Bigger problem is eating out (restaurants, fast food) where 90% of money is wasted. Or buying expensive ingredients like meat or very processed foods. 10 times more food can be bought if choosing wisely.
I pay maybe 4$-5$/day for food and I routinely throw away half. That's 2$/day wasted. But eating at restaurant wastes so much more.
That's not really accurate though. Half the point of heavily-processed foods is that they can use non-aesthetic parts of the animal or plant to produce edible food.
- Mechanically-processed chicken is made out of the parts of a chicken that you could never sell as beautiful chicken breasts
- Baby carrots are carrots that are too ugly to sell
- Fillers like corn syrup and soybean oil are calorically incredibly cheap to produce, and very efficient use of cropland.
More accurately, it's organic and locally-grown foods that waste the most cropland by being low-density (and are thus more expensive).
It used to be more common to purchase restaurant food, and home-cooked meals were a luxury for the rich a few hundred years ago, but income and sales tax have imposed higher transaction costs, and made restaurant food more expensive.
The point you tried to make with that seems twisted. Home made food was the norm, so when something like MacDonald started, it was actually not junk food, but more like food that only the rich could afford.
In the present environment, even with income and sales tax, restaurant food is cheap - relatively, of course. You can get a lot for $2 USD. The problem is that type of food is bad for you in the long term.
If your scope is restricted to the food culture of the urban poor, its worth pointing out that the American urban poor today largely do not prepare their own food, for much the same reason as in historical examples, with seriously deleterious health outcomes.
Throwing food away is a net loss of a valuable resource.
That's not inconsiderable. The global problem with food/hunger is one of distribution. If 50% of the food demand in the industrialized 1st world is just waste, reducing most of that could increase the share of food purchasing power of the rest of the world.
I can't really imagine relying on a restaurant or fast food for day-to-day food.
For a restaurant to survive they will add things to the food to TASTE better than competing restaurants, this will almost always be salt, sugar and oil/butter. Like humans think music recorded slightly louder is richer than music recorded slight quieter, I don't think people realize why one restaurants food tastes better than another.
so sure for socializing, meals while traveling and special occasions restaurants are fantastic, but surely day-to-day it's gotta be bad for you.
If you make 100$ per hour it doesnt take long before eating out is more economical.
It also depends whether you consider cooking work or fun. Some people like doing it, others don't.
I don't make $100/hour and I do enjoy cooking, so I don't eat out that much, but I do believe for some people it makes perfect sense.
2 KFC meals = 12 kilos of rice or pasta = 50 meals at least ?
You can survive for a long time on just rice+beans+vegetable oil - emphasis on survive - it's not optimal for health, obviously. You want to throw in at least some fish and vegetables for health.