But eating right is so expensive...

I process folks at the local food pantry and it brings home to me each week how tough some folks have it. Imagine first that you only have a few hundred dollars coming in a month, you are already living in someone's basement or old trailer for the lowest rent you can find, you don't have a car or access to public transportation and your cupboards are bare. You have been looking for work but even the part-time, minimum wage job you had disappeared. In the US, the sequester means your food stamps were just cut to $30 or less a MONTH. These are the people I deal with every Monday afternoon during my volunteer stint.

They don't have many choices and they can only return to our organization once every thirty days. Some of the people I see are young, some old. Some healthy, some sick. I see people with severe handicaps, both physical and mental. Yesterday there was a victim of a drunken driver who had suffered a traumatic brain injury. These are the people that come to the food pantry.

Yesterday, one client said, no, he didn't have trouble with utility bills because he no longer lived somewhere with utilities. He lost his job; he lost the roof over his head. Although some of the people I see are overweight, many are thin, some painfully so. Sometimes they have cancer or degenerative bone disease, worked hard all their lives and have been wiped out by medical expenses. These are the people I see each Monday afternoon.

So, yes, I do believe you can eat very healthily as well as you can eat junk IF you have access to good food at reasonable prices and the knowledge to cook the healthy food. The people I see on Mondays may not have access to a pot to boil beans or the knowledge of how to do it. No one gives them salt and pepper to make the beans palatable. One mentally handicapped gentleman yesterday asked me what he could do with the bag of dry beans someone gave him. I explained how he could cook them in his crock pot like potatoes. He didn't have a stove. He really didn't know and had no one to tell him. He'd had the beans for a year.

So, it isn't easy. How healthy could you eat if your TOTAL income were $700 a month and $30 in food stamps?

I switched to a plant based diet a month ago, no dairy,eggs, meat, cheese, fish or chicken and thought I'd have lower bills at the grocery store but just the contrary. I was spending about 40-50 a week and the last 4 weeks I've spend over 70-80 each week. Produce is expensive, if you want fresh, In my neck of the woods a small bunch of kale is $4, 3 small sweet potatoes cost me almost $5, a bag of oranges was $6. it adds up pretty fast. But on the other hand I can't put a price on how much better I feel physically & ethically so I'll keep forking out the dough

First, it's important to define eating healthy because that is different for everyone. I think eating healthy is getting your proper ratio of protein, carbs, fats, vitamins, and minerals while staying around your daily caloric intake needs. I do not define eating healthy as buying organic produce, GMO free meats, whole wheat pasta, no frozen stuff ever, etc. It's not necessary to buy any of that stuff in order to get proper nutrition.

Just because you can access healthy foods, doesn't mean everyone can. Lower income areas have less access to healthy foods...

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

It is definitely more expensive to eat fresh fruits and vegetables than processed/junk foods especially if you do not shop at big box stores like WalMart of Costco which I do not.

So you avoid the cheapest grocery outlets and claim your food costs more because it's healthier? No, your food costs more because you have an aversion to big box grocery outlets that have a more efficient supply and production infrastructure. I shop at Target because it's the cheapest option near me. They have plenty of fresh produce, they have even cheaper frozen veggies (green beans, broccoli, corn peas, carrots) which are just as nutritious, albeit at the expense of some texture when cooked.

No one is getting fat or succumbing to health problems by choosing frozen vegetables with a longer shelf life over fresh produce.

Btw, many of the ones that market themselves as local joints are also owned by mega companies.

I switched to a plant based diet a month ago, no dairy,eggs, meat, cheese, fish or chicken and thought I'd have lower bills at the grocery store but just the contrary. I was spending about 40-50 a week and the last 4 weeks I've spend over 70-80 each week. Produce is expensive, if you want fresh, In my neck of the woods a small bunch of kale is $4, 3 small sweet potatoes cost me almost $5, a bag of oranges was $6. it adds up pretty fast. But on the other hand I can't put a price on how much better I feel physically & ethically so I'll keep forking out the dough

Most of what you are eating can't be digested by the human body, which is why fruits and veggies are so low in calories. So yea, massive amounts of pounds of fresh fruits and vegetables that spoil quickly and are expensive to ship are going to cost more. But people don't have to eat a plant-only diet to eat healthy. In fact, it's probably not recommended by your average nutritionist.

So again, the only way eating healthy costs more is if you are sticking to TV dinners or you are buying snooty organic products. And the solution to that is A) learn to cook and stop buying overpriced produce. Again, my dinner tonight cost less than half of the average fast-food combo per person and came in at under 650 calories: Sausage and peppers with a side of baked ziti.