11 ms·

Our study in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (here, here, and here) shows that the majority of the Victorian urban poor consumed diets which were l

Our study in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (here, here, and here) shows that the majority of the Victorian urban poor consumed diets which were limited, but contained extremely high nutrient density. Bread could be expensive but onions, watercress, cabbage, and fruit like apples and cherries were all cheap and did not need to be carefully budgeted for. Show me a grocery store where fresh watercress and cherries are cheaper than some artificial crap loaded with added sugar, sodium, and preservatives, and people will start to eat healthier.

ghaff 11y ago
Watercress and cherries are relatively expensive but I think you'll find that onions, cabbage, and apples are all priced quite competitively with a lot of processed food.
- wdewind 11y ago
  By volume or mass yes, by calorie absolutely not. Edit: I totally misunderstood the comment I was replying to and agree with it.
  - johnchristopher 11y ago
    But that should even things out, right ?
- hueving 11y ago
  A single apple runs in the $0.30-$0.50 range where I'm at. It has 52 calories and 0.3 grams of protein. A mcdouble is $1 and it contains 390 calories and 22 grams of protein. Eating fresh fruit is cheap, but it's still not as cost effective as some fast food, let alone processed food in the grocery store.
  - ghaff 11y ago
    According to this study http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/healthy-vs-unhealthy-diet-costs-1-50-more/ http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/healthy-vs-u... healthier diet patterns--fresh meat, vegetables, etc.--cost about $1.50 more per day. So, yes, there is some difference and meal prep etc. certainly takes longer. However, the processed food is so much cheaper argument can also be overstated.
    - wdewind 11y ago
      It's not only meal prep (which I think you are understating the cost of), it's also having access to a kitchen and cooking supplies (knives, pans, bowls etc.) that allow you to easily cook, which is not cheap.
      - ghaff 11y ago
        I actually agree that there are a lot of understandable reasons that people (perhaps especially Americans) eat crappy food rather than cooking something more nutritious--time, knowledge, living environment. I'm just arguing that, while the relative cost plays some role, it's not the overriding factor that it's sometimes made out to be.
        hueving 11y ago
        See jandrese's response to your comment. It's not a trivial $6/day is not a trivial cost for even lower middle class people.
        federico3 11y ago
        On the contrary: http://www.ibtimes.com/us-spends-less-food-any-other-country-world-maps-1546945 http://www.ibtimes.com/us-spends-less-food-any-other-country...
      - deegles 11y ago
        Don't forget, you also need to have some cooking skills, access to recipes, and time. Lots of time (relative to fast food.)
  - mywittyname 11y ago
    Supplement the fresh produce with lentils, beans, and other nutritionally dense items that store well and you'll be far more competitive. Beans are insanely cheap, $0.44 for a 200g serving with 650 calories and 39g of protein. So $0.25 matches the calories/protein of a MD and leaves you $0.75 for fresh produce.
    - mirimir 11y ago
      I can live very cheaply on frozen mixed veggies, black beans and rice. Occasionally with some meat. Sometimes I use Mexican-style spicing. Sometimes Indian-style. Sometimes Chinese-style. I make huge batches, and freeze single servings. Plus spinach etc, and fruit and chocolate for desert.
      - tedks 11y ago
        Why not just soylent, at that point? Eating tasteless frozen vegetables and starchy beans and rice, again and again day after day, sounds like hell to me. Eating is so effortful compared to soylent -- it's revolting to me how much chewing I would have to do to eat something like that. You can just buy flavorings for soylent, or blend in some fruit, and it'll have a pleasant taste, and you won't spend time on it. Seems so much better than frozen anything.
