I do not think this is exactly true. People may stop eating junk outside. But having a healthy balanced diet is more expensive than buying junk and eating at home; and not only in money, but more importantly (maybe) in time. Cooking takes time and effort, which families with both working parents may struggle with. Please do not forget often those people have more exhausting and abusive jobs.
I know from first hand, how difficult can it be in that environment with limited money, time, and energy to go to the grocery store often, buy fresh things, and cook. It is much more convenient to buy things that go in the freezer, when they are in offer, and throw them into the oven when arriving home.
The problem is that people don't know how to cook. Something like pressure cookers (or crock pots where appropriate) are amazing for this sort of scenario. There are endless recipes you can find online that are toss a few ingredients in, wait, eat. Easy clean up, and delicious. I increasingly think cooking should be a part of basic education for everybody.
Stuff like rice, beans, and chicken breast are extremely cheap, and most of the way towards a balanced diet by themselves. And cookers are like magic - just toss a bunch of stuff in, some spices, and it will come out amazing. I like a bit of yogurt as my fat, but you can go way cheaper - just toss some lard in there, it'll taste great.
Costco has been 2.99/lb for chicken breast about as long as I can remember now here in Chicago. It’s only sometimes better priced than the local supermarket, but the quality is consistent and price stable.
If I have spare time on a weekend it can be picked up far cheaper in bulk from a food services supply store. 2 weeks ago when I last walked through the cooler section it was sitting at $1.29/lb in 40lb cases. Costs maybe 10 cents per food saver vacuum bag or so to freeze them in packs of 2-4 each.
A lot of folks are price takers and have forgotten how to comparison shop or buy on sale and stock up. These were skills lost over the past few generations - likely since stores thought they were competing on price far more than they actually are. Covid taught them the average consumer simply isn’t as price sensitive as the business classes teach you, and have engaged in aggressive price segmentation.
I don’t bother buying most shelf stable or freezable products these days unless it’s on a very large sale - which I’ve found tends to happen roughly quarterly for most things. Beef is the current exception, but we buy a half cow from a local farm and eat off that for a year or more.
Not everyone lives near a Costco. Not everyone is a fan of the environmental cost of their cheap chickens, or whatever. When I lived in San Francisco there was a Costco but it was more inconvenient to get to via Muni than most of the alternatives. Their parking garage is an absolute zoo.
If I have spare time on a weekend it can be picked up far cheaper in bulk
from a food services supply store.
Not everyone has the luxury of being able to store perishable items in bulk. Personally I struggle a bit to store a whole chicken in my fridge. Six and a half pounds (what you'd have to buy to get Costco's $3/lb price) is quite a lot. And if you want to cook that chicken first and then freeze it, you run a high risk of it just tasting weird.
I just checked around and for boneless, skinless chicken breasts:
Sprouts $7/lb.
Safeway $7/lb (more if you don't want the chlorine treated stuff).
Trader Joe's $7.50/lb (but they've gained a reputation for nasty, woody chicken).
Whole Foods out of stock.
Lucky's $8.50/lb.
Mollie Stone's $8.89/lb.
Berkeley Bowl $9.59/lb.
US Foods Chef Store $3.75/lb for *twelve pounds*.
At least out here there's a lot less variability than you're claiming, unless you're buying enough to fill your entire fridge/freezer.
About $5 bucks per skinless boneless chicken breast where I'm at in Canada. That's $20 in just the chicken for a meal if you happen to have a family of four.
I swear my growing boys have hollow legs. How do you eat more than I do?
Chicken well raised and fed, is usually good starting at around 30-40 EUR / kg. I supermarkets selling 1kg of chicken for 4-5 EUR / kg - I would not touch this.
The one who downvoted me obviously has a problem with high quality food.
Animals held and then sold for 4-5 EUR per kg is pure shit. Period. I would rather eat groceries instead.
Most people have no idea what high quality meet is because they buy their stuff always at large chains - remember: None of the sustainability-interested local farms sells to any of those supermarkt chains. You have to GO there to get your stuff.
Such animals you can also eat without having remorse.
The folks that this article is about are not the sort of folks who can afford €18/lb for protein. In the US, at least, cheap chicken can often be identified as it cooks up with a woody texture or suffers from a variety of visual defects. Out here I can't think of any farms selling chickens directly to consumers. More well regarded farms like Petaluma Poultry do, in fact, sell to the big chain grocery stores and that's closer to $5/lb for a whole "organic" chicken.
