7 ms·

> There are negative forces attempting to gain a maximum of profit by producing unhealthy food. No doubt. Fact. You can also never buy any of their products. Al

by recuter 14y ago

> There are negative forces attempting to gain a maximum of profit by producing unhealthy food. No doubt. Fact. You can also never buy any of their products. Also a fact. Anyone who says otherwise is essentially choosing their short term pleasure over their long term health. That decision is 100% made by the individual. If your health is important to you, you make time and money for it. For some people, McDonalds is cheaper than the healthy alternatives and they simply can't avoid it even though they'd like to. I know that's hard to believe but there you go.

hughlomas 14y ago
It is a myth that fast food is cheap. Fast food is more expensive than other foods on a by-weight basis. http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/junk-food-expensive-healthy-food-study-dept-agriculture-study-article-1.1079412 http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/junk-food-expen... http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/09/24/opinion/sunday/20110925_BITTMAN_MARSHgph/20110925_BITTMAN_MARSHgph-popup.jpg http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/09/24/opinion/sunda... People can eat more and healthier by purchasing and preparing their own food.
- recuter 14y ago
  It most certainly is not a myth. In order to purchase and prepare your own food you need a kitchen and some basic things but most of all, and what I'm guessing is being overlooked by the dismissers above me: You need time. Assume you have no car, have to rely on public transport, and work multiple jobs in geographically spread out locations. Nipping across town and back to stock your fridge with some healthy goodies doesn't sound so trivial now, does it? The McDonalds is probably a lot closer and thus indeed cheaper even if the bill for groceries is a few bucks less.
  - thenomad 14y ago
    Also, you need training and you need kitchen implements. Good food preparation equipment is far from cheap. Bad food prep equipment makes it a lot harder to do. And learning to cook healthy food, particularly when it has to be tasty enough to compete with the draw of processed meals, isn't easy either. I did some looking into this problem a few years ago when I was fronting a Web cooking show, and it's far more complex than it appears. Saying "They should just cook healthy food!" is a lot like saying "They should just install configure Linux to be as good as Windows" circa 2003 or so. It might make the speaker feel good, but actually the problems are more complex and more real than that.
    - mynameishere 14y ago
      So much rubbish. Cavemen could cook. People with modern amenities can cook faster than it takes to drive to McDonald's every day. People get fast food because of the taste and because they're too lazy to add rice to water/put a chicken in the oven/wrap a potato in foil/etc/etc/etc.
      - ahoyhere 14y ago
        You've never spent time with people who were really poor, have you? A lot of people live in situations where their simplest appliances (like ovens) don't work. Or they cannot afford a real (rental) home at all, and live out of extended stay motels. A bigger group than these are kids who grow up only ever seeing processed, pre-cooked foods. Many of these kids do not watch TV. What they see in their immediate family/friend group is all they know. There are reasons the obesity rates in the US are worst amongst poor, and especially urban, people. Many privileged, educated people would say it's a moral issue, but it's often an environmental issue. And probably more than a few "cavemen" died of carbon monoxide poisoning trying to cook over open fires in their "caves".
        mynameishere 14y ago
        You've never spent time with people who were really poor I've been really poor. On non-consecutive occasions. Many of these kids do not watch TV No offense, but you're just making shit up. You'd have to go to the most rural area of Mongolia before you find kids without ready access to television. That said, I'm not blaming children for anything--rather, most adults understand that a 99 cent can of pork and beans (available at any convenience mart) is healthier than fast food...and willingly ignore that fact.
        ahoyhere 14y ago
        No offense, but I have friends who teach in inner city schools and who mentor teens in places as diverse as Washington DC and Portland, OR. We talk about the plight of these kids all the time, and all the "obvious" stuff they don't know, and what's worse, how they don't realize their existences are abnormal because they have little exposure to what normal is. (Not: "Normal" is not a judgment. But if you don't know what options are, you can never be said to be able to choose.) One of the avenues of "normalizing" is TV. Recently I've been talking with a friend who mentors a teenaged boy who just got himself hooked on meth. I couldn't understand how that could even happen, because "everybody knows that meth is the worst of the worst." My friend explained that he did not realize it's not normal for the aunt who's on meth to be the "stable" one in their family (dad is such a drunk he never eats or buys food… Auntie Meth feeds the boy, somehow). Unfortunately, that poor kid is now fucked. I also used to live in a part of Baltimore City in the midst of gentrification and shared my block with people who'd lived in the same house for generations and people on welfare. Two of my neighbors on welfare didn't have a TV at all, or radio. Two, from a tiny block of 10 houses. Those happened to be 100% of my neighbors on welfare. (How did they entertain themselves all day? Well, they didn't. For whatever reason, they had zero curiosity and zero boredom. They did basically nothing. This is not a criticism. They were nice to me, I was nice to them, and given my interactions with their kids, their kids seem to have a better life ahead of them. But the parents were terminally incurious, to the point of not knowing street names just a couple blocks away… because they never went anywhere, not on foot or any other way. It's a given that they could not read, but you don't have to read to pick up a couple street names over 15+ years living in the same place. But I'm not sure that would have made a difference.)
