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Comment by ar_lan | Hacker News Reader

> Coke's position was clear: soda is one of the cheapest ways to get calories - a flagrantly inaccurate statement when factoring in the health consequences.

I'm always amazed at how many people flat out get angry with me when I say fast food is simply not cheaper than cooking yourself, provided you have a kitchen. I'm consistently told that that level of thinking is necessarily classist (and therefore racist), because it's more time, effort, and in the short-term, money, that needs to be involved.

I do not understand how making stir fry with chicken breast/thighs, frozen veggies, and rice is somehow the most expensive, time-consuming task in the world, but apparently that's a high-class dinner to many folks on the internet, and I'm 100% convinced it's because of the lie they are told (and then perpetuate) that the dollar amount you see in front of you is the dollar amount in totality.

Don't do Reddit, folks.

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>I do not understand

Well, that's an easy fix. Ask your employer to cut your salary to ~$20k-$30k. Tell them that you're going to be in the office at 7 on-the-dot, and he can write you up if you're 5 minutes early or late; you're going to be there for 8-10 hours, w/ a 30-minute lunch and two 15-minute breaks (again, write-ups for taking even a minute longer than alotted). Sell your car, get a used one (financed, of course), model year before 2012, 80k miles minimum; give the profit away (give away any savings you have, too; you can't access any of your retirement or investment accounts, either). Insist that any credit you have access to be cut severely and the rates jacked up. Sell anything you own other than your car that's worth more than $2k, give the money away. You are also now limited to going 20-30 minutes out of your way to the "good" grocery store, since you are moving to a food desert. Your mattress now comes in a box from Wal-Mart; get rid of any sleep or wake-up aids other than your cell phone. Hard mode: separate from your spouse, if you have one, and adopt as many kids as you need to get to 2 or 3.

People are not making poor individual choices. They are, collectively, subject to perverse incentives that are imposed by a regulatory-industrial complex that profits from the ill health they develop when behaving as might be expected of any normal human being of the past two centuries. Thank you for being frustrated at the state of the world; it means that you recognize that there are improvements to be made. First step: stop blaming the wrong people.

I don't see how any of that stops someone from "making stir fry with chicken breast/thighs, frozen veggies, and rice" as OP put it. Maybe the chicken is the most expensive part of that. What does your retirement account or mattress have to do with taking a few minutes to cook some veggies and rice?

Because it's not "just a few minutes". It's the time to learn how to make it well; it's the cooking equipment to make it well, consistently; it's the navigation of an ever-shifting retail environment with way too much choice and featuring the kind of sensory input meant to overload your decision-making abilities, just to get the ingredients; it's the way that poor sleep (mattress) also affects those decisions; it's the way that financial precarity means juggling concerns of the now with concerns of the future (retirement), and how that kind of anxiety also short-circuits your decision-making; it's knowing that eating "chicken and frozen veggies and rice" for every meal is going to leave you malnourished in short order, too, but that because the internet rando who's more focused on balancing a silver spoon on his nose than the points of discussion at hand will ALWAYS find fault in what you do (if he cares at all), maybe throwing all of that stress out the window and ordering Subway is the right call after all. Your inability to "see" doesn't preclude what I talked about from being there and material and true. And they are.

And for the record, I cook, but I only have time to because I'm unemployed.

So much of what you described happens because people intentionally make those bad decisions. That being said, you can still feed yourself well in the above scenario. What the parent described is nutritious and not expensive, and people get food stamps to cover food if they cannot pay for it. The actual problem is that people refuse discipline and don’t want to give up their vices and bad decisions. People hide behind blaming large ephemeral “complexes” and industries because they want to hide from their own irresponsibility and because some just want to have more control over other people including over other people who don’t choose bad decisions.

Ironically, this kind of post is your own attempt to hide from your responsibility as a member of a community and society that is setting up the wrong structures and incentives for people to naturally make the right decisions.

You are correct. The argument of "people are forced to eat fast food because it's too expensive to eat healthy" is not intellectually honest at all.

I believe many people hold on to that sentiment because it's easier to blame a boogieman than to educate themselves on affordable, healthy diets and execute on learning to shop and cook for yourself.

I am, however, interested in bringing better educational resources and time-saving instruments to consumers. Many people grow up in an environment where they don't know how to properly shop in a grocery store. For example, you give someone a $50 gift card to the supermarket and they walk out with a cart full of crap, because it's all they knew growing up.

Then once you teach someone how to shop, they may not have experience cooking for themselves. For those of us who grew up cooking with our parents and continued to do so for ourselves, it's hard to imagine how overwhelming the learning process can be. If you grew up in a lower income environment with busy parent(s), chances are you never helped out in the kitchen with your mom or dad. They probably brought home a kid's meal from McDonalds on their way back from their second job.

> I'm always amazed at how many people flat out get angry with me when I say fast food is simply not cheaper than cooking yourself, provided you have a kitchen.

I think the challenge here is looking at numbers without factoring in reality.

A common scenario in poverty is money isn't available when it's needed. If one has $4 today for food now and will have $4 more tomorrow, their choices are to forgo eating until they can save up the ingredients or buy whatever food can be had today.

You are describing idealogues and zealots and bureaucrats who want that problem to continue to exist no matter what. Because they have an agenda which involves taking control of whatever they can if they can. They would be deeply distressed if food insecurity was solved without needing their top-down control.

I've heard the same thing, and I usually respond with prices of decent, filling food at the grocery store - like potatoes, a can of beans, a bag of apples, etc. As for cooking, you can buy a used microwave at the thrift store for about what a soft taco costs at Taco Time.