        geoka9 11y ago
        > it's revolting to me how much chewing I would have to do I have heard that argument several times when Soylent is mentioned. Don't dentists ever bring up the importance of chewing for gum and teeth health? I thought it's common knowledge.
        tedks 11y ago
        Why do you think chewing is healthy at all? It allows organic matter to get into your teeth and physically wears them down. This is a hard question to google, because you get chewing tobacco and gum chewing results, but can you provide any evidence that chewing on its own is somehow healthy? What mechanism do you think it hits?
  - mmanfrin 11y ago
    I've seen large gallon+ sized bags of fiji apples at Safeway for $1.99 (containing maybe 15 apples). At my local grocer, I've seen 'bruised' bags that contain about 10 apples for 99c (with only one or two actually really bruised). The problem is that people assume that good food has to look good, and that fear of bruised/uncharismatic food is what drives prices of healthy base-ingredient foods up.
    - eridius 11y ago
      On a related note, tomatoes are a tragic victim of appearances. The "nice" looking tomatoes you can get in any grocery store here are really quite awful. They sacrificed taste and texture at the altar of appearances. In contrast, if you buy heirloom tomatoes, they look pretty bad, but they taste amazing.
  - atwebb 11y ago
    Well if it's pure calories/macros, take the 40 cent apple, add some 30 cent protein powder and then 10-20 cents of oats and you've got similar calories and better macros for the same or cheaper if you go for a banana or find some deals on apples. Throw in half a bag of frozen veggies and you're a lot better off for a quarter more than the McDouble. Easy and fast? No, there's opportunity cost there of course but that's just an example off the top of my head. Heck and apple and a can of tuna would come close in price.
  - joshvm 11y ago
    You could eat three eggs ~150g for ~20g protein, ~200 cals and it would cost you about a dollar if you buy by the dozen. Going by UK prices, we pay <£3 for a dozen large eggs so 75 pence for 3. If you fried them up as an omelette, you get a healthy breakfast with very few carbs. Chuck in a tablespoon of olive oil (again, we assume bought by the litre) and you've got another 100 calories. Fruit is expensive because, per your locale, it's almost always out of season. Supermarket apples in particular are massively marked up; we pay £2 a bag here. Any orchard will sell you apples (seasonally) for much much less.
    - justinator 11y ago
      Wow, £3 is a lot for eggs. Over here, they used to be around $2/dozen (~£1.30), and then this happened, http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/04/21/401319019/5-million-chickens-to-be-killed-as-bird-flu-outbreak-puzzles-industry http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/04/21/401319019/5-m... http://nypost.com/2015/06/07/eggs-prices-on-the-rise-due-to-avian-flu-outbreak/ http://nypost.com/2015/06/07/eggs-prices-on-the-rise-due-to-... All of a sudden, buying eggs isn't the cheapest way to eat animal protein https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/23/eggs-are-no-longer-the-cheapest-source-of-protein/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/23/eggs-...
      - joshvm 11y ago
        True, that's probably on the high side, I had a look on mySupermarket and it's around £2.00-2.50 depending whether you want factory/free range. Since all the supermarkets price match these days, they've settled on £2.25. Oraganic will set you back over £3.50. It seem the eggs I buy now from Morrisons are "Very Large" which have a slight premium for the size. If you shop at Waitrose then you're looking at £3-4.50. When I can, I buy from farms which sell by the roadside and you can normally get a half-dozen for £1.30 or so.
  - Alex3917 11y ago
    > A single apple runs in the $0.30-$0.50 range where I'm at. They're also free for a quarter of the year if god forbid you turn off the TV and walk outside. Same with cherries for that matter.
    - TTPrograms 11y ago