  - hughlomas 14y ago
    Buying a large bag of rice and large bag of beans once every two weeks isn't a big problem. Those dry foods have a huge shelf life and are cheap. I didn't say they need to eat fresh baby spinach and kale every day.
- ahoyhere 14y ago
  First of all, even those articles are untrue unless your time is valued at zero. Secondly, there are just as many - if not more - studies that show that junk food is, in fact, cheaper. Because weight is an obvious, but subtly wrong, measurement to compare by: "Healthy eating really does cost more. That’s what University of Washington researchers found when they compared the prices of 370 foods sold at supermarkets in the Seattle area. Calorie for calorie, junk foods not only cost less than fruits and vegetables, but junk food prices also are less likely to rise as a result of inflation…" http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/a-high-price-for-healthy-food/ http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/a-high-price-for-he...
  - arbitrarywords 14y ago
    Yeh, meat and vegetables can be expensive. But, for example, a bag of lentils, a bag of brown rice, some tinned tomatoes and spices. That stuff is so cheap, none of it requires refrigeration and it's easy to cook large amounts using a single pot on a plug-in stovetop. Sure, there's a process around it, but almost by definition, if you're poor, then you've got a low hourly rate. Even these days, as a "proper grown up", if someone suggests getting food out, my instinctive reaction is "No, I can't afford that". I think the problem more lies with the sort of idea that was in a front page article a couple of days back (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5279307 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5279307) the bad stuff is just so tasty - what can make different kinds of people choose to eat super boring lentils and rice over super stimulating delicious fat/salt/sugar?
    - nitrogen 14y ago
      That still doesn't address the issue that none of those ingredients look like "food" to someone who doesn't already know you can put them all together with some heat, water, and time. Part of what keeps those foods cheap, as well, is that they aren't marketed, they have dull packaging, and they're on the lowest-value shelves in the supermarket where they're practically invisible.
      - arbitrarywords 14y ago
bmj 14y ago
Does anyone have statistics about this? I find it hard to believe that buying good food[0] and cooking it yourself is more expensive that eating at McDonald's. I suspect that taste and convenience have something to do with these choices rather than simply money. [0] As the grandparent points out, I mean veggies, whole grains, etc, etc, not necessarily organic or boutique.
- timr 14y ago
  I cook on a regular basis, and have for years. Try as I may, there's no way I can match the cost of McDonald's for dinner every night, calorie for calorie. The closest I can come is by buying heavily processed foods. There's not much need for skepticism here. Pay even the tiniest amount of attention to prices at the supermarket, and you'll know that it's true. I can buy a can of beef stew for $5. Buying the raw ingredients to make the same quantity of beef stew would cost me at least $10.
  - anigbrowl 14y ago
    In fairness, what you do is buy the raw ingredients to make 5 ro 10 times the amount of beef stew you want and either freeze the rest or eat stew for 2 or 3 days in a row. That sounds dull if you're single and like variety in your diet, but if you have a family it's quite practical. Make friends with your freezer. Meat production, like everything else, goes in cycles so at regular intervals producers (and thus) supermarkets will find themselves with excess stock of this or that. The obvious example is buying turkey after Thanksgiving, but I see cycles in things like the price of pork every 4-6 weeks. So about every other month I buy a whole boneless pork loin (a single piece of meat about as long as your forearm) for about $25 instead of the usual cost of around $50. I spend about 20 minutes at home slicing it into pork steaks and freezing most of them, and get 20+ nice thick steaks out of it, so that's about $1.05 each. Add in the cost of the vegetables, other ingredients, energy to cool and cook, and the price of a good size meal is still only $2.50 at most. That's a particularly good deal (which is why I buy it so regularly) but if you can cook and don't mind forward planning your food a bit, you save a lot of money. Menu planning probably cuts your cost by 50% vs. buying your ingredients on a per-meal basis.
LukeShu 14y ago
Part of GP's point is that that's a myth. GP asserts that $20 of whole chicken, rice, and broccoli is good for 8-9 meals. You'd have a hard time getting 8-9 meals for $20 at McDonalds. It can be done, but most don't.
- timr 14y ago
  I cook, and I'm extremely skeptical of the GP's claim. A factory farmed fryer-sized chicken costs $8-$15, and feeds four adults. You'd need two to get 8-9 meals. Best case, that leaves you $4 for everything else. Maybe you can do better in rural America, but roughly half of the population doesn't live there.
  - anigbrowl 14y ago
    I think it's legit, and I live in an urban area. But it does take extra time and skill.
    - timr 14y ago
      There's no way that claim was legit. Not even close. You can argue that it's cheaper to feed a family with careful shopping than to go out for fast food every night, but there's no way that you can get that many of the meals described for $20. You could maybe do half that.
      - anigbrowl 14y ago
        I do that all the time. They have a whole chicken at $0.99/lb at my local supermarket fairly regularly (every 2-3 weeks), so I usually buy one. I'll typically pan-roast it and get 2 meals (for 2 people, making 4) from that. Then I'll take the rest of the meat (that doesn't carve as nicely) and make a curry or some other stew. 8 meals from $20 doesn't sound like a stretch at all, and I'm not talking about tiny nouvelle cuisine portions either - I have a hearty appetite.
        malyk 14y ago

