But eating right is so expensive...

Greybird3339

After my divorce six years ago, my food budget dropped to ~$12 per week. I pulled it off for about six months until I was able to get all of my finances re-kerfangled.

I could eat at $12 per week on ramen and eggs.

I could not eat at anywhere close to those numbers if I were adding meats, vegetables, and whole grains into the diet.

llkilgore

I disagree. In fact, that's exactly the problem with our food supply: Healthful foods cost more than empty calories by orders of magnitude. The number one predictor of obesity in the US is income level, and the very fact that I've decided to alter my lifestyle is an exercise in economic privilege.

The cheapest calories on our grocery shelves are from government-subsidized commodity foods: Corn, soybeans, and the resulting cheap animal products. Think boxed mac & cheese, packaged ramen, and the like. If you eat those foods until you're not hungry anymore, you will have eaten too many calories. If you have to do that every day, you're going to get fat and sick. Eating well costs quite a bit more money than eating the standard American diet, which is why most people don't do it.

So true. Don't care what anyone says. Healthier foods are more way more expensive than junk foods. Its so easy to eat 3-4k calories a day if someone wanted too. Cheaply for that matter.

That certainly tends to be true if you shop at the "cheap" grocery store on the less affluent side of town that sells mostly no-name brands of calorie dense foods. Such stores don't expect a fast turn-over on fruits and vegetables, other than maybe potatoes and onions, and that's often reflected in both the freshness and the prices of their produce. Prices are often inflated on the nationally recognized brand name frozen veggies too, and on nationally recognized brand names in general, for that matter. And for the same reasons: They may stock Green Giant and Keeblers for the occasional "elitist" shopper who wonders in, but expect to sell mostly their store brands and other generics. While grocery stores geared to a more affluent customer base may appear to be to be more expensive over all because they stock what passes for a higher quality of junk, they tend to be cheaper on the healthy stuff because they sell more of it.

Not saying any of this is applicable to you personally, by the way. I have no way of knowing where you shop, but it is generally true. My mom taught me to always buy seafood from the busiest seafood market in town because the fast turn-over would ensure the best quality at the lowest price. The same principle applies to produce departments in grocery stores.

Greybird3339

Not everyone is lucky enough to live in a town big enough to have 'ends.'

pavrg

$5 buys me 4 0z of wild fresh salmon $5 buys me lean ground beef for my tomato meat sauce $5 buys me a chicken breast

I just do not see the $$$ value in a pizza.

6 oz chicken breast: $1.25 ($3/lb @ Target)
1/3 packet McCormick garlic/herb marinade: $0.33 ($1/packet)
1 tbsp olive oil: $0.10 ($9/bottle)
1 tbsp tap water: $0.001
5 oz baked potato: $0.40 ($0.99/lb)
2/3 cup frozen green beans: $0.50 ($1.99/5 serving bag)

Total: $2.58/person * 3 = $7.75

Which is still less than a single McDonald's meal. And you can't feed more than 2 adults on a single $5 frozen pizza.

What the hell are you people eating?

cassiepathak

We buy all of our groceries at the international market, we eat fresh produce, lentils or lean meat pretty much everyday and our grocery bill is low. The price may look higher initially but you can make several meals from the ingredients so it works out cheaper.

RockinTerri

Bump - to look at all later.

Iron_Lotus

We are a family of 8 and I cook all of the meals and I don't find it too expensive to eat healthy.

Cortneyrenee04

I hate going through his with people. Boxed stuff and junk is so expensive. My family, too, spends much less now that we eat more fresh foods. We also plant a garden for super cheap veggies/herbs.

jenn26point2

Whole chickens are often less than $1/lb (of course, you're going to be tossing the carcass, so it's not entirely a fair comparison, but still...)

Why toss the carcass..........do like our frugal ancestors did; use it to make soup!

w0rd

llkilgore

Not everyone is lucky enough to live in a town big enough to have 'ends.'

My town is barely big enough for 2 grocery stores and a Walmart, and the Walmart counts as relatively high end. We definitely have a low end, though: a really trashy grocery store that smells like an open air meat market most of the time. Unfortunately we have the economically depressed neighborhoods to support it.

Walmart, by the way, honors the advertised prices of their competition, and that's a feature I use a lot for produce. It doesn't seem to matter to them if the store that put out the loss leader ad is in a much larger city up the interstate.

jardin12

The poorest people in the world don't eat packaged foods. They eat grains and herbs and veg. It's pretty easy to eat cheap in Australia on in season veg and grains. Plus my food bill went down from just eating at a healthy level - I mean not eating everything in sight just because its available!! Lol

svsl0928

Since I have been focused on making better healthy my groceries have not really increased. My trips to the grocery store has increased because I want to have fresh fruit. I don't eat out as often which is a savings.

The information you provided is great. The are other factors (social, career, reluctance to travel) that often are not considered when a person is obese.

