> It's also not cheaper to buy brown bread and raw carrots. It's less expensive to buy the "tasty" higher-sodium canned foods. Eating healthy is not inexpensive.

Also, you have to factor in how much it costs in terms of time to prepare a meal from fresh, more-or-less whole ingredients compared to throwing something prepared into the microwave or onto the stove. If you have the time to cook after your job, wouldn't you be tempted to get a second job instead of cooking, if only to make your constant, grinding debt go away faster?

Then you get into 'cultural poverty', where someone flatly doesn't know how to cook because their parents never cooked and only ate at cheap restaurants (which isn't cheap) and used prepared food. You might say 'oh, just get a cookbook', but I know first-hand how much implied knowledge you have to have to get much out of a cookbook. Implied knowledge has to come from somewhere; if you didn't get it from your parents, you likely don't have it.