Isn't buying vegetables, cheap meat cuts, flour and other basic staples much cheaper and healthier?
To put things in context: I'm European and been homeless, the core of my artistic research and career is precisely about food for the homeless.
In my neighborhood, a wealthy liberal enclave called Marin County, preparing something paletable from raw ingredients is usually more expensive than cheap salty starchy food.
There are no cheap cuts of meat at my Safeway.
Most people are horrid cooks. They might think they can cook, but usually it's just awful. (Learning how to cook is not my point though.)
Poor people have huge problems, and cooking a nutritious meal is down on the priority scale.
Plus---for many poor people, the little bit of enjoyment is eating something that tastes good. I can see why the poor gravitate towards the lousy quick food.
(My all means I am poor. I don't eat crappy food though. I was a cook in my teens though. I'm glad I learned how to cook, but understand those that didn't.)
Sorry how can raw ingredients be expensive? I'm talking about staples flour, onions, carrots, beans, rice, etc.
Is there a database with US staples prices somewhere?
Literally just the price tags in the store. I once baked some pumpkin spice muffins for a friend in NYC who wasn’t in the habit of cooking (so I had to buy everything). Total cost: $45. I think it would have come to about $10 in London (where I live).
Admittedly, he’d have had some flour and butter to spare after that. But you have to somewhat know what you are doing to take advantage of the remaining ingredients.
Cooked well, that will lead you to a bland meal. Cooked badly it will be pretty awful. If you're used to high in salt/sugar it will taste awful regardless.
Craft Mac and cheese is $1/portion and ready in less than 10 minutes with one dish.
Any one else here have parents put random stuff in your Mac to "balance the meal"?
Mac with tuna. Mac with peas. Mac with what EVER was handy.
Oh it brings back memories.
In season vegetables are dirt cheap. If not frozen, prepared, mixed veggies are a couple dollars for 5-6 servings (no need to wash or cut!). Chicken is easy to find at <$3/lb, same with hamburger. Rice and beans are dollars per pound.
The real answer is, like most things that humans do that aren’t good for them (eat too much and end up obese, not exercise, not eat healthy, smoke, drink too much, not take medication or go to the doctor or dentist), is cheap, starchy food is just easier and lower effort.
Those things are cheap in the US now?
I know people who don't take their $4/month heart medication prescription and end up hospitalized.
I know people that when faced with the choice of walking around the block for exercise would rather watch Netflix despite their uncontrolled type 2 diabetes and doctor telling them exercise will keep their blood sugar under control.
In my examples this was a person who had a pre-existing dentist who already accepted their insurance - it was literally just the effort to go they couldn’t muster.
The $4 heart medicine was not insurance related. It was already in their medicine cabinet, they just couldn’t muster the energy to set a reminder to take it (or even take it if their spouse reminded them).
And the last one is purely the trade off between Netflix and a walk.
When I was a kid, steak was a rare luxury.
These days, you can buy a nice steak in the supermarket for $3 (I buy when they have a 2 for 1 sale). Heck, a bag of chips costs about that. You don't have to be much of a cook to cook it, either. Just put it in the frying pan.
A dozen eggs is $1.99.
The expensive stuff is the cookies, candy bars, doritos, etc.
Even high fat ground beef is still $4 a pound.
Beef is dirt cheap compared to candy bars, frozen pizza and chips.
Processed food is _so_ cheap.
[0] https://www.walmart.com/grocery/ip/Great-Value-Rising-Crust-...
That's right. But you can get a microwave for $9.99 at the thrift store. I see bread machines for a similar price. If you can follow directions like "gather the ingredients, dump them in the bread machine, push a button" you can make incredibly tasty fresh bread for next to nothing.
Just yesterday I went to the thrift store, and donated a bunch of stuff I don't use anymore, and bought a bunch that I did have a use for. It's a cheap way to live without compromise.
A pound and a half of pizza, not even close?
The nutrition in the steak is better, but I don't see any other basis of comparison where it could be cheap. The right candy bar (high in peanuts) will have lots more calories and something like 50% of the protein, for half the total price of the steak.
The other reply already pointed out how cheap wheat calories can be.
And a dozen eggs for $1.99.
The store also sells bulk peanuts for far far less than peanut candy bars cost. Like $2.99 per pound. You pour it in a bag, weigh the bag, put the label on it, and voila! And it's good for you, too, unlike the sugar-ladened candy. No prep required.
So? They're still cheaper than chips and a lot better for you.
This is completely false. You should stop propagating things you don't know about.
Check out Efficiency Is Everything, you can eat for $1.50/day on raw ingredients.
On $1.50/day I eat only rice and salad.
Prepped food on the other hand is half the price in the US than it is in the UK. These two factors combined make it a no brainer to go for the prepped stuff over the raw ingredients when you are trying to save money.
