Show me a grocery store where fresh watercress and cherries are cheaper than some artificial crap loaded with added sugar, sodium, and preservatives, and people will start to eat healthier.
Show me a grocery store where fresh watercress and cherries are cheaper than some artificial crap loaded with added sugar, sodium, and preservatives, and people will start to eat healthier.
> The basis of their diet, therefore, is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea, and potatoes — an appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t.
In mid-Victorian times, eating margarine, bread, sugared tea, and corned beef regularly simply wasn't an option for the poor, regardless of any lack of self-discipline -- those things were all far too expensive to be anything other than a rare treat.
Check out, Down and Out in Paris and London
He's more like the Greek girl in Pulp's song 'Common People'
Whatever he did he could call time on it.
That's not to say I don't admire his work for its obvious compassion.
Poor people exist because of bad luck, whether in managing their money or the genetic lottery.
I'm all for abolishing both of these things. A society of genetically related clones would work great. A nation as a family. You'd meet a stranger and you'd know what they're like, even though you wouldn't know exactly who they are.
Now it's true that some people can absorb a whole lot more bad luck than others because of their family, but I remember one guy in particular who was rather determined to send his life into a ditch in spite of having parents who were willing and able to do a lot of things to help him. He managed to do things like going to prison for beating his girlfriend and robbing her sister and endangering (and injuring) himself on the job.
So it's not all black & white like you're making it out to be.
EDIT: I do feel I should put in a counter-point, in that I also knew a guy who made about one bad choice and the rest was hard luck, so there's that too. Most people were more a mix and for whatever it's worth, I tried to help where I could. The guy who loved to drink had his cruddy old bike stolen one Christmas, so I gave him a brand new one. That was pretty important to him, as it was how he got to work. I put a headlight on it too, as he had to ride a lot at night.
I'm not saying it's black and white. More of a greyish fractal, however, what is free will?
This is roughly what I've come to believe on free will: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will#Free_will_as_a_pragm...
No one can deny we 'make' choices based on the way we think, feel and the environment we are in. And the way we think and feel is determined partly by environment, but mostly by genetics. You can look this up. 2 pairs of Colombian identical twins got mixed up. One set grew up in practically medieval lifestyle in a rural province, the other was raised in the capital. Despite completely different environment, their personalities were remarkably similar. From adoption studies, we know that something similar is the case for intelligence.
1. if there is no free will then choices (and bad choices in particular) have to come from somewhere else.
2. that something is either unfortunate genetics or an unfortunate environment.
3. whichever of these is at fault should be fixed.
If you want to say that's an illusion or whatever, then you undermine empiricism and science with it. How many of our other perceptions about the world are unreliable and why can't this one be trusted?
Eating fresh fruit is cheap, but it's still not as cost effective as some fast food, let alone processed food in the grocery store.
That's not a small chunk of change for families like that. Sure they'll almost certainly earn that back in lower medical costs in the long run, but in the short term it's a serious burden.
A "working class" family doesn't have an income of $20,000. That would put a family in the bottom 12% by income. Median family income was $67,000/year in 2014.
People making $20k, like landscapers, janitors, forklift operators, and loaders, are generally called "Unskilled Laborers", not working class.
http://www.ibtimes.com/us-spends-less-food-any-other-country...
I can sit in a restaurant chair and be taking my soup within 60 seconds of sitting, in lots of places.
And it is usually (but not always) healthier than 'fast food'.
The problem is that people assume that good food has to look good, and that fear of bruised/uncharismatic food is what drives prices of healthy base-ingredient foods up.
Eating tasteless frozen vegetables and starchy beans and rice, again and again day after day, sounds like hell to me. Eating is so effortful compared to soylent -- it's revolting to me how much chewing I would have to do to eat something like that.
You can just buy flavorings for soylent, or blend in some fruit, and it'll have a pleasant taste, and you won't spend time on it. Seems so much better than frozen anything.
Here's my "Indian" spicing, with largest quantities first: cumin, granulated garlic, black pepper, coriander, cinnamon, turmeric. First I start microwaving the veggies in a large Pyrex bowl. Then I fry the spices lightly in ghee, add canned black beans. If I'm using meat, I add that first and brown. Then I mix it all in a large pot, and simmer for a while. Finally I adjust spicing, and let cool.
I freeze in single-portion containers. It takes me an hour or two to prepare ~20 servings. When I'm hungry, it takes about 10 minutes from freezer to microwaving to eating.
I totally don't get the thing about chewing. I like chewing. I enjoy the process as flavors from each component blend with each other and the spicing. I can't imagine feeling satisfied after just drinking a meal.
When I was on a DIY blend and mixed batches of powder weekly, it took 20-30 minutes (depending how much I concentrated on it) to prepare a week's worth of meals. It took ~2 minutes to pour the powder into a pitcher at the beginning of the day, so 40 seconds/meal prep time.