      Somebody buy this guy a ticket to Detroit or something, jeese.
      - Alex3917 11y ago
        And yet Detroit has pretty much the perfect weather for growing apples. I'd imagine there have to be old trees all throughout the city from back when there was money, given that they can easily produce fruit for 100+ years and can go decades with little to no maintenance.
        fractallyte 11y ago
        Absolutely right (to whoever downvoted you) - go explore! I've trekked with my bicycle to forgotten orchards and overgrown corners of parks and riverbanks, and found plenty. Even roadsides are laden with wild produce. Some less-trafficked verges are quite OK for foraging.
    - fractallyte 11y ago
      I've found, in my temperate industrialized urban area, an astonishing amount of 'wild' food, all free for the taking: apple, pear, cherry, plum, berries, rose hips, hazelnut, walnut... One fall I picked so many kilograms of apples that I still had a few wrinkled (but edible) left-overs by the following spring - all stored carefully, unrefrigerated, in a cellar. Other fruits are preserved as jellies, or in jars, or simply frozen. It angered me last year to see a fully laden plum tree in a parking lot, with plums squished on the ground, and a row of terraced houses nearby, with kids playing outside... Their stupid parents had ignored the bounty literally on their doorstep.
- codexjourneys 11y ago
  Watercress is about $2.49 to $2.99 for a bag with four servings in it. That's not prohibitive. A real problem is it's hard to find watercress, and anecdotally I see it more in upscale stores than in regular supermarkets in poor areas.
keithpeter 11y ago
I'm guessing that the produce referred to was cheap when in season and possibly unobtainable out of season unless preserved. Apples Sept/Oct, cabbage pretty long season.
- carlob 11y ago
  Apples will keep for almosta year in a proper cellar
  - keithpeter 11y ago
    Yes, I was thinking that too but the Victorian poorer people ('respectable working class') would not have had much spare space over their living needs (c.f. endless official reports on over crowding and various 'model' residential developments like Port Sunlight and Bournville). So unless the grocer had a cellar or a wholesaler somewhere... ...sounds like a research project over the holiday.
    - carlob 11y ago
      Yeah, but I'm pretty sure the grocer or the producer would have cellars both for apples and roots. All sorts of things like onions don't actually grow all year round, but need to be conserved away from heat and light. The same goes for wine, beer, fruit preserves, pickled vegetables…
  - hahamrfunnyguy 11y ago
    And root vegetables and cabbages will keep for several months or more. Plenty long enough to last the duration of a UK winter.
pjc50 11y ago
It's more about emotional satisfaction of the "unhealthy" stuff. Orwell on this subject, 1937 ( https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/o79r/chapter6.html https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/o79r/chapter6... ) > The basis of their diet, therefore, is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea, and potatoes — an appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- sjclemmy 11y ago
  Orwell was so insightful. It's rubbish being poor. And it's not a choice, or a result of bad morals.
  - RogtamBar 11y ago
    Nothing in life is a choice. Free will is a social construct, or more precisely a moral one. Poor people exist because of bad luck, whether in managing their money or the genetic lottery. I'm all for abolishing both of these things. A society of genetically related clones would work great. A nation as a family. You'd meet a stranger and you'd know what they're like, even though you wouldn't know exactly who they are.
    - Natsu 11y ago
