Eating healthy is not expensive

There are myriad reasons - cultural, socio-economic, etc - reasons why people don't choose to eat healthily. If you grew up in a family where dinner always came out of a bag or the microwave, the chances of you valuing or even liking fruit, veg, pulses and whole foods in general, and taking the time and effort to cook them every day are vanishingly small.

A massive proportion of the people who eat in a way that many here are sneering at don't do so out of laziness, or for cost reasons, or because it's more convenient - they have simply never been exposed to any other type of food. Also, most processed foods are designed to be hyper-palatable, so if you grew up on that kind of diet, your palate is almost literally hard-wired only to tolerate more of the same.

It's also a simple fact of economics that families on a lower income spend disproportionately more on food than higher earners. If you've to feed a family of four or five on a tight budget, and nobody ever taught you to cook - or ever even cooked from scratch for you - that Spar deal of a large Goodfellas pizza with a bag of wedges for €6 is going to win out over a whole chicken, a bag of spuds and a bag of carrots for 12 quid every day of the week. Because, again, if you come from a family where nobody ever cooked from scratch, you probably don't even know that a whole chicken with a few extras will actually do two dinners, or dinner and lunches the next day, etc.

There's a serious whack of "Why can't these people just pull themselves up by their own bootstraps???" off this thread. Unintentional, hopefully. Jack Monroe (who actually went by the Twitter handle The Bootstrap Cook) has done loads of really interesting writing on this and is well worth a read. The simple fact of the matter is that (as others have already noted) if you're in a position to wonder why people don't "just" cook and eat more healthily, then you're already in a position of privilege. That's not necessarily an inherently bad thing, but it should be recognised and acknowledged.

There's also the fact that some people's relationship with food is just… complicated. It can be an emotional or mental thing, even when their proclamation is just that it's an expense thing, or time.

A few years ago, having been overweight pretty much my whole life, I went on a long diet and lost 8 stone in a year. Now, several years on, I've put back on over half that, and am now finding myself having to hit a long journey back to having to shift a bunch of weight again.

The reasons people overeat are varied and complicated, and it's easy to look at fat people and just judge them or their decisions and sneer that they should just eat less and move more. That's very easy when you don't have a mentality that drives you to overeat, which gives you that compulsion, that makes your mind justify those decisions then makes you hate yourself after indulging in them, which funnily enough then contributes to driving people to overeat. Then you have the fact that most processed or sweet foods are balanced in such a way as to give you that satiation and that immediate hit you're looking for.

But yeah, chickpeas are about 50c. Problem solved.

Ain't that the truth.

wow… eight stone. That's some work, best of luck doing it again… of course with the help of the OP and their 50c chickpeas.

And the point I'm making is that even oftentimes when people say that is the excuse/reason they eat unhealthy foods, it's not. There are a multitude of reasons, and people tie themselves up in their own justifications because of those reasons.

So yes, healthy food is not that expensive in the long run and can often be cheaper. And pointing that out changes absolutely nothing.

Budget alone, family of six here, we eat 95% from scratch, as healthily as we can, we shop in Lidl, local butcher, local bakery and then Dunnes for the stuff you just can't get in the other ones. Our shopping bill is astronomical.

Fresh berries, grapes, cherries, fruit, lots of fish, dairy and meat seem to be the big culprits.
We’d easily go through nine or ten large punnets of strawberries, raspberries and blueberries a week.

Tried the frozen ones, but the kids will only use them in smoothies now with monster pots of Greek yogurt, bananas and honey. So the frozen berries trial just cost us more!!