Neither of those two are necessarily cheap. However I don't see that approaching 74% of the income either when you choose sensible options for vegetables and fish.
0: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
My take is more than:
- a scary amount of people of my generation are completely uneducated about food. They don't know what a balanced diet is. They don't know how to cook. They don't know where to shop. They don't know how to choose a product. They don't know how much their health is affected by this. And they rather spend an hour on facebook than starting to figure it out.
- food is hard. Our society make it harder: we have a huge quantity of low quality food at our disposal. We solved the starving problem, but replaced it with a malnutrition problem, aggravated with the desire to make money which lead to the promotion of shitty food and the production of it. Getting proper information on nutrition is a hell of confusion, contradictory messages, social pressure and guilt.
- tasty balanced food is expensive and requires time + work + planning. Anybody can buy the stuff I talked about. But if you go to your usual supermarket and buy them, they will taste like crap. In fact, it's even hard to find nice food at the farmer market nowadays. So of course they don't want to eat them. I mean, between this red plastic ball they call a tomato and a kit kat, why the hell would a kid not choose the kit kat ? Why would the exhausted parents fight again and again to force the kid to eat something themselves think taste bad ? Life is hard enough.
- there are too many of us. To feed everyone we need to use use production, processing and distribution methods that lead to crappy food. Over population affects everything, from medical care quality to democracy. Food is no exception.
- our culture is messed up. We made it so that eating meat was a social status indicator. So everybody started to want to it meat. Then everybody started to eat it every day. Producing meat is incredibly expensive, so we have to use tricks to produce such a quantity, which lead to terrible food again.
- morality is an issue. I've work in OHS for some times. The amount of disgusting things that are done to food for profit is astonishing. And people just shut up. SEP field. If you photophop food for a living, if you participate to those marketing studies, if you work in a factory making crap, if you cook in a fast food, if you sign on contracts for bad food, if you code a website for an immoral actor, you are part of the problem. I know people have many constraint, and I don't pretend to have the moral high ground. I'm part of it as well. But my point is, we are responsible too.
A scary amount of my peers are afraid of cooking; I mean they're suddenly comfortable w/ their Blue Apron w/ instructions, but having a home standby is unheard of them for the most part.
Now, follow the causality chain.
Hence we must produce crappy food to get that quantity for everybody. And of course as a consequence, we have a lot less resources for growing things for human.
Also, because animals are higher in the food chain, they concentrate all the active products we give to them directly (hormones, antibiotics...) or indirectly (pesticides, herbicides...).
Vegetables are cheaper than most people think. I usually buy $1/lb frozen peas and $1.5/lb frozen broccoli. Washed and cut fresh carrots are also about $1.5/lb. Spinach and kale are not bad either. Just don't waste money on fresh vegetables, by the time you cook them they will probably be in worse condition than the frozen stuff.
Fruits are probably the most expensive. The cheapest fruits don't even have great nutritional profiles other than fiber and maybe vitamin C (which not a lot of people know is actually abundant in many common vegetables).
Dry legumes are also affordable: - Natco stuff are ok quality. 2kg mung, kidney, white beans are between £7-10: https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=natco+beans&ref=nb_sb_noss
You can have a pretty decent vegan diet on £150/month/person. If you want to add fish oil or some basic vitamins add ~£10/month/person. At least my family spends no more than that.
The National Minimum Wage is £7.83, which is about £1200/month after tax, you can do just fine with that in a village. In major cities, well, that's a different story, but who is to blame if you live in a property you can't afford? NMW is the same everywhere, but the property prices are not.