Eating healthy is not expensive

I am going to introduce a radical idea. Why are we eating unhealthily? Where did we change our eating practices? What about our farming practices? What content and food are we consuming? Where is our education system wrong? How come we cannot dig for victory? Why do we no longer garden?

I have some really mad ideas that make John Seymour and Hugh Fernsley Whittingstall look sane. Its about our relationship with nitrogen, religion, bread, forgotten plants, mechanised agriculture, forgotten trees, our relationship with meat and how we process it now compared with our grand parents.

Imagine the world we would have of we had closed loop agriculture system. No fertiliser, no animal feed, no organic waste in the house, no finance for machines, herbicide, pesticides.

Slow cookers ARE great.

If you're a singleton like meself, you can cook 3 or 4 meals at once. Chicken or beef stews. Eat one, freeze one or two and have the other the next day.

All you have to do is cook the potatoes on the day.

Large trays of stewing beef are not expensive and, as pointed out in a previous post, chicken thighs are cheap and perfect for a stew.

Pastas are also very cheap and quick. You can do a lot with them very quickly and relatively cheaply.

Classic Carbonara, Chicken/Mushroom tagliatelle etc. They don't take long to cook.

Personally I'm not worried about "carbohydrates or proteins". I just want a good substantial meal and I know that's what I'll get.

Not adverse to the odd frozen pizza though.

Although raw produce has gone up in price in recent years, I think it's generally a lot cheaper that it was 30 or 40 years ago.

EDIT TO AD

I costed a classic carbonara before the cost of living crisis. It cost me between 1 and 1.20 Euros for a large portion.

Would be a little more now.

Bag of Pink Lady Apples three quid,Mango,Pepper,a euro each. Got a half kilo bag of frozen Blueberries this morning for around €2.50. Bag of six Kiwi's are two or three quid, little baby sweetcorn I get in Aldi for a euro or two.

I could probably go on if I looked.

Yes but a goodfellas pizza is 3 euro, I’m sure you could get an aldi own brand even cheaper. So you can’t really stand by the original claim that you can weigh yourself down with fruit and veg for the price of a pizza.

A punnet of fresh strawberries is around 3 euro and there is about 10 strawberries in it, not much less for even smaller packs of fresh blue and raspberries. I’m not complaining that they are over priced by the way - though I’m much happier to be giving it to Irish growers which isn’t possible this time of year.

This so much. Anytime this comes up it's always dragged into how disabled, elderly etc might not be able to cook or someone might not have access to cooking facilities.

We all know edge cases like this exist and it's not making little of them. But if someone tries to make the claim eating healthy is more expensive than shite it's complete and utter bullshit for the vast vast majority of people in the developed world where this normally is the whinge.

Usually US, UK more so you you hear this nonsense while they are tucking into their 5th takeaway of the week because usually it's lazy ****.

We know there's people with different circumstances but even someone that's food intolerant it's still cheaper buy proper ingredients than buy prepacked or fast food.

Talking about elderly, disabled, people who are working or with kids we get it FFS but it still doesn't change the fact it is cheaper to eat healthy. If your circumstances make it harder that is a shame no doubt.

Then you get the excuse people haven't been taught to cook from a young age. Yes this is true a lot as well, you have a device you use everyday with access to all the knowledge you could ever want in text, video form to help you.

You can make your own pasta in 5 minutes with a handful of flour and a couple of eggs. Or even just eggs and water Sicilian style.

Sometimes people just don't want to eat healthily.

The point is empirically it's not expensive to eat healthily in Ireland. Some people though aren't thinking about their health when choosing what to consume.

They may more education about nutrition in the mass food production age, but the argument that's it's not possible to eat healthily affordably simply does not hold up under examination.

In fact I'd say it's actual more expensive to just consume branded processed foods and ready made meals that are less nutritional than more affordable base ingredients.

There is no time shortage argument against eating healthily.

People's tastes are another factor. I'll try anything and I see merit in most things (even if they're not particularly nice). So I notice when people are reluctant to try new flavours or combinations. I can't imagine how much more difficult it would be if I didn't like trying new flavours.

I like cooking and trying things, even if they don't work out as well as I hoped, I can notice what I did right or wrong and improve it next time. I can also read a recipe and know how to modify it to my taste.

I'm thinking of someone who wasn't brought up to experiment with food and they find it so much more difficult than I do. They don't like trying new things and if you said 'healthy they'd hear 'gross'. They just have a poor sense of taste. I think it's easy to overlook how difficult some people find it to try new things.

Eating 'healthy' is more difficult for some people.