[ygjb-dupe]

> Eat less healthfully: because healthy food costs more than unhealthy food.

I hate this myth. It glosses over some of the most difficult choices that people in poverty have to make on a regular basis.

"Quantity has a quality all it's own." - various sources

This is anecdotal, and entirely based on my own experiences as I grew up in poverty (by Canadian standards, which is substantially better than most of the world). YMMV when evaluating this if you come from a part of the world that has more extreme cases of poverty.

Eating healthy foods is not inherently more expensive than eating unhealthy foods, but it is a risk management decision.

When you have a small budget and you have to make choices about where you will spend your money, you tend to make choices that insulate against risk. If you have a tight budget then you buy foods that provide the best economic value, not the best nutritional value. That means buying bulk, low cost food so that you can ensure that you have some food left at the end of the week, which might help reduce the amount you have to spend on food next week. This exacerbates the "healthy eating" myth because if you are buying foods that you hope last, you are disinclined to purchase foods that expire, so rather than buying fresh meat, produce, etc, you will instead purchase canned or frozen foods.

Everyone that I grew up with that has elevated themselves above their roots has a similar perspective - it's not that we could buy better food, it just didn't make sense to do so back then.

[jimrandomh]

That sounds like a slightly more nuanced way of saying the same thing? I agree that a lot of the cost differential between healthy and unhealthy eating is caused by shelf-life issues rather than a difference in sticker price, but it works out the same. Eg if eating a diet with fresh foods requires making shopping trips twice as frequently as a diet with frozen foods, then that's the same as if the fuel/time/car-wear costs of the extra trips were added to the cost of the fresh stuff. And if fresh stuff will sometimes spoil, that's like if it sometimes unpredictably cost extra.

[ygjb-dupe]

Again, all anecdotal, but here goes...

Yes, it's nuanced, because poverty and decision making is a complex issue :)

It's opportunity cost - you have the choice between eating fresh food, with the risk that it will spoil, or the choice of eating lower cost and frequently processed foods that have a longer shelf life.

There are also alot of factors to this - in a given week of budget the price difference between a processed product and fresh product might be radically different, but fresh food is almost always available throughout much of the developed world. There is another hidden cost here - when I see something I haven't tried before I will buy it and learn how to prepare it, but when I was poor, I didn't - it wasn't worth the risk that I would ruin the food, or that I wouldn't like it, and throwing away even a small amount of food was an intolerable waste. Less of a risk these days when even most people living at or below the poverty line have the ability to access the internet to learn, but in the late 90s, I was loathe to take those chances. There may be nutritionally rich, low cost options, but if people are too poor to have had regular exposure, or come from a culture unfamiliar with the foods available at reasonable prices locally, then poor eating choices will continue to be propagated.

The decision is not always a choice to eat the less healthy food over the more healthy food, it is a choice to marginally increase the level of food security you have by choosing less "healthy" options that have a longer shelf-life and offer a discount in bulk.