Fruits and veggies are among the cheapest items in any grocery store in the United States. And we provide food stamps to poor people for this very reason.
We cook and eat well on the weekends, we try to reserve food for the week and I continue to be amazed by people worse off than us that are working as much as we are _and_ a part time job on top of it.
Pick the right type of fruit, and you'll be done in less than 1 minute. You probably just spent more time than that writing a post about how you don't have time to eat fruit! - just think how much better your life would be had you spent that minute eating a banana.
(Many types of vegetables do require cooking, but, again, you have options: bell peppers, onions, spring onions, most types of lettuce...)
Jesus. 3 hours! That sounds awful. I'm unhappy when my commute is more than 20 mins each way.
What sort of meals are you comparing? To cook a steak, sausages, bacon and eggs and things like that can take more time than cutting up some vegies and making a basic salad. A lot of veggies like beans and lentins can be stored dried, their shelf life is infinitely longer than meat and bread.
> I applaud everyone who manages to cook every day and I strive to do so
It sounds like your comparing cooking to takeaway/frozen rather than comparing cooking veggies to other food.
The Geography of Poverty and Nutrition: Food Deserts and Food Choices Across the United States Allcott, Diamond, and Dubé:
We study the causes of “nutritional inequality”: why the wealthy tend to eat more healthfully than the poor in the U.S. Using two event study designs exploiting entry of new supermarkets and households’ moves to healthier neighborhoods, we reject that neighborhood environments have economically meaningful effects on healthy eating. Using a structural demand model, we find that exposing low-income households to the same food availability and prices experienced by high-income households would reduce nutritional inequality by only 9%, while the remaining 91% is driven by differences in demand. In turn, these income-related demand differences are partially explained by education, nutrition knowledge, and regional preferences. These findings contrast with discussions of nutritional inequality that emphasize supply-side issues such as food deserts.
For those interested in protein, or feeling full, chicken is one of the cheapest things you can possibly buy. In NYC, fresh vegetables, and (god forbid) organic, is one of the most expensive things you can buy. In my experience, buying ingredients for a full salad with relatively fresh ingredients is almost as expensive as going to a moderately priced restaurant. It's crazy.
If what I said sounds wishy-washy, it's because no one's defined what a unit of animal product versus a unit of fruit and vegetables is, when doing this price comparison.
It might just be because the weather here doesn't give us Mediterranean-like weather conditions and a lot of stuff has to come from places like Mexico and California (it seems from what the local grocery stores are stocking).
Your contention that it costs almost as much to buy ingredients for a salad as going to a moderately priced restaurant, don't make sense to me. Even a "basic lunch in the business district" costs $16. That's pretty close to my entire weekly budget for fruit and veg. According to this site you could by a kg of tomatoes, a kg of apples and a kg of potatoes for $12. That's a hell of a lot of food.
When I first moved to Japan I cooked vegan meals at home. Since I got married, I eat a small amount of meat and fish with my wife (I still like vegan cooking). First, I should point out that I didn't eat dramatically more fresh fruit and veg as a vegan -- definitely more beans and grains, and probably a bit more veg. Fruit stayed about the same. My budget for food (which I track pretty closely) has almost exactly doubled per person since adopting more animal products. I spend about $2500 per year per person on groceries now, while I spent about $1300 per year per person on a vegan diet.
One thing that might stand out is the really, really small values there. Food is cheap compared to about every other expense as long as you are cooking for yourself. If you find yourself trying to cut back on your grocery budget, I will suggest that for most people there are almost always better ways to save that money.
I'm not sure what I'm missing. That's only 1466 calories according to Google, mostly from the potatoes—which are not particularly healthy. For $12, it is not much food. An average man eating 2500 calories per day would be spending $143 per week with this diet (of potatoes!). How do you get it to $16/week, including fruits?
For me, at least, fruits and vegetables are the most expensive part of my diet. And I can't afford to buy organic or shop at the farmer's market. It's worth it for me, but I don't pretend it is cheap.
What isn’t expensive in NYC?
