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Comment by gozur88 | Hacker News Reader

It's cheaper to buy fresh food than junk food. If you're buying junk food it's because you don't have a place to cook or you're too lazy to cook.

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It could also be that you are too overworked to cook or that you are so illiquid that you cannot afford needed repairs.

You don't need to cook in order to eat well.

Salads are a thing.

You need to do the dishes when done. I am familiar with people who are saving money in order to have the sewer lateral fixed.

We're talking a single bowl here, and fork. If you're that hard up that you can't even wash something out with water. Clean it out with a towel, and use it again. Shit, as a bachelor, I do that now, and I've got plenty of cash.

Eat it out of the package that the stuff came in instead if cleaning is an issue

Poor student tricks work past being a student.

I cook stews in a rice cooker w/ slow cook setting, and I eat the stew right out of the cooker pan. Cheap, healthy, quick and one (nonstick) dish to deal with.

My metric for food price is calories per penny. For example, the 760 calorie slice of pizza for $1.99 at Costco works out to about 3.8 calories per penny, while the 500 calorie Caesar salad for $3.99 works out to about 1.3 calories per penny. In my worked example, the fresh food is more expensive than the junk food from the point of view of 'How much money do I need to spend to keep myself alive today?' Could you post some examples of the calories per penny of the fresh food and junk food costs you are referring to?

A pound of uncooked white rice is $0.69, and it has 1696 calories, which works out to 24.6 calories per penny. That's about 19x better by your metric.

Yep, and it doesn't take much to turn that rice into a full meal. If you've got a freezer and a microwave, fresh-frozen veggies are a good alternative to always buying fresh veggies for the time constrained. It's a little more expensive but you lose virtually none of the health benefits and gain ease of preparation.

Throw some veggies in with the rice and some soy or teriyaki sauce, and you've got a healthy meal that is compatible with most diets. If you're a meat eater, you can cook some chicken breast to go with it; if not, some tofu for protein will help make it more filling.

You have to factor in the time it takes to cook. Let's say you cook all the rice at once and it takes 20 minutes. At minimum wage of $7.25, that's $2.42 in addition to the 0.69 for the bag of rice, yielding 5.4 calories per penny, within the same order of magnitude as the prepared foods I gave as an example.

I acknowledge that a person's time isn't always tradable for wages, and that home cooking is generally cheaper and more satisfying.

I don't find the time argument very compelling. It takes just a minute or two to boil water, you throw in the rice, and simmer for another twenty. Sure, it takes twenty two minutes, but twenty of those are just waiting. Normally I start the rice and then prepare the rest of the meal while it's simmering. Maybe 20-30 minutes for the whole meal.

Time-wise fast food isn't as efficient as it would seem at first glance. If you go during a normal meal time (which you pretty much have to do if you have kids), between travel time and waiting at the register, it's going to end up taking as long as a home cooked meal.

You can buy an entire sackful of potatoes for around the cost of two slices of pizza, and it'll last for weeks. Or several pounds of flour which will likewise last for a while--you could make your pizza bases in a few minutes if you wanted to, then just add the toppings you want. These are all vastly better value for money than buying pre-made food.

I don't buy for a moment that processed food is cheaper than the raw ingredients. The processing has a significant cost. The main factor for many people is pure laziness--they can't be bothered to spend 10 minutes preparing stuff; they'd rather waste money on processed food.

> entire sackful of potatoes

if you have a kitchen to cook them, yes. else you probably have just a sack of vegetables that nobody could eat in his raw form. living in a box means eating pre-made food and you can buy healthy pre-made food (like the cesars salad) it's just not affordable.

I don't think a majority of people who are poor are lacking access to basic cookware or some means to cook food. You can purchase a brand new Crock-Pot for $15.

I do think there's an under appreciation for how time-poor most people are (moreso the less money you have). Or how a lack of basic cooking skills or knowledge keep people buying fast food instead of buying and preparing fresh, healthier food at home. I've invested a whole lot of time choosing recipes and learning how to buy, prepare, and store food. A friend of mine complained that going to the grocery store cost him more money than eating out. Turns out, he was just buying frozen dinners. One of my recent favorite meals to make is dried black beans, rice, and a shredded rotisserie chicken. The chicken is optional, the source ingredients are dry, less than $1/lb, freeze well after preparing, and don't require any special tools or skills.

While I think food insecurity is a huge concern for kids, the cost of food and the percentage of income being spent on food has halved over the last 50 years [1]. (I wish they showed what the lowest quintile was spending over time)

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/03/02/389578089/yo...

Nowaday you don’t need a kitchen to cook. Pizza/toaster oven, sous vide machine/crock pot/instapot, hot plate/griddle or George foreman or a blow torch, microwave and a fridge.

I thought those George Foreman grills were a gimmick (come on, they were selling it on informercials!), but a buddy of mine bought one and he swears by it.

