Doof isn’t cheaper than food
The refrain: “poor people can fill their stomachs with more with a dollar at McDonald’s than with healthy food,” often implying if you can afford healthy food, you don’t know what it’s like for people who actually have to struggle.
I’ll leave the ad hominem part for another post. As for the claim McDonald’s somehow saves money, it’s wrong.
Citing the USDA, Forbes reports, “Despite the rumor that government subsidies make fast food less expensive than fruits and vegetables, several recent articles argue that indeed, veggies are far cheaper than a meal at McDonalds.”
An Institute of Economic Affairs study in England study, Cheap as Chips: Is a healthy diet affordable?, found “healthier food in supermarkets tends to be cheaper than less healthy food. . . The ingredients for a nutritious meal can be bought for significantly less than the cost of ‘junk food’, ready-meals and—by a wide margin—takeaway food. It is not the direct cost of less healthy food choices that drives their consumption. On the contrary, it seems that UK consumers are prepared to pay more for taste and convenience. Neither price nor nutritional quality are necessarily considered paramount by food shoppers.”
If you claim cooking takes more time, first, do you know how to cook? As I’ve learned to cook, I spend less time preparing than ever. Second, several sites report Americans watch on average five hours of television per day (source 1, source 2, source 3).
Accessibility is another story than affordability. Communities often can’t access food because doof purveyors like McDonald’s, Starbucks, Walmart, and convenience stores relying on Coke, Pepsi, Frito-Lay, Budweiser, and tobacco squeezed them out. If you want to restore access to food in doof-flooded areas, I suggest the most counterproductive things you can do are to excuse or support doof purveyors. Like payday loan or cheap liquor stores, they extract wealth and time, impoverishing neighborhoods and creating dependency.
If you want to help such communities, support farmers markets, coops, and credit unions if you can to help fund their growth. Once all markets were farmers markets and sold only food, not doof.
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