by recuter 14y ago

hughlomas 14y ago

It is a myth that fast food is cheap. Fast food is more expensive than other foods on a by-weight basis. http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/junk-food-expensive-healthy-food-study-dept-agriculture-study-article-1.1079412 http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/junk-food-expen... http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/09/24/opinion/sunday/20110925_BITTMAN_MARSHgph/20110925_BITTMAN_MARSHgph-popup.jpg http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/09/24/opinion/sunda... People can eat more and healthier by purchasing and preparing their own food.

recuter 14y ago
It most certainly is not a myth. In order to purchase and prepare your own food you need a kitchen and some basic things but most of all, and what I'm guessing is being overlooked by the dismissers above me: You need time. Assume you have no car, have to rely on public transport, and work multiple jobs in geographically spread out locations. Nipping across town and back to stock your fridge with some healthy goodies doesn't sound so trivial now, does it? The McDonalds is probably a lot closer and thus indeed cheaper even if the bill for groceries is a few bucks less.
- thenomad 14y ago
  Also, you need training and you need kitchen implements. Good food preparation equipment is far from cheap. Bad food prep equipment makes it a lot harder to do. And learning to cook healthy food, particularly when it has to be tasty enough to compete with the draw of processed meals, isn't easy either. I did some looking into this problem a few years ago when I was fronting a Web cooking show, and it's far more complex than it appears. Saying "They should just cook healthy food!" is a lot like saying "They should just install configure Linux to be as good as Windows" circa 2003 or so. It might make the speaker feel good, but actually the problems are more complex and more real than that.
  - mynameishere 14y ago
    So much rubbish. Cavemen could cook. People with modern amenities can cook faster than it takes to drive to McDonald's every day. People get fast food because of the taste and because they're too lazy to add rice to water/put a chicken in the oven/wrap a potato in foil/etc/etc/etc.
    - ahoyhere 14y ago
      You've never spent time with people who were really poor, have you? A lot of people live in situations where their simplest appliances (like ovens) don't work. Or they cannot afford a real (rental) home at all, and live out of extended stay motels. A bigger group than these are kids who grow up only ever seeing processed, pre-cooked foods. Many of these kids do not watch TV. What they see in their immediate family/friend group is all they know. There are reasons the obesity rates in the US are worst amongst poor, and especially urban, people. Many privileged, educated people would say it's a moral issue, but it's often an environmental issue. And probably more than a few "cavemen" died of carbon monoxide poisoning trying to cook over open fires in their "caves".
      - mynameishere 14y ago
        You've never spent time with people who were really poor I've been really poor. On non-consecutive occasions. Many of these kids do not watch TV No offense, but you're just making shit up. You'd have to go to the most rural area of Mongolia before you find kids without ready access to television. That said, I'm not blaming children for anything--rather, most adults understand that a 99 cent can of pork and beans (available at any convenience mart) is healthier than fast food...and willingly ignore that fact.
        ahoyhere 14y ago