We bought one for a family member with Alzheimer's for fear they would burn the house down otherwise.

Works fine but the burgers come out a bit dry.

I think that was part of the point of the parent comment.

"I don't buy for a moment that processed food is cheaper than the raw ingredients. The processing has a significant cost. The main factor for many people is pure laziness--they can't be bothered to spend 10 minutes preparing stuff; they'd rather waste money on processed food."

When was the last time you worked multiple jobs, and had to take care for kids? That 10 minutes is not readily available.

This is a ridiculous comparison where you're cherry picking data. You're comparing something that is loaded with fat to something that is mostly water (the salad bit). Compare the slice of pizza to a can of beans from Walmart (https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Black-Beans-15-25-oz/...), 385 calories for 50 cents, and its pretty easily beat costwise and healthwise.

Ground beef, even at whole foods comes out to about 2 calories / penny. Getting it at a regular store would put it at 3 to 4 calories per penny. Rice is 3.2 beans even better.

You can mix all these things in endless ways with a little creativity.

You could free fat from the Costco meat dept and have an infinite metric.

I'm not sure why you're being down voted here but you're pretty close to correct. There have been many recent studies showing fast food really isn't cheaper than buying other types of healthier food. It is pretty close because there are an incredible amount of low cost high calorie foods like beans, nuts, rice, cheap cuts of meat, the list goes on. Here is one from the UK Economic Affairs: https://iea.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Cheap-as-Chips...

The conclusion to save you a click: Food in the UK has never been more affordable and healthy food is generally cheaper than unhealthy food. A day’s diet that meets the requirements of the Eatwell Guide can be purchased for less than the price of two cheap supermarket ready-meals and for much less than a single meal at a fast food chain. Switching to healthier versions of many staple products can be achieved at no extra cost, and a wide range of fruit, vegetables and carbohydrates can be bought in supermarkets for less than £1 per kilogram. Five portions of fruit and vegetables can be purchased for as little as 30p.

Some studies that have come to the opposite conclusion have used a cost-per-calorie measure of food pricing which makes high-energy food appear expensive regardless of the cost of a meal. Others have compared a small selection of food products which are classified as ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy’ on the basis of relatively minor differences. By looking at the cost by edible weight and studying the price of typical food portions, this report has been able to make better comparisons between the cost of healthy and unhealthy diets in Britain today.

We conclude that the real question is not why unhealthy food is so cheap but why people consume unhealthy food despite it being more expensive. The answer, we suggest, is that taste and convenience often play a larger role in people’s food choices than price or nutritional quality.

>We conclude that the real question is not why unhealthy food is so cheap but why people consume unhealthy food despite it being more expensive. The answer, we suggest, is that taste and convenience often play a larger role in people’s food choices than price or nutritional quality.

I suggest you consider the fact that many people in the US, especially in poor, urban areas live in "food deserts" where there are no supermarkets close by that sell healthy food at reasonable costs.

http://americannutritionassociation.org/newsletter/usda-defi...

If you are poor and have no vehicle you depend on mass transit. This costs both money and time. If you are poor and lucky enough to have a job, its likely to be a low-paying job with a lengthy commute (in terms of time, bus and train transfers, if not in distance). This leaves you very little free time to spend half of a day for a lengthy trip outside of your food desert to get some fresh food. There is also the issue of bringing your groceries home. Have you ever tried to ride the bus or the train while carrying a bunch of packages, especially when it is crowded? How about transferring buses and trains while trying to carrying several packages? Do you have a proper kitchen? Many poor people don't. Proper storage facilities and equipment? Most poor people have roaches.

These are just some of the collective obstacles faced by many poor people in terms of their access to fresh food.

>Lee also notes in her study that, on closer inspection, food deserts don’t actually exist in the U.S., at least not as a national problem—on average, poor neighborhoods have more grocery stores than wealthier neighborhoods.

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2014/02/food_deserts...

It's more likely that unhealthy food is the one source of pleasure that a poor person can afford, and with all the troubles of their lives, they may find solice in eating the delicious junk. Healthy food either takes a bunch of effort, or don't taste very good (unless you couple it with some expensive condiments/spices).

This is basically Scott Adams's "Pleasure Unit Theory", which I find very plausible: http://pratie.blogspot.com/2006/04/scott-adams-pleasure-unit... . If it's true, then developing healthy food that's convenient and tasty will do a lot more good than hectoring people about their bad decisions.

We can't fix everyone's problems. Hectoring may be bad, but at the end of the day a lot of change has to come from the people making bad decisions. Sacrifice for ones children should be the norm, otherwise they shouldn't be bringing them into such a suffering existence.

Tasteful, healthy food doesn't take that much effort, but you do have to know a little bit about cooking.

Or have the time to cook. Which is a very important criteria, as someone who works two jobs likely does not have the luxury of that amount of time.

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