From a thermodynamic perspective this is somehow true; but not regarding taste, structure etc. of the meat product: There is a clear difference between superlarge chickenfarms and my local farmer with only a couple of hundreds?
Also, depending on how the animals are fed, you have different substances in the final product, like Antibiotics.
So feel free to optimize only for the "thermodynamic calorie perspective" ;-)
This [1] is amazing, and also prep freezes extremely well. There are so many great recipes online, just search - it's also referred to as an instant pot in many places.
I'm afraid home cooking is the first victim of "big tech" strip mining our attention. When you are hooked it's too difficult to plainly keep concentrated on the cooking/cleaning process and on procuring of individual ingredients. No matter how easy it is, still needs capability to deal with messy physical stuff. And it's too easy to get demotivated by mediocre result.
An harbinger of things to come, widespread crippling executive dysfunction.
Not knowing how to cook isn't the main problem. Really poor people don't have time to cook and don't have any disposable income to buy a luxury like a pressure cooker, so this is fantasy. Really poor people are on SNAP (which doesn't cover a lot of fast food) and food banks (which provide random/useless stuff like unhealthy ultra processed food, dented canned food like canned corn and tomatoes, and random produce that requires a lot of time to use).
I think this really mischaracterizes the modern poor, especially in developed countries. It's not uncommon to see poor families with things like recent model phones worth hundreds of dollars, designer clothing/shoes, and the like. In many ways these are the sort of traps that keep people in poverty. Or referencing this article itself, apparently they decided to go eat at McDonalds and managed to spend $20 on two coffees and one coke. I mean that'd break the budget of just about anybody outside of well into the upper edge of middle class.
And a pressure cooker is not a luxury, nor is it something that's outside anybody's price range. On Amazon it looks like they start around $20. And the whole point is that it takes basically 0 time, and saves a ton of money, and even time, relative to things like eating outside the house.
A good microwave oven is extremely cheap, about the same as the food for a few weeks.
I eat only food cooked by myself from raw ingredients, in a microwave oven. Previously I was cooking with traditional methods, but some years ago I have eventually discovered that I was misusing a microwave oven only for reheating, when it can be much better be used for cooking.
In most of the cases, I cook everything that I eat immediately before eating it, which rarely needs more than 20 minutes for cleaning/peeling/paring/slicing vegetables, cooking in the oven and washing dishes.
This is short enough. If I would go out to eat somewhere, I would loose much more time than that. The only thing that I do not cook immediately before eating is meat, as depending of its kind it may need up to 30 minutes of cooking in the oven, so I cook all the meat for a week during the weekend and I just reheat it and combine it with the garnish in the other days. When you cook for a large family, you can cook all the food for a week, for a few hours during a weekend day, and you can reheat the food in less than 5 minutes in all the other days.
You can even bake bread very quickly and with excellent results in a microwave oven. When I want bread, I bake it immediately before the meal. Cooking at home and using only raw ingredients results in a cost for food that is frequently even 10 times less than a similar dish would cost from a supermarket, while being more healthy due to the use of high quality ingredients without any dubious additives. Even for bread, home-made bread is about half of the price of supermarket bread. Eating in a restaurant is of course much more expensive than buying processed food from a supermarket, so the difference in cost is even higher.
Therefore I agree that most poor people spend too much on food that is also unhealthy, and that is because they do not know how to choose wisely what they eat and how to cook that quickly and inexpensively. I believe that these are essential survival skills that should be taught to everyone in elementary school, but, even if I had a much better education than most, that did not help me, so I have learned most of them only when old and after a lot of failed experiments.
You can use a traditional recipe, e.g. wheat flour + 75% water by mass + salt + either yeast or baking powder (e.g. for 500 grams of flour either 7 grams of instant dry yeast or 10 grams of baking powder), then you knead the dough for a few minutes (until the dough becomes homogeneous, elastic and sticky; after you do it a few times it becomes very easy to recognize the moment when you have kneaded enough) and when using yeast you leave it for an hour to grow.
Then you bake for a time depending on the oven and on the amount of bread. I normally make breads from 500 grams of flour, which need about 13 minutes @ 1000 W. The advantage of a microwave oven, besides the short time, is that after you have determined the right time through experiments it will be always correct.
For baking you must use a glass vessel with lid, to prevent the bread from being too dry. The vessel must be much bigger than the dough, at least twice bigger, because the bread will grow tremendously and it will be very fluffy.