        No offense, but I have friends who teach in inner city schools and who mentor teens in places as diverse as Washington DC and Portland, OR. We talk about the plight of these kids all the time, and all the "obvious" stuff they don't know, and what's worse, how they don't realize their existences are abnormal because they have little exposure to what normal is. (Not: "Normal" is not a judgment. But if you don't know what options are, you can never be said to be able to choose.) One of the avenues of "normalizing" is TV. Recently I've been talking with a friend who mentors a teenaged boy who just got himself hooked on meth. I couldn't understand how that could even happen, because "everybody knows that meth is the worst of the worst." My friend explained that he did not realize it's not normal for the aunt who's on meth to be the "stable" one in their family (dad is such a drunk he never eats or buys food… Auntie Meth feeds the boy, somehow). Unfortunately, that poor kid is now fucked. I also used to live in a part of Baltimore City in the midst of gentrification and shared my block with people who'd lived in the same house for generations and people on welfare. Two of my neighbors on welfare didn't have a TV at all, or radio. Two, from a tiny block of 10 houses. Those happened to be 100% of my neighbors on welfare. (How did they entertain themselves all day? Well, they didn't. For whatever reason, they had zero curiosity and zero boredom. They did basically nothing. This is not a criticism. They were nice to me, I was nice to them, and given my interactions with their kids, their kids seem to have a better life ahead of them. But the parents were terminally incurious, to the point of not knowing street names just a couple blocks away… because they never went anywhere, not on foot or any other way. It's a given that they could not read, but you don't have to read to pick up a couple street names over 15+ years living in the same place. But I'm not sure that would have made a difference.)
- hughlomas 14y ago
  Buying a large bag of rice and large bag of beans once every two weeks isn't a big problem. Those dry foods have a huge shelf life and are cheap. I didn't say they need to eat fresh baby spinach and kale every day.
ahoyhere 14y ago
First of all, even those articles are untrue unless your time is valued at zero. Secondly, there are just as many - if not more - studies that show that junk food is, in fact, cheaper. Because weight is an obvious, but subtly wrong, measurement to compare by: "Healthy eating really does cost more. That’s what University of Washington researchers found when they compared the prices of 370 foods sold at supermarkets in the Seattle area. Calorie for calorie, junk foods not only cost less than fruits and vegetables, but junk food prices also are less likely to rise as a result of inflation…" http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/a-high-price-for-healthy-food/ http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/a-high-price-for-he...
- arbitrarywords 14y ago
  Yeh, meat and vegetables can be expensive. But, for example, a bag of lentils, a bag of brown rice, some tinned tomatoes and spices. That stuff is so cheap, none of it requires refrigeration and it's easy to cook large amounts using a single pot on a plug-in stovetop. Sure, there's a process around it, but almost by definition, if you're poor, then you've got a low hourly rate. Even these days, as a "proper grown up", if someone suggests getting food out, my instinctive reaction is "No, I can't afford that". I think the problem more lies with the sort of idea that was in a front page article a couple of days back (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5279307 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5279307) the bad stuff is just so tasty - what can make different kinds of people choose to eat super boring lentils and rice over super stimulating delicious fat/salt/sugar?
  - nitrogen 14y ago
    That still doesn't address the issue that none of those ingredients look like "food" to someone who doesn't already know you can put them all together with some heat, water, and time. Part of what keeps those foods cheap, as well, is that they aren't marketed, they have dull packaging, and they're on the lowest-value shelves in the supermarket where they're practically invisible.
    - arbitrarywords 14y ago

