6 ms·

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 ho

by f1shy 11mo ago

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.

somenameforme 11mo ago
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.
- lurking_swe 11mo ago
  i’m interested in using my pressure cooker more. Do you have a favorite recipe?
  - somenameforme 11mo ago
    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. [1] - https://kristineskitchenblog.com/honey-garlic-instant-pot-chicken-breasts/ https://kristineskitchenblog.com/honey-garlic-instant-pot-ch...
    - lurking_swe 11mo ago
      Thank you very much!!
- badc0ffee 11mo ago
  I agree with most of what you're saying, but here in Canada, chicken breast is so not cheap.
  - doubled112 11mo ago
    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?
    - ta12653421 11mo ago
      Thas fucking cheap! LOL 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.
      - ta12653421 11mo ago
        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.
        inferiorhuman 11mo ago
        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.
- burnt-resistor 11mo ago
  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).
  - adrian_b 11mo ago
    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.
- rini17 11mo ago
  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.
ponector 11mo ago
You can have a balanced diet based on frozen meat, fish and vegetables. Add there pasta, beans, rice, oats, etc. Also I'm pretty sure they are spending more time on social media than cooking.
notepad0x90 11mo ago
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.
phil21 11mo ago
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.
- throwawayqqq11 11mo ago
  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.
Libidinalecon 11mo ago
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.
- seanmcdirmid 11mo ago
  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.
- bdavbdav 11mo ago
  Where do you live that chicken breast is cheap? It’s about £7/kg for the crummy water filled breast here in UK
  - baiac 11mo ago
    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
johnisgood 11mo ago
> 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.

by f1shy 11mo ago

somenameforme 11mo ago

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.

lurking_swe 11mo ago
i’m interested in using my pressure cooker more. Do you have a favorite recipe?
- somenameforme 11mo ago
  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. [1] - https://kristineskitchenblog.com/honey-garlic-instant-pot-chicken-breasts/ https://kristineskitchenblog.com/honey-garlic-instant-pot-ch...
  - lurking_swe 11mo ago
    Thank you very much!!
badc0ffee 11mo ago
I agree with most of what you're saying, but here in Canada, chicken breast is so not cheap.
- doubled112 11mo ago
  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?
  - ta12653421 11mo ago
    Thas fucking cheap! LOL 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.
    - ta12653421 11mo ago
      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.
      - inferiorhuman 11mo ago
        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.
burnt-resistor 11mo ago
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).
- adrian_b 11mo ago
  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.
rini17 11mo ago
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.

ponector 11mo ago

You can have a balanced diet based on frozen meat, fish and vegetables. Add there pasta, beans, rice, oats, etc. Also I'm pretty sure they are spending more time on social media than cooking.

notepad0x90 11mo ago

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.

phil21 11mo ago

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.

throwawayqqq11 11mo ago
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.

Libidinalecon 11mo ago

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.

seanmcdirmid 11mo ago
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.
bdavbdav 11mo ago
Where do you live that chicken breast is cheap? It’s about £7/kg for the crummy water filled breast here in UK
- baiac 11mo ago
  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

johnisgood 11mo ago

> 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.