[sapote]

This article smacks of narrow-minded contrarianism for its own sake.

The cheapest thing one can do -- and healthier than the option of eating Lucky Charms daily -- is to grow one's own food. The space requirements are actually tiny -- it's possible to grow all of one's own veggies in something like 300 sq ft of space (in a mid-latitude region) and all one's own calories in something like 800 sq ft of space. It's cheaper to do it without sprays too, so you end up organic by default. I'd recommend interested folks check out ... Grow More Vegetables ... by John Jeavons and One Circle by David Duhon for how to do space-efficient veggie gardening.

Edited to add: I should have mentioned: I'm opposed to the fad diets that the article is attacking as much as I am to the contrarian posture the article takes. Growing food and eating it, and eating a variety of such homegrown foods with a mix of other things, seems sensible to me, and it's also cheaper than either highly-processed industrial food products or fad-oriented yuppie foods.

[Banthum]

This is only a cheap option if you consider your own labor to be free.

Plus don't forget about the seasonality of the crops, the effort of preservation, etc.

[sapote]

It is free. The time you spend in the garden is time you would have otherwise spent exercising in some other form and (to a lesser extent) shopping.

[saosebastiao]

Im glad you've found something that works for you, but you must understand that you have quite the unique circumstance there. There is no gardening out there that would ever be able to replace the exercise that I do...gardening is extremely mild cardio at best. And 300-800 sqft of sun-exposed space per person in the city where I live would undoubtedly cost an order of magnitude more than I currently spend on food.

If it were really that easy to grow one's own food, industrialization would have never happened.