[freewilly1040]

Slight tangent re: fitness. Over Christmas my dad and some similarly aged people (70’s) were reminiscing about their childhood, and pointed to the lack of Doritos as memorable. Junk food was neither the product of decades of addictiveness-enhancing R&D not cheap.

A poor person today by contrast has junk food as the cheapest option.

[redisman]

Cheapest by effort plus taste divided by cost maybe. It’s still much cheaper to buy a bag of rice and a bag of beans and some frozen veggies. You can eat sub $1 meals

[jmknoll]

Thank you! This line about "unhealthy food is the most affordable option" doesn't really hold up in my experience.

Some "superfoods," exotic fruits, nice cuts of meat and fish, and certain vegetables are expensive, and that's a problem, but its a problem at the margins. The basic building blocks of a healthy diet are all widely available and affordable.

Some quick googling says the avg price for a dozen eggs in the US is $1.48. A can of tuna is $0.77. A pound of bananas is $0.57. A pound of potatoes $0.75. Dried beans/lentils/rice are even cheaper.

I understand there are complicating factors. You need a place to cook, and a big mac probably generally looks more enticing than canned fish, especially if you've spent all day on your feet at a job you hate. But these are separate problems, unrelated to the food supply chain.

[pdfernhout]

Another complicating factor of all this is "The Pleasure Trap" of "Supernormal Stimuli" and "The Acceleration of Addictiveness" in a society far from what humans are adapted for.

Related:

"How to escape The Pleasure Trap!" By Douglas Lisle and Alan Goldhamer https://web.archive.org/web/20150430050047/http://drfuhrman....

"Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose" by Deirdre Barrett https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_Stimuli

"The Acceleration of Addictiveness" by Paul Graham http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html

"The Lifestyle Cure" https://tlc.ku.edu/

From the last: "We were never designed for the sedentary, indoor, sleep-deprived, socially-isolated, fast-food-laden, frenetic pace of modern life. (Stephen Ilardi, PhD)"

[docmars]

You struck a good balance here -- well put! :)

[Falkon1313]

Except if like a great many in the U.S., your only source of nearby groceries within reasonable walking distance is a gas station. In that case a bag of Doritos is $40+ cheaper than hiring a cab to take you to the grocery store and back for a bag of beans and rice. Also saves you a couple of hours of travel and cooking.

When I was younger even though I lived on a major street downtown in a city, there were no grocery stores around. Plenty of fast food restaurants with $1 menus though. Cheap, quick, and easy, but not all that healthy. Actual grocery shopping was a once or twice a month thing - bus ride out to the store in the strip mall, cab ride back, 2+ hours total and a lot of money.

One of the things I love about my house now is that there's a full grocery store right at the end of the street (along with other stores and a restaurant a block over). But most people don't have that.