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An eight pound bag of pinto beans costs $6.88 at my local Walmart and contains over 12,000 calories - that's six days of the 2k calorie diet! Lots of healthy gr

An eight pound bag of pinto beans costs $6.88 at my local Walmart and contains over 12,000 calories - that's six days of the 2k calorie diet! Lots of healthy grains like buckwheat and brown rice are available at similar price per calorie and they all require little effort beyond setting a timer for the unattended boiling. Add a couple cents for spices from the value store and a dollar or two for frozen veggies and you've got a meal going for the family! I challenge you to find any junk food that comes even close to that kind of caloric density per dollar. The cheapest junk food has a tenth of the calories per dollar than a bag of rice from Costco (4-5k calories per dollar), at best. The problem is that the cheap stuff takes a little effort to make tasty compared to the hyper-palatable junk food. The whole "junk food is cheaper than whole foods per calorie" is nonsense.

dghlsakjg 4y ago
Yes, There are exceptions, although, it's worth pointing out that a pinto bean is processed minimally in terms of drying. Like I said, if all you want is calories you can make bread with a 5lb bag of floor and some salt at less than half the cost per calorie of pinto beans. The point is, if money is tight, which invariably means that time is tight, people don't have time to cook dried pinto beans, or make bread for EVERY meal where the prep time is roughly 12 hours. Add into that, even knowing how to cook is a skill. An all bread and pinto diet is likely to take more time than most people have, and not yield a great health outcome anyway. If you look at it as categories, the junk food, and processed food aisles are where you are going to on average get your dollar to go furthest. The whole point of the "myth" is that it is FAR more efficient and cheaper to get everyone enough calories with food from the junk aisle. The origins I believe come from a cooking show where the budget and time were limited. Professional chefs gave up. Here's the challenge: you need to serve a meal to 4 people (2,500 caloriesp) you have $10 and 1 hour including shopping and cooking. I can think of half a dozen meals that come from processed foods where that is possible, but doing that with fresh foods is HARD. If you want to go the pure science route, here's a peer review study from the NIH showing that in many places on earth, healthy food is provably more expensive https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6825829/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6825829/

dghlsakjg 4y ago

Yes, There are exceptions, although, it's worth pointing out that a pinto bean is processed minimally in terms of drying. Like I said, if all you want is calories you can make bread with a 5lb bag of floor and some salt at less than half the cost per calorie of pinto beans. The point is, if money is tight, which invariably means that time is tight, people don't have time to cook dried pinto beans, or make bread for EVERY meal where the prep time is roughly 12 hours. Add into that, even knowing how to cook is a skill. An all bread and pinto diet is likely to take more time than most people have, and not yield a great health outcome anyway. If you look at it as categories, the junk food, and processed food aisles are where you are going to on average get your dollar to go furthest. The whole point of the "myth" is that it is FAR more efficient and cheaper to get everyone enough calories with food from the junk aisle. The origins I believe come from a cooking show where the budget and time were limited. Professional chefs gave up. Here's the challenge: you need to serve a meal to 4 people (2,500 caloriesp) you have $10 and 1 hour including shopping and cooking. I can think of half a dozen meals that come from processed foods where that is possible, but doing that with fresh foods is HARD. If you want to go the pure science route, here's a peer review study from the NIH showing that in many places on earth, healthy food is provably more expensive https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6825829/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6825829/