In general, despite extensive government subsidies, hyperprocessed food remains more expensive than food cooked at home. You can serve a roasted chicken with vegetables along with a simple salad and milk for about $14, and feed four or even six people. If that’s too much money, substitute a meal of rice and canned beans with bacon, green peppers and onions; it’s easily enough for four people and costs about $9. (Omitting the bacon, using dried beans, which are also lower in sodium, or substituting carrots for the peppers reduces the price further, of course.)If those advertisements are to have any value, they'll teach parents that spending those 20 extra minutes are worth it.
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THE fact is that most people can afford real food. Even the nearly 50 million Americans who are enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as food stamps) receive about $5 per person per day, which is far from ideal but enough to survive. So we have to assume that money alone doesn’t guide decisions about what to eat. There are, of course, the so-called food deserts, places where it’s hard to find food: the Department of Agriculture says that more than two million Americans in low-income rural areas live 10 miles or more from a supermarket, and more than five million households without access to cars live more than a half mile from a supermarket.
Still, 93 percent of those with limited access to supermarkets do have access to vehicles, though it takes them 20 more minutes to travel to the store than the national average. And after a long day of work at one or even two jobs, 20 extra minutes — plus cooking time — must seem like an eternity.
In general, despite extensive government subsidies, hyperprocessed food remains more expensive than food cooked at home. You can serve a roasted chicken with vegetables along with a simple salad and milk for about $14, and feed four or even six people. If that’s too much money, substitute a meal of rice and canned beans with bacon, green peppers and onions; it’s easily enough for four people and costs about $9. (Omitting the bacon, using dried beans, which are also lower in sodium, or substituting carrots for the peppers reduces the price further, of course.)If those advertisements are to have any value, they'll teach parents that spending those 20 extra minutes are worth it."
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THE fact is that most people can afford real food. Even the nearly 50 million Americans who are enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as food stamps) receive about $5 per person per day, which is far from ideal but enough to survive. So we have to assume that money alone doesn’t guide decisions about what to eat. There are, of course, the so-called food deserts, places where it’s hard to find food: the Department of Agriculture says that more than two million Americans in low-income rural areas live 10 miles or more from a supermarket, and more than five million households without access to cars live more than a half mile from a supermarket.
Still, 93 percent of those with limited access to supermarkets do have access to vehicles, though it takes them 20 more minutes to travel to the store than the national average. And after a long day of work at one or even two jobs, 20 extra minutes — plus cooking time — must seem like an eternity.
I can feed myself at the farmer's market for about 30 dollars a week and eat well, as a society we need to bust the "healthy food is expensive" myth.You can get a half gallon of cheap ice-cream for $2, and that might have maybe 1,800 calories? So you could feed yourself ice cream for just $14 a week. That's $127.5 a month vs. $59.5. When you're poor $68 a month can be a lot.
First, let's start with the school lunch. This is a US Department of Ag initiative. During the Depression the idea was to provide as many calories as a kid would need in a DAY, just in case it was the only meal he or she might eat that day. Somehow, that is still the norm. Loaded with fat and carbs, the school lunch is ballast. Also, we've added a school breakfast, so that's another shot of carbs and fat. -- Ruthless BunnyThere are probably lots of kids for whom it will be the only meal of the day, especially in Georgia.
We all know this is not food, it's a food-like substance. I believe that if the school lunch changed materially, and the snack and pop machines were eliminated from school, that 50% of your problem could be addressed that way. -- Ruthless BunnyUgh, enough with this 'food like substance' stuff. Food is food. The fact you don't morally approve of it doesn't transform it into 'not food'
I live in Atlanta and the two types of billboards I see the most are the ones targeting obesity and the ones targeting meth.Hey, that gives me an idea! Why not just give fat kids meth!? Solve two problems at once.
This is especially true when the real problem isn't people not cooking, it's obesity. Getting people to cook at home can help that problem, it's almost certainly part of the solution, but's not all of the problem. I cook all the time and make food that's just as unhealthy as going out; getting people to eat healthier food, whether homemade or not, is more important. -- BulgaroktonosYeah, why do people think cooking is a panacea for weight? It's easy to cook food that's loaded with fat, and delicious. For example, I tried making these French fries a couple times and they were really good.
That was a pretty crappy piece of social-analysis by anecdata. I would say that nothing at all that we know about the study of happiness suggests that anyone, poor or wealthy, can significantly improve their overall happiness by being obese. -- yoinkHe didn't say they could increase their overall happiness by being obese, he said they could increase their immediate happiness by eating tasty junk food, as opposed to trying to delay gratification and enjoy being skinny later.
Several of us have linked to or referenced large scale and well controlled studies to back up our opinions. -- yoinkNone of which have anything to do with what Coates was saying, not that it would be difficult to show his premise as true using various studies.
Last night I took a fucking can of condensed celery soup (organic) that cost me $2.49 in Manhattan. 3 servings but I ate it all because I'm a big guy. Then I added a red pepper $.79 and an onion ~$.50. I also ate a piece of wheat bread. -- gagglezoomerWow, that sounds satsfying. Maybe we should just start feeding poor people gruel out of big vats again. Organic gruel of course. I'm sure they would totally give up eating at McDonalds.
