Dining out is a reason Americans are broke and overweight
marketwatch.com
marketwatch.com
With Americans marrying later and often times dual income even then this has left most individuals doing 1.5 jobs (house work and their actual job)
Additionally the time required to access to the basics has also gone up. Super markets are more crowded. Traffic is much worse.
This has left Americans with a drastic reduction in time and created large amounts of time pressure stress.
The major advantage of eating out is a massive reduction in stress related to food prep, particularly around time savings and mental energy expenditure.
Now eating out is not on average healthy, but not all meals that are prepared at home are either. When faced with equivalently unhealthy meals, dining out has the advantage of automatic portion control.
The REAL reason American's are broke is cost of living. Rent and housing costs have skyrocketed and wages have stagnated.
Coupled with a reduction in time and increased time-stress taking care of every day chores, health goes out the window.
In short, there is a direct correlation between health and wealth. Specifically, if one partner earns enough to support a relatively unstressed house mom/dad, the family unit is healthy.
Otherwise if an individual earns a large sum of money with sufficient few hours, they have compound time benefits in other aspects of their lives allow for health considerations.
"Government data shows that in 2017 American spent more than $3,300 a year on dining out"
Can spending 3300$ yearly result in being broke?
Being broke requires spending the other 75-80% of discretionary income too, and that is a much larger pool of money.
We recently started using one of those ingredient/recipe delivery services and it has drastically reduced the stress. The meals are quite good and my kitchen skills are improving quite a bit. The downside is the cost is greater than shopping for your own meals.
Portions in restaurants are way too big. After a while this totally skews your perception of appropriate amounts of food.
Pay-by-the-weight buffets (as opposed to all-you-can-eat) seem to offer me the best way to control portions and get a variety of healthy things to eat without the prep hassle, but it still costs a good deal more than it does for me to make my own meals.
Inflation adjusted housing costs have not risen much over time [1].
If you don't account that housing now is vastly bigger than before you lose this fact.
Here's [2, Figure 5] a shorter timespan, showing that the ratio of income to housing payment has remained essentially flat 1985-2005.
Nothing in any of this data supports skyrocketing costs. If you're going to claim it's skyrocketed in small pockets, then yes, it has, but over that same window it's crashed in some pockets.
[1] https://www.huduser.gov/portal/publications/pdf/Trends_hsg_c...
[2] https://www.huduser.gov/portal/publications/pdf/Trends_hsg_c...
Here is inflation adjusted housing price per square foot over time [2]. It is not much different for anytime in the past 100ish years as far as I can find from various datasets.
[1] http://www.newser.com/story/225645/average-size-of-us-homes-...
[2] http://www.aei.org/publication/new-us-homes-today-are-1000-s...
https://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/10/05/take-out-restauran...
It's very possible to go out and not spend a lot. Does this cost include alcohol? 60$ with drinks/person sounds right to me (for a week). Dropping alcohol: 20$ is doable (granted I don't go out 3 times a week).
However: why state the weekly budget over average meal cost?
I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that most of the 40% who didn't eat out are lower income, and income has some correlation with obesity. Eating cheap, processed food is going to make you gain more weight than occasionally eating out. Sure, there are lots of wealthy people who eat out frequently and don't exercise, but there are a lot more poor people who can't afford to buy healthy food and don't have time to exercise.
http://americannutritionassociation.org/newsletter/usda-defi...
Calling a place a "food desert" because people choose cheaper vegetables with less spoilage risk is condescending and easy to say from a position of economic privilege. I know an urban 1%-er that still eats canned green beans -- she loves the taste, having eaten them as poor child (I detest them, though for the same reason).
Healthy food is unbelievably dirt cheap in the US and available almost everywhere but it takes a lot of time and effort to prepare it. When you are working 60+ hours per week, that isn't always an attractive option. Poor people can afford healthy food.
Tangentially, the common definition of "food desert" improperly and tacitly conflates expensive food with healthy food. You can eat a very healthy and more importantly very cheap diet while living in a nominal food desert. Poor people can't afford boutique organic heirloom tomatoes so they don't sell them where poor people live. Frozen and canned vegetables are perfectly nutritious and cheaper substitute -- and I can vouch that poor people eat these in abundance -- but for the purposes of labeling an area a "food desert" they don't count.
There's also a bathtub curve I think. Bulk carrots, onion, potatoes, and celery are cheap. But as you move up the scale it starts to be not-cheap, with spices, shallots, olive oil, garlic, leafy greens, organic anything (which has been shown to be healthier long term). I cook from scratch and shop savvy but, perhaps partly due to cuisine and partly caloric needs, struggle to keep it in the $300/mo range I hear some couples and small families manage.
This is not hard arithmetic.
I can go to McDonald's and buy some combo for $5-8 and get a single meal, or I could go get some chicken thighs, some black beans and some rice and boom, you've got like 5 much healthier meals for $15. People all over the world do this, but in the US we always parrot that eating healthy is "too expensive".
I don't know if people are too strapped for time because of being overworked, having other priorities with the free time they do have to want to cook, or what the root problem is but I can't wrap my head about it being a financial issue.
If you are working two jobs to make ends meet, the extra hours required to buy food, and cook said food, may literally be more time than you have available.
Couple that with the simple fact that fresh food expires quickly, and you have a recipe (ha)for fast food being the best available option. You say you could buy some chicken thighs, but you can guarantee you have a fridge available.
The reality is that in spite of being unhealthy fast food has a lot of calories which you need, and is functionally cheap.
I think also this kind of article ignores that the bottom of the poverty spectrum in America aren’t eating fast food, they literally can’t afford it - they live on canned food and rice. The elderly living on canned cat food is not uncommon, and is a response to that being the among cheapest sources of fat and protein you can get; it’s not by choice.
The jokes about people in the Appalachia’s eating raccoon are based on fact - I have a friend who grew up there, and his parents still hunt and can literally anything they can. So they do have canned raccoon for the winter.
My parents and I lived in a literal shed until I was 3 or 4. My dad actually shot rabbits from the bedroom window.
I don’t think people on HN actually understand what real poverty is like.
Injustice is stressful. When I’m under stress, I know I am liable to make decisions that I wouldn’t otherwise make. I’m liable to use material means to assuage the feelings of despair. After all, isn’t this the messaging reinforced in advertising and media? Am I able to ignore advertising when it intrudes upon me at every turn? In the subway, on billboards, in my apps, in news papers, in news headlines, on TV, in movies, in books, in stores, between songs, in songs, from our friends, from our families, starting from birth.
There’s really no escaping from environmental stressors anymore. Not short of leaving society entirely. But billions of people lack the financial independence to do so. And I’m not talking about wealth. I’m talking about a lack of debt and enough money to abscond after taking care of ones obligations.