http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/junk-food-expen...

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/09/24/opinion/sunda...

People can eat more and healthier by purchasing and preparing their own food.

Assume you have no car, have to rely on public transport, and work multiple jobs in geographically spread out locations. Nipping across town and back to stock your fridge with some healthy goodies doesn't sound so trivial now, does it?

The McDonalds is probably a lot closer and thus indeed cheaper even if the bill for groceries is a few bucks less.

Good food preparation equipment is far from cheap. Bad food prep equipment makes it a lot harder to do.

And learning to cook healthy food, particularly when it has to be tasty enough to compete with the draw of processed meals, isn't easy either.

I did some looking into this problem a few years ago when I was fronting a Web cooking show, and it's far more complex than it appears. Saying "They should just cook healthy food!" is a lot like saying "They should just install configure Linux to be as good as Windows" circa 2003 or so. It might make the speaker feel good, but actually the problems are more complex and more real than that.

That is very much not my experience.

I actually like to cook. It's fun and the food is perfectly suited to my tastes. But when I'm pressed for time, I'll still just stop by a fast-food restaurant because it's faster. And I have better access to fresh food and good cooking implements than many poor people, so cooking is even more of a decision for them.

A bigger group than these are kids who grow up only ever seeing processed, pre-cooked foods. Many of these kids do not watch TV. What they see in their immediate family/friend group is all they know.

There are reasons the obesity rates in the US are worst amongst poor, and especially urban, people. Many privileged, educated people would say it's a moral issue, but it's often an environmental issue.

And probably more than a few "cavemen" died of carbon monoxide poisoning trying to cook over open fires in their "caves".

I've been really poor. On non-consecutive occasions.

Many of these kids do not watch TV

No offense, but you're just making shit up. You'd have to go to the most rural area of Mongolia before you find kids without ready access to television. That said, I'm not blaming children for anything--rather, most adults understand that a 99 cent can of pork and beans (available at any convenience mart) is healthier than fast food...and willingly ignore that fact.

One of the avenues of "normalizing" is TV. Recently I've been talking with a friend who mentors a teenaged boy who just got himself hooked on meth. I couldn't understand how that could even happen, because "everybody knows that meth is the worst of the worst." My friend explained that he did not realize it's not normal for the aunt who's on meth to be the "stable" one in their family (dad is such a drunk he never eats or buys food… Auntie Meth feeds the boy, somehow). Unfortunately, that poor kid is now fucked.

I also used to live in a part of Baltimore City in the midst of gentrification and shared my block with people who'd lived in the same house for generations and people on welfare. Two of my neighbors on welfare didn't have a TV at all, or radio. Two, from a tiny block of 10 houses. Those happened to be 100% of my neighbors on welfare.

(How did they entertain themselves all day? Well, they didn't. For whatever reason, they had zero curiosity and zero boredom. They did basically nothing. This is not a criticism. They were nice to me, I was nice to them, and given my interactions with their kids, their kids seem to have a better life ahead of them. But the parents were terminally incurious, to the point of not knowing street names just a couple blocks away… because they never went anywhere, not on foot or any other way. It's a given that they could not read, but you don't have to read to pick up a couple street names over 15+ years living in the same place. But I'm not sure that would have made a difference.)

Or salmonella, e coli, lysteria, botulinus, cholera, etc, etc...

Secondly, there are just as many - if not more - studies that show that junk food is, in fact, cheaper. Because weight is an obvious, but subtly wrong, measurement to compare by:

"Healthy eating really does cost more. That’s what University of Washington researchers found when they compared the prices of 370 foods sold at supermarkets in the Seattle area. Calorie for calorie, junk foods not only cost less than fruits and vegetables, but junk food prices also are less likely to rise as a result of inflation…"

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/a-high-price-for-he...

A factory farmed fryer-sized chicken costs $8-$15, and feeds four adults. You'd need two to get 8-9 meals. Best case, that leaves you $4 for everything else.

Maybe you can do better in rural America, but roughly half of the population doesn't live there.

You can argue that it's cheaper to feed a family with careful shopping than to go out for fast food every night, but there's no way that you can get that many of the meals described for $20. You could maybe do half that.

It's incredible how easily we overlook everything it takes to do what you said.

Yesterday I was talking to a friend who recently had a baby. He's an educated, employed, white, probably wealthy, smart, guy who loves good food and knows how to cook and lives in wealthy suburbs. What he said yesterday was along the lines of "I totally understand why people eat fast food so much. I drive by Jack in the box on the way home and, while I haven't done it yet, the idea is compelling."

So here's a guy who "knows" that it's bad to eat fast food. and doesn't want too. But he's tired from his 9-5 desk job, doesn't sleep as well as he wants to do to the newborn), and doesn't want to cook at the end of the day.

What if he was a high school graduate with a physical job making $35k a year with 2 kids who doesn't live near a grocery store and never had any exposure to cooking, food saving, and all the other things you have? What is the chance that person, on their own, is going to discover their horrible diet, learn how to prepare and save their food, break the habit of sugary foods, etc.

Just because you can do it doesn't mean it's easy, or common sense, or even possible for a huge swath of the population.

Thanks for having empathy. Hopefully comments like yours will help other people see what they're lacking.

So basically, the numbers only work out if you're living somewhere cheap (i.e. not urban). Where I live, a chicken that feeds four costs $8-$15 (roughly $2 a pound). Eight meals means two birds, plus the cost of everything else.

[0] As the grandparent points out, I mean veggies, whole grains, etc, etc, not necessarily organic or boutique.

There's not much need for skepticism here. Pay even the tiniest amount of attention to prices at the supermarket, and you'll know that it's true. I can buy a can of beef stew for $5. Buying the raw ingredients to make the same quantity of beef stew would cost me at least $10.

Make friends with your freezer. Meat production, like everything else, goes in cycles so at regular intervals producers (and thus) supermarkets will find themselves with excess stock of this or that. The obvious example is buying turkey after Thanksgiving, but I see cycles in things like the price of pork every 4-6 weeks. So about every other month I buy a whole boneless pork loin (a single piece of meat about as long as your forearm) for about $25 instead of the usual cost of around $50. I spend about 20 minutes at home slicing it into pork steaks and freezing most of them, and get 20+ nice thick steaks out of it, so that's about $1.05 each. Add in the cost of the vegetables, other ingredients, energy to cool and cook, and the price of a good size meal is still only $2.50 at most.

That's a particularly good deal (which is why I buy it so regularly) but if you can cook and don't mind forward planning your food a bit, you save a lot of money. Menu planning probably cuts your cost by 50% vs. buying your ingredients on a per-meal basis.

And this isn't surprising: $5 is remarkably cheap for a beef-based product. They do it by using remnant beef, which you can't really get in stores. Grocery store stew meat is probably 2-3x more expensive than the stuff they're using. Mine will taste better and be higher quality, but it won't be cheaper.

I can't understand how you come to this conclusion. I definitely save money by buying larger cuts or bulk packs. Maybe you should come over for dinner :-)

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/a-high-price-for-he...

"Healthy eating really does cost more.

That’s what University of Washington researchers found when they compared the prices of 370 foods sold at supermarkets in the Seattle area. Calorie for calorie, junk foods not only cost less than fruits and vegetables, but junk food prices also are less likely to rise as a result of inflation. The findings, reported in the current issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, may help explain why the highest rates of obesity are seen among people in lower-income groups."