bmj 14y ago

Does anyone have statistics about this? I find it hard to believe that buying good food[0] and cooking it yourself is more expensive that eating at McDonald's. I suspect that taste and convenience have something to do with these choices rather than simply money. [0] As the grandparent points out, I mean veggies, whole grains, etc, etc, not necessarily organic or boutique.

timr 14y ago
I cook on a regular basis, and have for years. Try as I may, there's no way I can match the cost of McDonald's for dinner every night, calorie for calorie. The closest I can come is by buying heavily processed foods. There's not much need for skepticism here. Pay even the tiniest amount of attention to prices at the supermarket, and you'll know that it's true. I can buy a can of beef stew for $5. Buying the raw ingredients to make the same quantity of beef stew would cost me at least $10.
- anigbrowl 14y ago
  In fairness, what you do is buy the raw ingredients to make 5 ro 10 times the amount of beef stew you want and either freeze the rest or eat stew for 2 or 3 days in a row. That sounds dull if you're single and like variety in your diet, but if you have a family it's quite practical. Make friends with your freezer. Meat production, like everything else, goes in cycles so at regular intervals producers (and thus) supermarkets will find themselves with excess stock of this or that. The obvious example is buying turkey after Thanksgiving, but I see cycles in things like the price of pork every 4-6 weeks. So about every other month I buy a whole boneless pork loin (a single piece of meat about as long as your forearm) for about $25 instead of the usual cost of around $50. I spend about 20 minutes at home slicing it into pork steaks and freezing most of them, and get 20+ nice thick steaks out of it, so that's about $1.05 each. Add in the cost of the vegetables, other ingredients, energy to cool and cook, and the price of a good size meal is still only $2.50 at most. That's a particularly good deal (which is why I buy it so regularly) but if you can cook and don't mind forward planning your food a bit, you save a lot of money. Menu planning probably cuts your cost by 50% vs. buying your ingredients on a per-meal basis.

LukeShu 14y ago

Part of GP's point is that that's a myth. GP asserts that $20 of whole chicken, rice, and broccoli is good for 8-9 meals. You'd have a hard time getting 8-9 meals for $20 at McDonalds. It can be done, but most don't.

timr 14y ago
I cook, and I'm extremely skeptical of the GP's claim. A factory farmed fryer-sized chicken costs $8-$15, and feeds four adults. You'd need two to get 8-9 meals. Best case, that leaves you $4 for everything else. Maybe you can do better in rural America, but roughly half of the population doesn't live there.
- anigbrowl 14y ago
  I think it's legit, and I live in an urban area. But it does take extra time and skill.
  - timr 14y ago
    There's no way that claim was legit. Not even close. You can argue that it's cheaper to feed a family with careful shopping than to go out for fast food every night, but there's no way that you can get that many of the meals described for $20. You could maybe do half that.
    - anigbrowl 14y ago
      I do that all the time. They have a whole chicken at $0.99/lb at my local supermarket fairly regularly (every 2-3 weeks), so I usually buy one. I'll typically pan-roast it and get 2 meals (for 2 people, making 4) from that. Then I'll take the rest of the meat (that doesn't carve as nicely) and make a curry or some other stew. 8 meals from $20 doesn't sound like a stretch at all, and I'm not talking about tiny nouvelle cuisine portions either - I have a hearty appetite.
      - malyk 14y ago