So are adult literacy campaigns also evil? After all, you can't tell illiterate people that becoming literate will help them without implying that being illiterate isn't as good as being literate. It's pretty clearly illiteracy-shaming. - yoinkThat is completely ridiculous. Anyone with a brain knows that there is positive and negative encouragement. "reading is awesome" won't shame anyone who doesn't know how to read anymore then "skydiving is awesome" shames people who don't know how to skydive.
In 2007, diabetes was listed as the underlying cause on 71,382 death certificates and was listed as a contributing factor on an additional 160,022 death certificates - Threeway HandshakeBy that metric, teaching kids how to drive is also 'killing' them since driving results in a lot of death.
Sure, there's part of me that can understand the appeal of eating a birthday cake or bloomin onion or bag of doritos every day, but to only understand that appeal is to be the guy who's all "let's get wasted!!1" when your friends want to go out for a hikeWell, there's nothing preventing 'that guy' from eating birthday cake, while his friends munch on Kale, or whatever. There isn't nearly the same 'incompatibility' as with hiking and getting hammered.
Honestly, junk food disgusts me. It is too fatty, too salty just blowing out all the senses. In your sex analogy, its like the guy who spends all his money on cheap prostitutes every nightWell, so what? What difference does it make if it disgusts you? It doesn't disgust most people. That's the point. Your personal tastes are not a moral issue. The fact that you don't enjoy snickers bars does not mean someone is morally corrupt if they do. And the whole point is that a person who goes to hookers every night would also probably be happy having sex with women who also wanted him.
Wow. Implying that I have been thin for my entire life? Do you know how hard I have worked? How hard anybody has worked? Do you sit at the end of marathons and disparage the runners being born able to complete the race?I lost a ton of weight in my mid 20s by working out every day and counting calories. I still ate junk food, just not much of it. One thing that did change was that after switching to diet pop I no longer like the 'regular' stuff. It's way to syrupy and sweet, etc.
With all due respect, I think this is bullshit. All of the obese people I know are middle class and have access to the same or better resources I do. I don't know who first equated obese people with poor people in this thread but I'm going to guess it was someone on the other side of the argument.I never meant to imply that no one raged on middle class fat people. Just that in particular, most people were talking about the poor in this thread, since obviously poor people are more likely to be fat. Which seems to come down to an argument over whether or not they're fat because they can't afford food that's healthy and delicious, or if it's because they won't get their fat lazy asses off the couch to cook instead of watching TV all day.
A: Again, what's with the rage? It's so bizarre that people could flip out so hard about the fact other people prefer different foods then them and B: it was a response to me and I did not say everyone loved junk food. In fact, the central premise of the post was that people had different tastes, and that therefore pointing out how an whether an individual, personally, does not like junkfood is completely irrelevant to whether or not other people like it.I know what the ads are about, I was responding to a specific thing someone else said about how they felt that junk food tasted gross.Which was, in turn, a response to people saying how everybody loves junk food.
You're the one who was claiming that suggesting meals like beans and rice and celery soup is equivalent to "wanting poor people to suffer" and "feeding poor people gruel out of big vats again".Right...
That's not exactly "people have different tastes"Yeah, it is. If everyone had the same tastes, then making poor people eat bland food wouldn't be a problem. However, because people have different tastes, some of the people would be deprived of eating the food they enjoy eating.
So your argument is that fat people are horrible human beings because, through hurting themselves, they are going to make their families feel bad when they die? Yet somehow their families won't feel bad about them being raged and insulted? Somehow it's hard to buy that concern for people's families is what's driving this, especially since it's likely people in their families have a similar relationship with food.But eating too much food doesn't really cause too many problems for other people.This is nonsense. Eating too much food is one of the primary causes of both the number-one (heart disease) and number-six (diabetes) causes of death in this country ... I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that overeating has caused utter tragedy in the lives of many of my family and friends, and I'm by no means alone in that.
If people have different tastes then there's no one definition of "bland food".yes, that's exactly what I'm saying I'm not sure what's so complicated about this. If you restrict a broad class of people to a certain small subset of cheap food, then it's very likely that it will be bland to some of them.
My point is that food doesn't work this way. Many spices, hot sauces, and even MSG are cheap and can combine with "bland" food to improve the flavor in many different ways. I can think of probably ten things one can do with cheap spices (cumin, cayenne pepper, and turmeric) and "beans and rice" (plus bouillon cubes, some oil, and maybe an onion) which will give them completely different flavors and even textures. You could make a couple different soups, a biryani-style bake, a stir-fry, a curry, Mexican food, Cajun food, blah blah etc. And that's not even getting into all the different kinds of affordable beans and rice.That may be true, but then you have the other problem: Knowlege. Lots of people don't know anything about cooking or flavors. Maybe if the state spent their $25 million teaching poor parents how to cook delicious meals on a tight budget it would be a lot more effective in actually curbing obesity.
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posted by WidgetAlley at 9:04 AM on January 10, 2012 [86 favorites]