Not to mention the time saved shopping, planning for shopping, driving to the store, etc., Which almost certainly takes at least 90 minutes/trip, which let's say you make biweekly. comes to 105-155 minutes of weekly overhead plus 10 minutes a meal for 315-365 minutes of total time wasted by consuming solid food a week. In comparison, DIY soylent is 62-72 minutes a week. If you're buying powder, that drops to just the time required to mix a day's batch, dropping the total time cost to 42 minutes a week! If you buy Soylent 2.0, you spend ZERO minutes on food preparation and can ALWAYS consume nutrients concurrently with any other task.
That is HOURS a week you are literally stealing from yourself. You could use that to scale your startup that much quicker, or if you're a freelancer you could just convert it directly to billable hours! (If you're a wage slave, why are you on HN?)
By design Soylent has a complete nutritional profile, so you're getting everything you need, complete proteins, fiber, whatever, and far better than your vegetables, which have variance that can't be measured or controlled. This also means you're always satisfied while on Soylent ("drinking a meal" is possible, but quixotic... Soylent allows you to liberate yourself from the concept of meals, and just consume calories as you need to throughout the day, which has the added advantage of eliminating food coma and keeping energy release steady).
I usually drink my soylent unflavored, because I've long since stopped caring about things like taste. The ROI just isn't there. Taste sensations are a fleeting experience that rarely generates a lasting memory (how did your lunch taste yesterday? The day before? The month before?), whereas the tangible benefits you can attain from saving that time tend to be persistent long into the future and generally compound. But, if you want to add ~30 seconds to prep time, you could mix in cinnamon, MSG, blend in some fruit, whatever, and you'll have a taste experience that is almost certainly on the same tier as reheated frozen vegetables.
I have heard that argument several times when Soylent is mentioned. Don't dentists ever bring up the importance of chewing for gum and teeth health? I thought it's common knowledge.
It's the fresh fruit and produce that's expensive, relatively speaking. You have to keep an eye out for whats on sale or in season.
Where people often go wrong is in buying expensive junk food. Potato chips cost $3 a bag around here. Same with a package of Oreos. Ridiculous.
found an interesting example that matches this description, "‘cucina povera" (poor cuisine), yesterday ~ http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/nov/17/rachel-r...
If you fried them up as an omelette, you get a healthy breakfast with very few carbs. Chuck in a tablespoon of olive oil (again, we assume bought by the litre) and you've got another 100 calories.
Fruit is expensive because, per your locale, it's almost always out of season. Supermarket apples in particular are massively marked up; we pay £2 a bag here. Any orchard will sell you apples (seasonally) for much much less.
http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/04/21/401319019/5-m...
http://nypost.com/2015/06/07/eggs-prices-on-the-rise-due-to-...
All of a sudden, buying eggs isn't the cheapest way to eat animal protein
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/23/eggs-...
When I can, I buy from farms which sell by the roadside and you can normally get a half-dozen for £1.30 or so.
Easy and fast? No, there's opportunity cost there of course but that's just an example off the top of my head. Heck and apple and a can of tuna would come close in price.
They're also free for a quarter of the year if god forbid you turn off the TV and walk outside. Same with cherries for that matter.
One fall I picked so many kilograms of apples that I still had a few wrinkled (but edible) left-overs by the following spring - all stored carefully, unrefrigerated, in a cellar. Other fruits are preserved as jellies, or in jars, or simply frozen.
It angered me last year to see a fully laden plum tree in a parking lot, with plums squished on the ground, and a row of terraced houses nearby, with kids playing outside... Their stupid parents had ignored the bounty literally on their doorstep.
Even roadsides are laden with wild produce. Some less-trafficked verges are quite OK for foraging.
Edit: I totally misunderstood the comment I was replying to and agree with it.
Here in urban China people still shop at fresh food markets, where there is only fresh food. Typical prices might be...
Tomatoes 4-8元 (yuan=CNY=<USD$2) per 斤 (jin=500g=1/2kg). Spinach 4元 (<USD$1) per large bunch Bananas 10元 (<USD$2) per large bunch (like 15-20 bananas) Onion 1-2元 (<USD$0.50) per large purple onion (brown is rarely found)
Artificial crap can be had elsewhere for cheap, but it's not available in the markets, which also provide fresh soy milk, tofu, rice and wheat noodles, nuts, fish, etc.
Cheap, good food is easy to find. The problem isn't in the pricing of watercress and cherries, it's that people don't see those as complete meals and don't want to go through the effort to cook for themselves. Eating poorly isn't done because it's cheaper, it's done because it's easier.
In other words, it is more expensive in a different way.
These considerations aren't conclusive, and I'm sure there are people who find a way to overcome them, and possibly we could use resources that help others to do so.
But on HN of all places people should understand the power of marginal gains. And marginal obstacles.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert
Within cities, there are more than three times as many supermarkets in wealthier neighborhoods compared with poorer areas.
...sounds like a research project over the holiday.