But of course, the economic stimulus for corporations is for you to become addicted to salt, sugar, and fat. From ads to aisle positioning, junk foods are first. Big Food is the modern day Big Tobacco.
I've worked with poor people in different countries, and even with the homeless. A lot of them eat mostly junk food, smoke, drink sodas, chew gum, watch junk TV, some gamble, many don't brush often, most don't exercise, and many get trapped in unpaid loans. And it's worse for their kids. Churches of all denominations used to steer them out of that path. This is a massive society whole now, and note I'm not a religious person.
But between on one hand enabling liberals telling them it's not their fault and it's out of their control, and on the other hand media bombarding them with advertisements of such products, it's becoming impossible to contain. Add that to the YOLO culture of social media.
This is not going to end well if we don't make drastic measures right now.
Nobody is a perfectly rational economical agent, like most comments in this subthread seem to suggest. Stuff sucks, work was hard today, you're tired, and you haven't even started thinking about dinner yet. Fuck. Let's just do hamburgers today. Can't afford them but let's worry about that tomorrow.
I say this as a person that lived homeless and that comes from a line of people that had to make do with scraps.
I guess it could also be cultural, who knows.
I'm not poor, which is thankful because it means I can live off food bars instead of having to prepare meals daily, which would annoy me a lot.
That line is long. It only takes one generation feeding their children a diet of pre-made meals and snacks to break it.
Here's an article from yesterday's NYT that has a historical background section about halfway down:
When No Landlord Will Rent to You, Where Do You Go? https://nyti.ms/33ZiTKV
You can cook in microwaves and rice cookers, no?
Poverty simply means you live without things. I lived for some years cooking on burner plates because I couldn't afford propane/natural gas (different houses). I also didn't have hot water. If my electricity got turned off? No warm food.
There are a number of rentals that do not come with appliances. "You can use what is there, but if it breaks, I'm not replacing it" happens a lot too. Maybe you can rent one, maybe not. You can probably carry a rice cooker home if you don't have transportation, but not a microwave (easily, anyway)
There are plenty of low cost apartment buildings with shared toilets and no bathtub/shower. That's when a gym membership might be necessary at the very least. Except in covid times when you weren't allowed to use the gym's shower facilities.
No room for a fridge, cooker, or anything else.
It also takes a long time to learn to cook effectively, and you need a decent kitchen, utensils, storage, spices, scales etc. which all cost money.
There's also the mindshare element, if you need to do a thousand things to survive, adding cooking from scratch to the list is really hard.
You don't need utensils, scales, nor anything decent, just a container that can be put on the fire. I survived cooking in army surplus over a tin can stove.
Food is basic survival so I don't know what to say about the mindshare element, especially when cooking from scratch saves you money and keeps you healthy.
Anyway, for me, maybe 50/50 I'd forget the soup on the stove and it would char a bit.
If you forget stuff on the fire then yeah go get a burger
Every person that cooks often that I've talked to grossly underestimates how much time their cooking takes them.
The ones that are more efficient either have a ton of cooking experience and talent or just a great kitchen setup, which is a rare luxury and generally a large investment.
Turns out, people started ordering food for home a lot more, even though they now had the time as well as the incentive to save money due to the uncertainty.
Add to it that you don't even make your 10000 steps a day like you normally would just by existing, if you want to keep little health you have to make more time for exercising too.
So I guess there must be something else going on here. I guess the situation must somehow be less simple and obvious than you assume. Reality, it appears, just doesn't match your simplistic view of how the world should work.
Cooking requires both time and resources. Most healthy ingredients have a limited shelf life and are bulkier (low calorie density) so you need to do your shopping more often. You then need to store them so they don't spoil too quickly (which is harder if you have a small kitchen and no pantry). Then you need to prepare meals in advance and cook them, both of which requires not only dedicated time but also time available on a somewhat predictable schedule, not to mention making meal plans in the first place to organize your shopping, which not only takes time but also mental energy.
Compare this to simply stocking up on cheap meals and throwing one in the microwave for a few minutes at dinner time.
Immigrants also occasionally to have support networks that born-american poor do not. Additionally, while some immigrants appear to be barely scraping by, sometimes its an improvement of circumstances compared to the okd country. That resilience is borne out of environments no American should be subjected to, IMO.
The problem isn't just poverty, it's generational poverty. Immigration is expensive and time consuming, whether you take the legal route or not. If you managed to immigrate to another country, that's already a huge achievement regardless of how much money you'll make there.
Also even cheap/easy unhealthy food can mean different things depending on your circumstances. There are plenty of tales of startup founders living on ramen before their company turned a profit or landed the investment but their situations are very different from those of the working generationally poor.
The ramen is always a temporary thing, a cost-cutting measure on your way to becoming a millionaire (or at least falling back onto your family's safety net of free rent and food if you fail). The Saturday McDonald's on the other hand is the highlight of the week because there's literally nothing to look forward to and you're already on the last dimes of your payday loan.