      Having worked with many, I have to believe it's more a mix of things. There were certainly cases of hard luck, but it's also not hard to see that spending your paycheck on beer every week when you have no money is never going to improve things. In reality, it's more a mix of things, some bad luck and some bad choices. Now it's true that some people can absorb a whole lot more bad luck than others because of their family, but I remember one guy in particular who was rather determined to send his life into a ditch in spite of having parents who were willing and able to do a lot of things to help him. He managed to do things like going to prison for beating his girlfriend and robbing her sister and endangering (and injuring) himself on the job. So it's not all black & white like you're making it out to be. EDIT: I do feel I should put in a counter-point, in that I also knew a guy who made about one bad choice and the rest was hard luck, so there's that too. Most people were more a mix and for whatever it's worth, I tried to help where I could. The guy who loved to drink had his cruddy old bike stolen one Christmas, so I gave him a brand new one. That was pretty important to him, as it was how he got to work. I put a headlight on it too, as he had to ride a lot at night.
mmanfrin 11y ago
My local grocery store (Berkeley Bowl) is very expensive, on par with Whole Foods -- however their produce department is shockingly cheap. They even have bags of bruised food that go for 99c and contain a gallon-sized bag of random fruits or veggies -- and this is at the super expensive local grocer. Cheap, good food is easy to find. The problem isn't in the pricing of watercress and cherries, it's that people don't see those as complete meals and don't want to go through the effort to cook for themselves. Eating poorly isn't done because it's cheaper, it's done because it's easier.
- danharaj 11y ago
  > Eating poorly isn't done because it's cheaper, it's done because it's easier. In other words, it is more expensive in a different way.
- ksenzee 11y ago
  Easier _is_ cheaper. Don't discount the value of the labor required to prepare all that produce and bring it to the table.
  - wwweston 11y ago
    Not just labor -- expertise. Also, do you have access to fully furnished kitchen? Living out of a car or in a marginal housing situation where a kitchen isn't available (or you've got a microwave/hotplate and fridge) changes some of the cooking. These considerations aren't conclusive, and I'm sure there are people who find a way to overcome them, and possibly we could use resources that help others to do so. But on HN of all places people should understand the power of marginal gains. And marginal obstacles.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- dougmany 11y ago
  I used to live on Channing and loved going to Berkley bowl. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert Within cities, there are more than three times as many supermarkets in wealthier neighborhoods compared with poorer areas.
contingencies 11y ago
Show me a grocery store where fresh watercress and cherries are cheaper than some artificial crap loaded with added sugar, sodium, and preservatives, and people will start to eat healthier. Here in urban China people still shop at fresh food markets, where there is only fresh food. Typical prices might be... Tomatoes 4-8元 (yuan=CNY=<USD$2) per 斤 (jin=500g=1/2kg). Spinach 4元 (<USD$1) per large bunch Bananas 10元 (<USD$2) per large bunch (like 15-20 bananas) Onion 1-2元 (<USD$0.50) per large purple onion (brown is rarely found) Artificial crap can be had elsewhere for cheap, but it's not available in the markets, which also provide fresh soy milk, tofu, rice and wheat noodles, nuts, fish, etc.
- carlob 11y ago
  That seems motre expensive than Italy! Here 1lg of tomatoes ranges from less than 1 euro/kg in the summer in the south to 3 out of season.
  - contingencies 11y ago
    Yes, it probably is. China is not cheap anymore. Beers in the bar I was at last night were 45元/pint (that's about 6.6EUR or 7USD). Travel in Europe feels positively affordable compared to major Chinese cities. That said, many Italians love it here because they can actually find a job and make money. I know Italian film directors, restauranteurs, import-export people, and English teachers. They all tell me it's virtually impossible to find a job in Italy, let alone live in your own large modern apartment or save for a house.