> I've heard the same thing, and I usually respond with prices of decent, filling food at the grocery store - like potatoes, a can of beans, a bag of apples, etc. As for cooking, you can buy a used microwave at the thrift store for about what a soft taco costs at Taco Time.

You may want to factor in that the 20 minutes they have to acquire and prep a meal is already coming out of the 6 hours they have allocated for sleep.

Having done a decade of hunger-level poverty, I found it surprising busy.

Takes me 2 minutes to microwave a $2 can of chili. The can is worth about 2 meals. The trip to the store, once a week.

Driving to Taco Time every day takes time, gas, and costs $20 for a meal.

Ironically, I microwave meals and such not because I'm poor, but to save time. I dislike going to restaurants and even McBurger because it takes too much time.

Another meal I like takes less than a minute. Pour some oats in a bowl. Add raisins. Add milk. Ready to eat. I doubt it costs 50 cents. Or make a couple cheese sandwiches with butter and a pickle.

FYI, half-decent Chili at Safeway is now more like $3.50-5.50. The days of canned food being cheap are over, even the tiny cans of super high sodium 200%+ DV Campbell's Chicken Soup costs like $2-3.

What are the poor people supposed to live off of? Potatoes, beans, and rice 24/7?

That diet is a tough sell. Especially since people in a low socioeconomic position are frequently quite busy trying to hold life together between 2-4 jobs and a family which includes children. I can understand why someone in this position would spring for something quick, easy, flavorful, and requiring as little expenditure of mental and emotional energy as possible.

The lack of empathy demonstrated throughout this thread for less well-off folks is not surprising but still a disappointing non-deviation from the HN stereotype. Why is it so hard to imagine being in someone else's shitty position? Being poor obviously sucks, it wears people down and disrupts and interferes with making optimal long-term decisions. This is obvious and I can't say I've ever truly been in this exact situation.

These sound like things that can be done by someone who has resources when and where they need them.

They do not sound like something that can be done consistently by someone without regular transportation or pay.

> These sound like things that can be done by someone who has resources when and where they need them.

> They do not sound like something that can be done consistently by someone without regular transportation or pay.

If someone has transportation to go to a fast food restaurant, they have transportation to go to a corner store and buy a can of beans. If they have money for one, they have money for the other. It's actually usually cheaper not to eat the junk food.

Reality is that most poor people eat junk food because it's less effort, and because the high amounts of salt, fat, and sugar that make it so unhealthy are nearly addictive and act as a comfort.

> If someone has transportation to go to a fast food restaurant, they have transportation to go to a corner store and buy a can of beans.

There's a number of ways this wouldn't be true and they aren't difficult to come up with.

Beyond that, the discussion is encapsulating somewhat broader points - the resources it takes to eat consistently healthy vs eating cheaply. It wouldn't make sense to only include fast food in the poor diet options.

Your seem to be asserting this: That someone living in a healthy-food dessert and without reliable access to transportation has no excuse to not consistently eat a healthy diet.

I counter that 60 seconds of thinking it thru would produce any number of scenarios that clearly speak against that assertion.

> Reality is that most poor people eat junk food because it's less effort, and because the high amounts of salt, fat, and sugar that make it so unhealthy are nearly addictive and act as a comfort.

This is meaningfully related, though it's a bit over declared. Some with limited access to resources may be able to put a healthy meal together if they're playing their A Game. But A Games are hard to come by for folks condemned to survival mode - maybe the sort where 5 hours sleep is the norm along with caregiving multiple people while working multiple jobs.

Apples don't contribute much to a healthy diet: they're sweet, acidic enough to damage tooth enamel, and packed with fructose. You'd be much better off leaving fruit out of your diet and occasionally treating yourself to a little bit of brown rice or raw broccoli in between your meals of beans and potatoes.

Apples are a lot healthier than the same amount of fructose in isolation. they have a huge amount of fiber, which is both filling and good for your microbiome. And I'd bet on some good vitamin content though I'm not sure which off the top of my head.

Some fruits may be not much better than candy in that the sugar can metabolize quickly, but apples aren't one of those despite their fructose content.

One hundred grams of apples (with skin) consists of 86 grams of water and 10.5 grams of sugar (mostly fructose), 2.5 grams of fiber, and negligible everything else. The only vitamin present in apples in non-trivial quantity is vitamin C.

There is as much protein in broccoli as there is fiber in apples.

To get your daily suggested intake of fiber (30 grams), you'd need to eat almost three pounds of apples a day.

Assuming what you say is true, an apple provides you with about 1/27th the amount of carbs the FDA recommends in a day, and 1/12th the amount of fiber recommended in a day.

I fail to see the harm. If I did feel wild one day and decide to down a dozen apples (I'm not sure I physically even could), I'd meet my fiber RDA for that day, and still have only eaten 504 calories worth of carbs.

You may object that I'm not getting any micronutrients this way, but most sources of micronutrients are nearly irrelevant calorically, so they don't really matter when you talk about capacity planning for macronutrients and calories.

The harm is that the apple is acidic, damages tooth enamel over time, its nutrition value comes only from sugar (most of which is fructose), and it's not actually filling. Ask any fruitarian how soon after a meal of fruit they feel hungry again.

Seeing no harm in eating apples is like seeing no harm in eating candy. Sure, eating a piece of candy once is trivial -- but you're insisting on candy as a part of my diet, not as an incidental, rare snack. Eating candy only has downsides.

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