There are 310 million people in the USA who don’t live in NYC
Sorry for the rant, if that tone is coming through. But no, the problem is not that poor people aren’t trying hard enough, which is what these kinds of responses seem to boil down too. The problem is people without wealth are exposed to way too much risk and hardship to ever have a chance (or even enough resources and time) to act strategically the way people. Everything is tactical, everything is about just staying upright.
Money is a huge problem if you are poor. My point is just that you can substitute frozen vegetables for whatever you are eating and it can be the same exact price. It does take more time to make, and is less convenient than unhealthy options. This is what I mean by time and discipline.
There are comments about vegetables having a high cost per calorie, but this misses the important point that many unhealthy, poor people are obese in the US. By swapping a meal at McDonalds or packaged snacks at the convenient store for some pasta with frozen vegetables, you may not be getting the same calorie/dollar value. But getting enough calories is not the issue for most poor Americans, getting enough vegetables is.
I'm not talking about fancy meal prep either. Roast some broccoli in the oven, boil some noodles. Add salt, pepper, butter. Done. Don't like broccoli? Swap it for something else.
It doesn't matter how much food (discipline) you've got if your water supply (time, money) is dry for a month.
I think the biggest thing you need is to have the skill to understand where the time/money tradeoff pays off. If you have a low paycheck, it doesn't make any sense to work overtime and then not have time to cook a meal. If you have a family, you might be talking about making $20 and spending all of it at Mac D's. These kinds of things add up as well. If you need a car to maintain a hectic schedule, it can easily end up costing you as much as your entire food budget.
These things are super hard and I think people, whether poor or rich, get it wrong all the time. Prioritisation is also super hard. It's easy to get in your head "Oh, I should have a least X" and so you go out and get X, even though you don't actually need it. Then you get stuck in an inefficient part of the curve for all of the other things that you do need.
In that way, the stigma of poverty is often worse than the poverty itself. If you accept your poverty and cooly make the right choices all the time, then you can live on very, very low levels of money. You can even do so very comfortably and be happy. But if you fight against it, loose heart and try to be "like everyone else", then it's this terrible downward spiral that you can't get out of.
And it's kind of stupid because you can work out the math a million times over and say that people should be able to live on $X or make time for Y, but nobody teaches people how to be poor and happy. We collectively send the message that poor is bad and that only through increased money will your life get any better.
I honestly wish we taught more life skills in high school. Most of the academic stuff people ignore and forget anyway. I'm happy I know about ionic bonding, how titration of acid works, etc, etc because I have used it to make beer and cheese. But it's just not relevant to the vast majority of people on the planet. How we get away without teaching basic skills like managing a budget, shopping, finding a place to live that you can afford, finding and doing well at a job, etc, etc, etc I just don't understand.
* Sous vide: It's very easy to learn and make for juicy and delicious food easy.
* Meal prep. Rather than cooking everyday of the week, spend two hours or so prepping meals for the rest of the week so that you don't have to cook.
That said, the problem is that such knowledge isn't that widespread, although it's widely available on youtube university.
More sensibly, time and money poor people should invest in a slow cooker. You can cook a huge variety of different cheap and easy meals with one. It also allows you to prep in the evening, then put it on to cook in the morning, so you have dinner ready to go the instant you get home.
https://www.amazon.com/My-Sous-Vide-My-101-Immersion/dp/B071...
An ordinary ziploc type bag works fine for sous vide as long as you don't submerge the opening. I've used them for that many times. It's a bit awkward and takes a little more time, but no big deal.
The "my way or the highway" approach is only really valid when children are involved so that advice is quite limited in terms of value.
https://www.luckyvitamin.com/p-555407-luckyvitamin-easy-iron...
I have to take iron but I struggled for many years, most iron pills cause me lots of digestive distress. These ones don't, at all. I even can take them on an empty stomach. Pretty much a godsend.
I would think a pressure cooker might be a practical solution to the "no time to cook veggies" - I use mine to do things like steam a bag of prewashed and cut kale in under 5min.
The effects of social discourse and corporate indoctrination are a thing.
A lot of people believe it’s a duty to support American companies by purchasing their packaged foods.
Advertising branches out of government propaganda research. It’s powerful stuff.
Note: I'm not counting potatoes, rice, and other carb-rich foods here as veggies.
The market where I am pushes you towards things that are not fruits and vegetables.