I often hear people complaining that eating healthy food is too expensive. I call bullshit on that. I was in Dunnes today and bought a bag of sweet potatoes for 1 euro and a tin of chickpeas for 44c.
I wasn't talking about processed food when I was mentioned cooking from scratch. Sticking a frozen meal in the oven isn't cooking, it's Wetherspoons.
Neither am I. Im saying some people mistake that for healthy eating that isnt always quicker.
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.
Well said.
There's a real sense of condecension/superiority about this thread and I was trying to figure out how to respond, but you've articulated my thoughts perfectly.
Not really. There's a trope about that people eat junk food because it's cheaper. It's not.
I tried, they taste revolting compared to actual chocolate
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.
Congratulations on spectacularly missing the point. Genuine question, did you even read my entire post? Because I'd love if you could point out where I said that junk food is cheaper and that's why people eat it?
I get your point and know you mean well but there's also ironically a tiny bit of condescension in it too.
'Oh the poor working classes / deprived / lower classes, they don't know any better, bless 'em - let them eat their fried foods and leave them alone'.
Everyone has it within them to not be a picky eater and to eat healthy food. I too grew up in a usual Irish 80s household eating chicken and mashed potato, those crappy spongy pizzas from Tesco / Findus crispy pancakes most nights of the week and not a lot else. Doesn't mean I subsist on that now.
I really don't get this pandering to picking eaters tbh. I'm going to sound like a bit of an arse but to be honest, find it incredibly childish and infantile.
I'm not in any way saying we should just let people make shítty choices and leave them at it. I'm simply pointing out that understanding why they make those choices is sometimes a worthwhile - and human - thing to do.
I know. Your post was about posters being condescending. People are simply arguing the point that healthy food is cheaper,as per the thread title.
Almost everyone in Ireland has the time and money to prepare healthy meals. The same people who say they don't have time are the people who spend hours everyday watching tiktok and netflix.
They are actually chocolate. That's the point!
What you call chocolate is probably more sugar.
Thats quite the generalisation and judgment.
Nobody said you're problem would be solved by buying chickpeas, that's a whole other topic. The salient point is that healthy food is cheap, this is about dispelling the myth that healthy food is expensive.
It's an observation. A lot of people are bullshitters.
Ain't that the truth.
Love dark chocolate. Made some one day from cacao. It was only a small amount and put in I think two good teaspoons of sugar in,it was still bitter.
Dunno what they put in the commercial stuff,but it must be laden with sweetener.
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.
Breakfasts - porridge oats are a lot cheaper than box cornflakes or Cheerios
Healthier & more versatile
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.
Absolutely. It's so versatile. In winter it's hot porridge with a banana, roasted wallnuts and greek yogurt and that getts me through til lunch. In summer I'll steep porridge oats in yogurt for a cold breakfast.
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.
What are you buying that's so expensive?
Even better, 44c.
You're prob not going to like this one, but a real money saver is to buy relatively good quality (not the flavoured stuff!) dark cooking chocolate for half the price.
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!!
If you want to solve a problem, you have to first establish what the source of the problem is.
By propogating the myth that healthy food is expensive, policymakers will focus their efforts in the wrong areas.
So I beg to differ, pointing out the nonsense that healthy food is not too expensive brings people closer to the truth. A significant cohort of people aren't fully functional adults, they're children in adult bodies.
A young child tends to follow its immediate desires without impulse control or consideration of the future consequences. This is how a significant cohort of adults behave. It's important for policymakers to understand this before wasting time, money and effort trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist, namely healthy food being expensive.
On the subject of eating disorders, someone mentioned back in the thread that often people concerned about healthy eating actually have an eating disorder. I would say the reality here is that this only applies to a tiny percentage of those that eat healthily, but the home truth is that the opposite applies to those that don't eat healthily - i.e. a much larger percentage of those that don't eat healthily probably have an eating disorder of some sort (even as subtle as comfort eating etc )…
We went to the in laws a few weeks back and were asked what did we want off the Deliveroo app😀
A cabbage, spud and bacon dinner would definitely have been cheaper, and more filling.