The alternative to traditional bread is to make unleavened bread, which can be made even faster and I actually like its taste more.
Even with a traditional recipe, unleavened bread will grow a lot at microwaves, due to the expansion of embedded air and water. It can be made to grow more, almost like traditional leavened bread baked in a traditional oven, by increasing the amount of water in the dough. Instead of using 75% water as in traditional bread, you can increase the amount of water to around 120% by weight. With so much water, there is the additional advantage that the dough becomes very thin, so there is no need to knead it, you just have to mix it very thoroughly for a few minutes with a spoon or with an electric mixer.
Such an unleavened dough with excess water can then be baked in a glass vessel without lid, also for 10 to 15 minutes. With unleavened bread, you can have delicious bread in less than 20 minutes from start to finish.
For improved taste, you can add to the dough various spices or seeds, either whole or ground. You can also add a sweet filling when you desire it.
Microwave-baked bread normally does not have the burned crust, but if you desire it many ovens have an infrared lamp that can be used for this purpose.
Unleavened bread is trivial to make in this way. You weigh the water and the floor in the baking vessel, you mix them, then you bake.
Leavened bread is slightly more tricky, because you need to know how to knead.
For kneading dough made from 500 grams of wheat flour (high-protein flour, which is usually sold as "bread flour"), I use a big glass bowl and I knead with a single hand, while keeping the bowl in the other hand. This is much less messy than when kneading in the way used for big amounts of dough.
At the beginning, kneading consists mostly of opening and closing the hand through the dough, while at the end it consists mostly in pulling the dough upwards, which becomes very elongated while one end of it sticks to the kneading bowl, then pressing again the dough into the bowl.
At the end of kneading, the dough becomes extremely sticky, so I keep ready a so-called "pie server" that I use to remove the dough from the hand that has been used for kneading, and for aiding in the transfer of dough from the kneading bowl to the baking vessel. The same pie server is also useful after baking, to detach the hot bread from the baking vessel.
Are you interpreting "poor" as "unemployed"? The OP was talking about people who are employed full time but at a low level job (at a shop, or as a janitor or something like that).
The idea you can't eat a healthy and cheap diet is just absurd.
This is exactly how I eat. Lean chicken breast is some of the cheapest protein.
Eggs have come back down to be a good deal.
Oatmeal, sweet potatoes and rice are cheap. Olive oil is cheap.
Walmart has frozen kale in a bag for $1.50.
People don't eat healthy because they don't want to eat healthy. It doesn't taste as good and is not as much fun.
My weekly grocery bill is not that much more than cost of eating one meal from door dash.
In term of taste, of course it sucks compared to door dash. For me, that is a feature and not a bug or else I would over eat and it wouldn't be a healthy diet.
Cheap isn’t just money to buy ingredients, but also the time to prepare them. If you are working two 8 hour shifts a day, your time and energy for cooking a real dinner might be limited.
Can't really say about the UK but the cheapest options here are in order 1) frozen chicken leg quarters and 2) an entire chicken (fresh, not frozen) which you have to break down yourself. Both options are around 3-3.5€/kg
> But having a healthy balanced diet is more expensive than buying junk
In which country? Not in Central Europe, and it was never the case. Healthy food here has always been cheaper than junk food. I come from a poor family and a visit to McDonalds was always a special occasion, yet my mom cooked every single day and they were all healthy and balanced.
More expensive? Absolutely not. Never has been and is unlikely to ever be true.
More difficult? Time consuming? Requires practice? Yes. Usually overblown though on all fronts, considering the types of families that seem to find ways to make cheap meals compared to those that do not in my experience.
Fast food (and prepared/junk foods) are low friction and convenient. Cheap is not a metric they compete within.
Cooking your own food can generally be more expensive then anything mass produced because efficiency is usually better in centralized setups, but this depends on the meal. Including the time it takes, you will never beat eg. a bakery for more cost efficient bread.
Hmm.. I see your point. Grocery stores do have a lot more unhealthy foods than fast food I suppose. Lots of snacks and drinks. Even sugary breads, canned food,etc.. But because you're not eating out, it feels healthier.
I know from first hand, how difficult can it be in that environment with limited money, time, and energy to go to the grocery store often, buy fresh things, and cook. It is much more convenient to buy things that go in the freezer, when they are in offer, and throw them into the oven when arriving home.