AnnaMarieDinVa

Honestly, I spend less money on food than I used to. The $20 less a month I spend on my own junk food goes to adding to the kiddo's choices so he'll gain weight. Trader Joe's is the best place ever for people on special diets.

Heck yeah! I get almost everything from Trader Joe's now, which is crazy, because the healthy stuff at Trader Joe's costs less that the items at the "regular" grocery store, i.e., Kroger, Food Lion, Farm Fresh. And the Trader Joe's items taste better too. I rarely eat out anymore, so my food bill has gone down. Thankfully.

Greybird3339

I've seen studies showing the relative value of fresh foods vs cheap crap. None of them seem to have been run by people who have actually been poor, as they tend to use high priced junk food - chips, pizzas, hot pockets, that sort of thing - as their basis for 'cheap' food, which completely misses the issue.

Let me put it this way: $5 buys 20 packs of ramen. Each one is ~400 calories. Eat one for lunch and two for dinner, and that $5 is enough to lunch and dinner for a full week.

Add in a $2 pack of Bar-S hot dogs and a $3 carton of eggs and you're eating for ~1.40 per day, or $10 per week.

That's what people are talking about when they talk about crappy food being cheaper than fresh. They aren't talking about eating Ruffles and Twinkies for every meal.

Lichent

My buddy is an ex smoker and he likens giving up his junk food to giving up smokes. We both have quit eating junk food. no easy task as the $%^! stuff is everywhere.



We would go through 3 dozen or more sodas weekly, as well as the big bottles of the stuff, 10 bags of potatoe chips, 3 bags of cookies, a cpuple packages of chocolate bars packaged up in threes for better value. Halloween was like XMAS for us, we would go back the next day and buy bags loads of the little chocolates when they were half price.
Not to mention we would hit the Pizza joints and the Burger Joints weekly.
Also we bought alot of the bakery items.



Things had gotten out of hand we had to get a trainer and a nuitrionist to devise new grocery lists and menus. We are learning to home cook big time. The food bill has gone down even with the fruit, vegetables and more meats. We are gung ho and already have lost weight.

The thing is for us is to make this fun for ourselves. We no longer feel that like we are deprived children by giving the nasty sweet stuff up .
We purged and detoxed our cupboards and threw out the remaining junk food.

kgbsn80

I think it depends on how savvy of a shopper you are and finding creative ways to make healthy recipes
For exp. If you need to spend less you could purchase frozen fruits and veggies from dollar store or cheap grocery store that cost
$1.00 or less, do most of your own prep. work and separating you will definitely save like that off the top. and if you don't have the time to prep pick an off day to prep for your week or longer. I once made quesadilla by purchasing frozen bag of spinach 1.00,frozen salad shrimp 1.00,blocked cheese that I shredded myself 1.00, and a bag of soft tortilla shells 1.00 which the total came to $4 and some change. so its possible!!!

Morgaath

Elitist bs. Walmart is the king of low-income neighborhood retail and you can find plenty of affordable, nutritious food there.

I think that depends. St. Louis City, not the county, is about as low income as it gets. Guess what there is not a single one of in St. Louis City? Now, you get to the county, where the money is, oh they are out there.
I know, just drive out to the county, right? Guess what lots of inner city people do not have....a car. You ever try to carry a week's worth of groceries for a family of 4 on a bus?

But not to single out Walmart, there are not even many chain grocery stores in St. Louis MO. I live in St. Charles MO, the slightly richer suburb city next to St. Louis County. I have a Super Walmart, Sams, Costco, 2 IGAs, 2 Schnucks, 1 Dierburgs, 1 Aldi, and a Shop n Save within 4 miles of my house. In season there is also 2 farmer's markets.

I occasionally wander into the grocery stores in St. Louis City, due to a daughter that lives there, plus friends asking me to pick up stuff on the way to a party. Same chain of stores, but the quality and quantity of the fruit and veggies is lower in the city, there are fewer good options (Low cal, low fat) on stuff like snacks...actually just fewer options over all.

The good stuff is where the money is. The poor don't have the option of shopping around, and they can't go else where when they don't like it, so they get whatever is offered at the only place they can get to. Same as it has always been throughout time.

For that matter, many of them don't even know that there is better stuff out there. I know that growing up, I sure didn't. I got more money, moved to nicer places, met folks with more money, got introduced to better stuff, and now I look down on what I used to eat as being low quality stuff.

fultimers

Brown basmati rice is also about $1per pound, delicious and lower arsenic content than regular brown rice.

Brown rice has arsenic? Oh dear!

sloth3toes

We purged and detoxed our cupboards and threw out the remaining junk food.

Say it's not so.....

NonnyMary

its worth it to me to eat food that tastes delicious rather than some cheap stuff that is just filling. I dont even want to waste time eating a bag of cheetos, you can if you want, but it would not work for me. I would rather eat a pile of shrimp and enjoy that, even though its expensive, so i have it as much as i can afford it. If i couldn't afford shrimp I'd find the best most delish food I could eat even if it was a little bit more money. i am saving money on all the coffee cakes i used to eat.