You can go well beyond a slow cooker in time and money with a one time purchase of a solid pressure cooker. I have a 21-qt All American that I can produce tasty brown and black bean based meals at less than the cost of the Mac-n-Cheese. I'd cook about 15 quarts of beans in one evening, freeze 12 and eat the other 3 over the next few days.
If you were to ban ready-to-eat foods high in sugar and hydrogenated fats, you'd force people to learn about these alternatives. The benefit of banning is that it eliminates the path of least resistance where people remain ignorant of alternatives.
If people still want sweet foods and other things that are bad for them, they can still have them, but they have to do some work by cooking those sweet things themselves.
Even if you are right, and the only way for people to learn about slow cookers is by banning McDonalds / Chinese take out, I still wouldn't do it.
Although the slow cooker is a pretty good idea.
Once that is done, I would take items that are known health hazards and classifying them as toxic for consumption such as HFCs and hydrogenated oils. They are basically slow acting poisons. You would still be able to buy them and use them in your own home as an individual citizen, but food companies cannot buy them and use them to make food. Instead they need to use the healthier alternatives by default. This way all the junk food we enjoy today would still exist, but we would mitigate how unhealthy they are for us, since food companies would have to use the least unhealthy recipe possible.
I see this as reasonable since it preserves individual freedom, but prevents corporations, which have a fiduciary duty to psychopathy, from producing maximally unhealthy foods in search of a profit.
If those least unhealthy options were still economically attractive to the poor after the elimination of food subsidies and classification of cheaper, less healthy substances as unfit as an ingredient in manufactured foods, I would then look into how to incent people to choosing the healthier alternatives.
I think the best option here would be to make it easy for a family to acquire a cheap slow cooker and recipes and subsidize a ready-made pack of food that contains spices and other bulk ingredients used in the slow cooker recipes. The latter option is already done in Brazil under the name "cesta basica". Here's an image of the foods included in the "cesta basica"
http://www.utahpreppers.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/cesta...
You can feed an entire very well for very cheap on it. It's also available to everyone regardless of income.
Pasta costs next to nothing, as does rice, as do beans. Veg and dairy are a bit more but still cheap by any standards. Cigarettes and alcohol, on the other hand, are expensive. As is running a car, or going to McDonalds.
So maybe try subsidising your meals by smoking less, or drinking less, or eating out less, or walking more.
How do poor people have less time to cook than well off people? We all work the same hours.
But not all poor people are like that, so what about the ones who have jobs with regular full-time hours, or less than full-time? Well, a lot of their time might be spent looking for another job, or some other way to supplement their income, that you, with your good income, don't have to worry about. That's time they can't spend cooking or thinking about how to cook well. And if they can't afford a car? Walking to whatever job they have, which you apparently think would be an unadulterated good for them, probably takes a lot longer than driving would- less time to cook or eat well. And in bad weather it may be impossible, meaning that they have to take public transportation, because that's all they can afford right now, even though it's more expensive that owning a car in the long run- again, less money they can spend on food, and still less time than if they had their own vehicle.
And add to all of that the psychological toll of knowing that you in poverty and exercising the willpower to deal with all of the above problems and others that come with poverty, and it's freakin' hard to find both the time and mental energy to figure out how to eat both healthy and cheap.
Ever try to buy groceries without a car? How much time would you add to your day if you had to take the bus from work to the supermarket, and then the bus back to your house. A 15 minute 2 stop car trip becomes an hour+ with all the waiting, shuffling to and from the bus stop, etc.
Also, ever notice how those big supermarkets with the cheap prices aren't really present in poor neighbourhoods? All you can find are cheap bodegas and convenience stores in those neighbourhoods.
Finally, a lot of poor people have 2 jobs or try to get as much overtime as they can to supplement their income, so 'We all work the same hours.' is a bit of a fallacy.
Finally, a lot of poor people have 2 jobs or try to get as much overtime as they can to supplement their income, so 'We all work the same hours.' is a bit of a fallacy.
This is almost undoubtedly false. 40 hours at the federal minimum wage doesn't come anywhere close to providing a livable income, particularly if the person is supporting a family; many low-income workers work multiple jobs.
Eating well is relatively Expensive. Sure you can cut out the car and carbs and obviously all poor people have their liquor and smoke money set aside... Or maybe poverty is a bit more complex than your overly simplistic and a bit dickish analysis... Just let them eat cake (Preferably gluten free)...
To make good food on the cheap, you need a bit of equipment and you need an upfront investment in spices and staples, all of which are significantly cheaper in the long run in bulk. Besides the investment, you need to plan long term, something the poor often struggle with (being poor is rarely only a question of lacking money).
With that in mind, it's pretty naïve to expect banning marketing to achieve much improvement in poor people's diets.
Not to mention the difference in commute time between owning a car versus taking a bus and walking in many areas. It takes me fifteen minutes to get to work; if I took the available buses it would be nearly three hours each way.
(We'll leave aside whether cheap pasta and rice are actually healthy eating.)
But I take issue with banning sugary, hydrogenated things. The problem with the modern diet isn't that a kid drinks a Coca Cola with his McDonald's fries once a month when he goes out for a treat with his mom after swim practice. The problem is that the poor lack both the skills, the time, and the money to prepare healthy and tasty food. I made homemade beef chutney last night. Mango, two different types of onions, red peppers, other peppers, etc. It was delicious. Cost about $4 or $5 per person just in food, not counting my Wustof knives or $200 non-teflon non-stick pan.
Kraft dinner would have taken 1/10th the time, at 1/5th the cost, with absolutely no knowledge or skill. If we want the poor to eat healthier we need to show them options that are cheap, easy, and fast. Tuna fish on Rye with an orange. That type of thing.