ghaff 11y ago

Watercress and cherries are relatively expensive but I think you'll find that onions, cabbage, and apples are all priced quite competitively with a lot of processed food.

wdewind 11y ago
By volume or mass yes, by calorie absolutely not. Edit: I totally misunderstood the comment I was replying to and agree with it.
- johnchristopher 11y ago
  But that should even things out, right ?
hueving 11y ago
A single apple runs in the $0.30-$0.50 range where I'm at. It has 52 calories and 0.3 grams of protein. A mcdouble is $1 and it contains 390 calories and 22 grams of protein. Eating fresh fruit is cheap, but it's still not as cost effective as some fast food, let alone processed food in the grocery store.
- ghaff 11y ago
  According to this study http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/healthy-vs-unhealthy-diet-costs-1-50-more/ http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/healthy-vs-u... healthier diet patterns--fresh meat, vegetables, etc.--cost about $1.50 more per day. So, yes, there is some difference and meal prep etc. certainly takes longer. However, the processed food is so much cheaper argument can also be overstated.
  - wdewind 11y ago
    It's not only meal prep (which I think you are understating the cost of), it's also having access to a kitchen and cooking supplies (knives, pans, bowls etc.) that allow you to easily cook, which is not cheap.
    - ghaff 11y ago
      I actually agree that there are a lot of understandable reasons that people (perhaps especially Americans) eat crappy food rather than cooking something more nutritious--time, knowledge, living environment. I'm just arguing that, while the relative cost plays some role, it's not the overriding factor that it's sometimes made out to be.
      - hueving 11y ago
        See jandrese's response to your comment. It's not a trivial $6/day is not a trivial cost for even lower middle class people.
        federico3 11y ago
        On the contrary: http://www.ibtimes.com/us-spends-less-food-any-other-country-world-maps-1546945 http://www.ibtimes.com/us-spends-less-food-any-other-country...
    - deegles 11y ago
      Don't forget, you also need to have some cooking skills, access to recipes, and time. Lots of time (relative to fast food.)
- mywittyname 11y ago
  Supplement the fresh produce with lentils, beans, and other nutritionally dense items that store well and you'll be far more competitive. Beans are insanely cheap, $0.44 for a 200g serving with 650 calories and 39g of protein. So $0.25 matches the calories/protein of a MD and leaves you $0.75 for fresh produce.
  - mirimir 11y ago
    I can live very cheaply on frozen mixed veggies, black beans and rice. Occasionally with some meat. Sometimes I use Mexican-style spicing. Sometimes Indian-style. Sometimes Chinese-style. I make huge batches, and freeze single servings. Plus spinach etc, and fruit and chocolate for desert.
    - tedks 11y ago
      Why not just soylent, at that point? Eating tasteless frozen vegetables and starchy beans and rice, again and again day after day, sounds like hell to me. Eating is so effortful compared to soylent -- it's revolting to me how much chewing I would have to do to eat something like that. You can just buy flavorings for soylent, or blend in some fruit, and it'll have a pleasant taste, and you won't spend time on it. Seems so much better than frozen anything.
      - geoka9 11y ago
        > it's revolting to me how much chewing I would have to do I have heard that argument several times when Soylent is mentioned. Don't dentists ever bring up the importance of chewing for gum and teeth health? I thought it's common knowledge.
        tedks 11y ago
        Why do you think chewing is healthy at all? It allows organic matter to get into your teeth and physically wears them down. This is a hard question to google, because you get chewing tobacco and gum chewing results, but can you provide any evidence that chewing on its own is somehow healthy? What mechanism do you think it hits?
- mmanfrin 11y ago
  I've seen large gallon+ sized bags of fiji apples at Safeway for $1.99 (containing maybe 15 apples). At my local grocer, I've seen 'bruised' bags that contain about 10 apples for 99c (with only one or two actually really bruised). The problem is that people assume that good food has to look good, and that fear of bruised/uncharismatic food is what drives prices of healthy base-ingredient foods up.
  - eridius 11y ago
