right off the top.
95/5 isn’t more expensive because it’s healthy, it’s more expensive b/c it uses more expensive cuts of meat for the grind. Try turkey or chicken instead. They’re both healthier and less expensive than beef.
If a food, like ground beef or potato chips, is inherently unhealthy, then the healthy version is almost by definition going to be more expensive. The unhealthy version is the “base” version, the lowest cost, easiest to make version.
OTOH, inherently healthy foods like rice and beans are dirt stinkin’ cheap. There is no extra low cost version, there might be a premium version, a special kind of rice, but it isn’t really better or worse for you, it’s still just rice.
For a lot of people (such as me) eating healthy often means taking your unhealthy food choices and spending more to buy a slightly healthier version, instead of making better choices.
Well yeah, but why aren’t we subsidizing the “healthy” foods to promote a healthier society?
I guess maybe I should be pitting the USG for letting the populace go down this road by allowing unhealthy foods to exist on such a scale that is it less about ‘choice’ and more about ‘cost’
If people were choosing to eat “unhealthy”, I wouldn’t have a problem with it but it seems to me that the choice is one made based upon the cost of the item. I typically do what you said you did by buying the upgraded ‘slightly healthier’ version of something in order to find the middle ground but it irks me that it’s seen as ‘the cheaper the item the more unhealthy’ applies.