It may be true that these ingredients are available in certain markets for those prices, but that isn't accounting for a significant portion of the true overall cost of healthful eating.

Healthy food tends to spoil, and if you're not able to go shopping multiple times a week and have unpredictable availability for meal preparation, you're going to see a lot of spoilage. If 30% of your fresh produce ultimately spoils, your actual cost is 43% higher.

Healthy food requires a degree of planning and execution which takes time and focus. Finding healthy options which are appealing for 3x meals a day is a lot of work if you aren't happy with 1 or 2 standbys every day.

Healthy food is extremely hard to find on the go. If you don't have a kitchen at your disposal generally you are shit out of luck for finding something that is truly healthy. So for example, the quality of my diet is highly inversely correlated with the amount of travel I am doing in a given month.

Making unhealthy choices more expensive through taxes is extremely regressive for many of these reasons.

>Healthy food tends to spoil, and if you're not able to go shopping multiple times a week and have unpredictable availability for meal preparation, you're going to see a lot of spoilage. If 30% of your fresh produce ultimately spoils, your actual cost is 43% higher.

That's not at all true. I eat healthy, lots of vegetables, beans, lean meat,and so on, and I go shopping only once every two weeks. Apples keep for weeks, ditto cauliflower in the refrigerator, kale, cabbage, tomatoes, and so on. Meat you can freeze. Dry beans keep forever, and plus there is canned goods.Plus flavorings like salsa in a jar. I waste virtually nothing.

And it is cheaper than living off of processed foods, unless you are living off of pure starches like macaroni and cookies.

You do know have to know how to cook. Nothing fancy, just the basics like boiling beans, chopping vegetables, mixing together a bunch of things to get something that tastes reasonably good. And it does take time.

The issue, as you suggest, isn't so much that healthy food isn't available at a reasonable price but that turning it into meals may be challenging for someone working two jobs and lacking a proper kitchen. I don't think anyone can seriously dispute that. I just think it's mostly a mistake to lay the problem solely on prepared and fast food--which often isn't actually all that cheap.

As for travel, yeah. I started doing a lot more a number of years back and it took me a while to get more disciplined about it. I find it's more about regulating my intake than eating healthy per se. I try to avoid eating just because some food has been laid out for me. And I tend to keep things to one or two full meals a day.

Frozen vegetables aren't bad for you.

Definitely agree about finding healthy food on the go. Mostly salads.

you're suggesting that humanity has historically had easier access to healthy (fresh) food as they went shopping multiple times a week? I doubt this. What makes you think there was improved transportation options or significant amount of free time ?

Either they lived in a city with multiple food stands and stores within walking distance, or they lived on a farm and grew it themselves.

>> Most vegetables are less than $3 a pound.

And you call that cheap.... In my country most vegetables cost below 1$ per kilogram, which is 6 times cheaper. I think this has to do with EU policy of subsidies for farmers.

"most vegetables cost below 1$ per kilogram"

I haven't seen 0.80 EUR/kg in Germany for vegetables, so I wonder where you live. I've assumed vegetables are rather cheap in Germany due to very high competition. Lettuce is around $1.85 a piece, carrots are 1 EUR/kg or 1.50 EUR/kg when organic. Karfiol is 2 EUR/kg here.

The cheapest discounters (Aldi) are little bit cheaper.

Cheapest I've seen in a UK Lidl was a kilo of carrots discounted to 20p. I can't see how that could possibly pay for any of the supply chain but I'll take it.

Up here in Scotland I think we have a good illustration of how obesity can be a cultural problem, especially linked to alcohol. There's a reasonable amount of healthy food available but the traditional preference is all fat, starch and sugar.

I partially agree with you guys substaining that there were cheap healthy things, but for my experience they were exceptions. I could find very rarely vegetables at affordable price and at decent quality together. Or they were cheap, or they were decent. And a head of lettuce at 2$ is a high price. As exceptions examples, avocados were good and cheap.

>avocados were good and cheap

Maybe in California. Certainly not in the eastern US.

Canned vegetables are usually not very nutritious but a lot of frozen vegetables are pretty cheap year-round as well.

You're right, California, Nevada and Arizona, I visited the west coast.

I may be wrong, but I think OP is referring to buying it at a restaurant instead of at a grocery store.

No, that sounds about right. At the normal grocery store in my area, for example, cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage are $1.99/pound right now, celery is $1.49/pound. Asparagus is much more expensive, I think around $4.99/pound.

I cheat by shopping at the local Korean grocery store instead, prices are much cheaper but you have to sort through the produce to make sure quality is up to par.

If you're buying non-frozen leafy greens that have been sitting around before getting sold a great deal of nutritional content has degraded and you can definitely taste it.

Vegetables aren't subsidized the same way corn is.

That is around 2 times what i pay in germany

In the Midwest chicken is often $2 a pound. Vegetables vary a lot, but $3 a pound is about right for perishable stuff other than greens (which are more expensive). Carrots and onions and the like are way less than $3 a pound.

A little OT: The price for food in Germany are to my knowledge one of the lowest in the world compared to the average income.

This trend of food getting cheaper all the time has led to a real „industrialised“ agricultural sector in Germany. This effect is good for the consumer because an egg costs like 15 euro cents, but it is horrible for the environment and especially for the animals. You just can‘t produce so much cheap food without tremendous sacrifices.

Food prices here in Germany indeed are very low. In my experience this has another bad side effect. Many people expect food to be that cheap and don't even consider buying 'good' food for higher prices (even if they can afford it).

E.g. I buy ecological eggs (not the 'supermarket-ecological' ones) and they cost about 45 cents a piece. That's at least 3 times the usual price.

Vegetables have very few calories. Look at the cost per calorie: http://www.mymoneyblog.com/what-does-200-calories-cost-the-e...

Broccoli is $2.93 per 200 Calories. Doritos are 39 cents per 200 calories. That's the issue.

I don't think access to raw calories is the problem here, given that we're talking about people being _overweight_. Broccoli provides considerably more satiety per calorie than Doritos, to say nothing of the difference in healthfulness.

You could raise the price of Doritos to be higher than broccoli and overweight people will still choose the Doritos.

Source: Me