    On a related note, tomatoes are a tragic victim of appearances. The "nice" looking tomatoes you can get in any grocery store here are really quite awful. They sacrificed taste and texture at the altar of appearances. In contrast, if you buy heirloom tomatoes, they look pretty bad, but they taste amazing.
- atwebb 11y ago
  Well if it's pure calories/macros, take the 40 cent apple, add some 30 cent protein powder and then 10-20 cents of oats and you've got similar calories and better macros for the same or cheaper if you go for a banana or find some deals on apples. Throw in half a bag of frozen veggies and you're a lot better off for a quarter more than the McDouble. Easy and fast? No, there's opportunity cost there of course but that's just an example off the top of my head. Heck and apple and a can of tuna would come close in price.
- joshvm 11y ago
  You could eat three eggs ~150g for ~20g protein, ~200 cals and it would cost you about a dollar if you buy by the dozen. Going by UK prices, we pay <£3 for a dozen large eggs so 75 pence for 3. If you fried them up as an omelette, you get a healthy breakfast with very few carbs. Chuck in a tablespoon of olive oil (again, we assume bought by the litre) and you've got another 100 calories. Fruit is expensive because, per your locale, it's almost always out of season. Supermarket apples in particular are massively marked up; we pay £2 a bag here. Any orchard will sell you apples (seasonally) for much much less.
  - justinator 11y ago
    Wow, £3 is a lot for eggs. Over here, they used to be around $2/dozen (~£1.30), and then this happened, http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/04/21/401319019/5-million-chickens-to-be-killed-as-bird-flu-outbreak-puzzles-industry http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/04/21/401319019/5-m... http://nypost.com/2015/06/07/eggs-prices-on-the-rise-due-to-avian-flu-outbreak/ http://nypost.com/2015/06/07/eggs-prices-on-the-rise-due-to-... All of a sudden, buying eggs isn't the cheapest way to eat animal protein https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/23/eggs-are-no-longer-the-cheapest-source-of-protein/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/23/eggs-...
    - joshvm 11y ago
      True, that's probably on the high side, I had a look on mySupermarket and it's around £2.00-2.50 depending whether you want factory/free range. Since all the supermarkets price match these days, they've settled on £2.25. Oraganic will set you back over £3.50. It seem the eggs I buy now from Morrisons are "Very Large" which have a slight premium for the size. If you shop at Waitrose then you're looking at £3-4.50. When I can, I buy from farms which sell by the roadside and you can normally get a half-dozen for £1.30 or so.
- Alex3917 11y ago
  > A single apple runs in the $0.30-$0.50 range where I'm at. They're also free for a quarter of the year if god forbid you turn off the TV and walk outside. Same with cherries for that matter.
  - TTPrograms 11y ago
    Somebody buy this guy a ticket to Detroit or something, jeese.
    - Alex3917 11y ago
      And yet Detroit has pretty much the perfect weather for growing apples. I'd imagine there have to be old trees all throughout the city from back when there was money, given that they can easily produce fruit for 100+ years and can go decades with little to no maintenance.
      - fractallyte 11y ago
        Absolutely right (to whoever downvoted you) - go explore! I've trekked with my bicycle to forgotten orchards and overgrown corners of parks and riverbanks, and found plenty. Even roadsides are laden with wild produce. Some less-trafficked verges are quite OK for foraging.
  - fractallyte 11y ago
    I've found, in my temperate industrialized urban area, an astonishing amount of 'wild' food, all free for the taking: apple, pear, cherry, plum, berries, rose hips, hazelnut, walnut... One fall I picked so many kilograms of apples that I still had a few wrinkled (but edible) left-overs by the following spring - all stored carefully, unrefrigerated, in a cellar. Other fruits are preserved as jellies, or in jars, or simply frozen. It angered me last year to see a fully laden plum tree in a parking lot, with plums squished on the ground, and a row of terraced houses nearby, with kids playing outside... Their stupid parents had ignored the bounty literally on their doorstep.
codexjourneys 11y ago
Watercress is about $2.49 to $2.99 for a bag with four servings in it. That's not prohibitive. A real problem is it's hard to find watercress, and anecdotally I see it more in upscale stores than in regular supermarkets in poor areas.

keithpeter 11y ago

I'm guessing that the produce referred to was cheap when in season and possibly unobtainable out of season unless preserved. Apples Sept/Oct, cabbage pretty long season.

carlob 11y ago
Apples will keep for almosta year in a proper cellar
- keithpeter 11y ago
  Yes, I was thinking that too but the Victorian poorer people ('respectable working class') would not have had much spare space over their living needs (c.f. endless official reports on over crowding and various 'model' residential developments like Port Sunlight and Bournville). So unless the grocer had a cellar or a wholesaler somewhere... ...sounds like a research project over the holiday.
  - carlob 11y ago
    Yeah, but I'm pretty sure the grocer or the producer would have cellars both for apples and roots. All sorts of things like onions don't actually grow all year round, but need to be conserved away from heat and light. The same goes for wine, beer, fruit preserves, pickled vegetables…
- hahamrfunnyguy 11y ago
  And root vegetables and cabbages will keep for several months or more. Plenty long enough to last the duration of a UK winter.

pjc50 11y ago

It's more about emotional satisfaction of the "unhealthy" stuff. Orwell on this subject, 1937 ( https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/o79r/chapter6.html https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/o79r/chapter6... ) > The basis of their diet, therefore, is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea, and potatoes — an appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
sjclemmy 11y ago
Orwell was so insightful. It's rubbish being poor. And it's not a choice, or a result of bad morals.
- RogtamBar 11y ago
  Nothing in life is a choice. Free will is a social construct, or more precisely a moral one. Poor people exist because of bad luck, whether in managing their money or the genetic lottery. I'm all for abolishing both of these things. A society of genetically related clones would work great. A nation as a family. You'd meet a stranger and you'd know what they're like, even though you wouldn't know exactly who they are.
  - Natsu 11y ago
    Having worked with many, I have to believe it's more a mix of things. There were certainly cases of hard luck, but it's also not hard to see that spending your paycheck on beer every week when you have no money is never going to improve things. In reality, it's more a mix of things, some bad luck and some bad choices. Now it's true that some people can absorb a whole lot more bad luck than others because of their family, but I remember one guy in particular who was rather determined to send his life into a ditch in spite of having parents who were willing and able to do a lot of things to help him. He managed to do things like going to prison for beating his girlfriend and robbing her sister and endangering (and injuring) himself on the job. So it's not all black & white like you're making it out to be. EDIT: I do feel I should put in a counter-point, in that I also knew a guy who made about one bad choice and the rest was hard luck, so there's that too. Most people were more a mix and for whatever it's worth, I tried to help where I could. The guy who loved to drink had his cruddy old bike stolen one Christmas, so I gave him a brand new one. That was pretty important to him, as it was how he got to work. I put a headlight on it too, as he had to ride a lot at night.

mmanfrin 11y ago

My local grocery store (Berkeley Bowl) is very expensive, on par with Whole Foods -- however their produce department is shockingly cheap. They even have bags of bruised food that go for 99c and contain a gallon-sized bag of random fruits or veggies -- and this is at the super expensive local grocer. Cheap, good food is easy to find. The problem isn't in the pricing of watercress and cherries, it's that people don't see those as complete meals and don't want to go through the effort to cook for themselves. Eating poorly isn't done because it's cheaper, it's done because it's easier.

danharaj 11y ago
> Eating poorly isn't done because it's cheaper, it's done because it's easier. In other words, it is more expensive in a different way.
ksenzee 11y ago
Easier _is_ cheaper. Don't discount the value of the labor required to prepare all that produce and bring it to the table.
- wwweston 11y ago
  Not just labor -- expertise. Also, do you have access to fully furnished kitchen? Living out of a car or in a marginal housing situation where a kitchen isn't available (or you've got a microwave/hotplate and fridge) changes some of the cooking. These considerations aren't conclusive, and I'm sure there are people who find a way to overcome them, and possibly we could use resources that help others to do so. But on HN of all places people should understand the power of marginal gains. And marginal obstacles.
deleted 11y ago
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dougmany 11y ago
I used to live on Channing and loved going to Berkley bowl. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert Within cities, there are more than three times as many supermarkets in wealthier neighborhoods compared with poorer areas.

contingencies 11y ago

Show me a grocery store where fresh watercress and cherries are cheaper than some artificial crap loaded with added sugar, sodium, and preservatives, and people will start to eat healthier. Here in urban China people still shop at fresh food markets, where there is only fresh food. Typical prices might be... Tomatoes 4-8元 (yuan=CNY=<USD$2) per 斤 (jin=500g=1/2kg). Spinach 4元 (<USD$1) per large bunch Bananas 10元 (<USD$2) per large bunch (like 15-20 bananas) Onion 1-2元 (<USD$0.50) per large purple onion (brown is rarely found) Artificial crap can be had elsewhere for cheap, but it's not available in the markets, which also provide fresh soy milk, tofu, rice and wheat noodles, nuts, fish, etc.

carlob 11y ago
That seems motre expensive than Italy! Here 1lg of tomatoes ranges from less than 1 euro/kg in the summer in the south to 3 out of season.
- contingencies 11y ago
  Yes, it probably is. China is not cheap anymore. Beers in the bar I was at last night were 45元/pint (that's about 6.6EUR or 7USD). Travel in Europe feels positively affordable compared to major Chinese cities. That said, many Italians love it here because they can actually find a job and make money. I know Italian film directors, restauranteurs, import-export people, and English teachers. They all tell me it's virtually impossible to find a job in Italy, let alone live in your own large modern apartment or save for a house.