In any major city basically, unless you give zero value to the time spent cooking/prepping.

Just going by Walmart prices in dc:

Salad veggies and other veggies in the meal, probably 2-3 a day. Fruit another 1-2. That only gets us like 200-300 calories. Let’s eat some cheap carbs and spend another dollar on 700 calories or so worth of rice, bread, or whatever carbs you fancy. That leaves 1000 calories unaccounted for. Let’s do a table spoon of oil basically for free. About 900 calories left. Another dollar on two eggs and two slices of bacon. About 600 calories left. Spend another 2 on chicken breasts, spend another $1 for another 200 calories for whatever indulgence and we are still within a reasonable range.

That’s 8-10 a day at Walmart prices assuming no waste and a pretty strict diet. Add the value of time and some unavoidable eating away from home, you’re easily at 800-1000 a month. 600 at least.

To push the cost even lower we’d be eating more than 50% carbs, drink a lot of milk, and/or relying on some cheap canned food.

There is a big difference between 600 per person per month and 800 to 1000. 1000 per person per month would imply that a family of 3 would spend almost the entirety of a median American household after tax income on food.

In any case, markksman clarified that its under the blue ribbon pricing model which makes the 800 to 1000 figure fairly accurate as blue ribbon is fairly expensive.

The first paragraph is kind of the problem. To eat healthy, even cooking at home, can’t really be done without increasing what Americans spend on food on average. Even at 600 a month per person, that’s still 1800 a month for a family of 3. That’s a lot even for the median household. It is not surprising that most households would opt for junk food that has much better calories/dollar ratios.

This doesn’t even consider the fact that to realize such low costs for a family of three is a job by itself.

I know you're trying to break this all down and stuff, but you're just wrong. $1000 a month!! LOLOL. Like have you ever had to eat on a budget? It's not hard stay under $10/day while eating pretty healthy, buying cheaper cuts of meat and lots of fresh produce (and being in a big city). And that's cooking for one. Costs per meal per person go down the more you're making.

I'm pretty sure people who think you can't eat cheap and healthy have never been to a mexican market

Grizy, are you implying that the cost of food is too expensive in the US?

No. I am saying people are being stupid about the costs (including opportunity costs) of eating healthy and underestimating how much the cheapness of junk food (much of the cheapness due to farm subsidies, particularly corn) is causing unhealthy diets.

It’s really not rocket science. I came from a pretty well to do family and even my parents would just get lazy and dump a kfc bucket meal on the dinner table or a little caesars pizza at least once a week. It’s just cheaper and more convenient. For low income parents working long and unstable hours, it gets even harder to resist the easy way out.

But if you stop subsidizing corn (and therefore the feedstock for much of the meat in our junk food supply chain), prices between junk food and healthy food will get a lot closer. Of course it means we’d need to spend more on food (and food subsidies to the poor) but it would actually change our eating behavior.

The time and other hidden costs of eating well are underappreciated by most people. I made a huge pot of beans this past weekend, the ultimate poor people healthy food. I netted about 20 servings, with a base ingredient cost of about $30, salt, pepper and spices not included. Between shopping, prepping, stirring, tasting, storing and cleanup it took around 5 hours labor spread over 3 days, plus another 4 inactive where I had to be home to mind the pot. I also had to plan ahead and save the ham bone from the ham I bought a couple months ago.

To make that many beans at once I needed a huge stockpot much bigger than you'd find in most home kitchens - $50 for a cheap one. It will take me months to eat all those beans and they take up a good bit of space so I need a standalone freezer to store them - $250, plus electricity. You can't keep food in a freezer that long without freezer burn unless you vacuum seal it - $150 for sealer, 25¢ each per bag.

Oh, and if I eat my beans with rice I need to figure another 20-30 minutes cooking time, plus cleanup.

That's me being about as frugal and doing economies of scale about as well possible in a home kitchen. Conservatively valuing my time at minimum wage, I'm well over $5 per serving for about 750 calories of rice and beans. And I needed almost $500 of equipment to do it that you won't find in most people's houses, especially poor people's.

Fruits and vegetables are not only the cheapest but also the laziest thing we eat. No cooking at all.

The biggest problem is simply people would rather eat junk and we're all too lazy to fight it.

Caesars pizza was pretty good 25 years ago though, then some CEO figured out they could make more money if it was instead cheap **** and I haven't had it since.

Someone smarter than me pointed out this is going to basically be the version of the 20s where it's all going to be white people food to indoctrinate--same as it ever was.

Not to pick on you in particular, but how is this the case? $2 worth of veggies has like 100 calories, whereas the same $2 spent on peanut butter has over 2000 calories. People need calories and things like PB, rice, bread, cheese are the most cost-effective ways to get it. Fruit and Veggies you need in the long run so your health doesn't go to ****.

Even cp thinks this is impractical.

I know a lot of "clean" eaters will kill me for this. But a spicy chicken crisp from Wendy's, a protein shake made with two cups of milk is actually pretty solid in terms of macro-nutrients. You can make up the deficiencies (honestly can't think of a lot) with a centrum pill.

My mom took in the only homeless person in our suburban town. We got govt cheese for it. Yeah it was quite tasty - mild cheddar.

This. And there's a 100% chance it turns into a gigantic crony boondoggle.

Also

i actually learned something from my facebook feed today on this topic....

in oklahoma we have already been doing this to native americans(no surprise) for like a century. And it has apparently been working horribly.

so not only is this a dumb idea, but we already have 100 years of data that its a terrible inefficient unsuccessful idea.

My wife and I live in a pretty major city, although it's not as expensive as somewhere like New York or SF, obviously. We usually spend about 60-70 bucks a week on groceries, and we eat out or get takeout 2-3x a week for like another 100-150 bucks total. Obviously that's not being frugal, but we're lucky enough that we can afford to do that.

Add that up and, combined, we're looking at 800-900 bucks for two 30 year olds. WTF kind of awful budgeting are you guys doing that you think 800 PER PERSON per month in food is reasonable?

I'm confused at to why people are even surprised that the Trump administration can't govern itself out of a wet paper sack?

Do you value your time at zero?

Wait, are you seriously valuing the time it takes to cook food as like $20/hour then saying it costs 800-1k pp per month to eat healthily?

As far as groceries go, I am the same as the previous poster. I spend ~$100 / week at trader joe's for 2 people. We don't particularly cut corners and get shrimp, packaged salad, etc so you could eat even cheaper. We eat out maybe 4 meals a week for $20 pp so another $160, conservatively. So combined, we're at $1k per month and that is absolutely not trying to be cheap on food.

FWIW we live in NYC

Also, this is actually a pretty expensive way to eat healthy. When I was in school I hate oatmeal with water and a protein scoop (myprotein.com) for breakfast, chicken or turkey breast with brown rice and a veggie for lunch, a couple scoops of protein for a snack, and something similar to lunch for dinner. All in, like $7 a day for a 6'0 200 pound. This took like 3 hours of prep MAX a week.

My food stamp philosophy is if we're going to put guardrails on food stamps to impart wisdom to those on it we really shouldn't ask anything of them that we wouldn't ask of ourselves. Can't buy hot or prepared foods? How many people have gone a week without eating out when they felt they needed to or did a check and realized the hot chicken at the Walmart deli is nearly the same as buying it yourself? Can't buy energy drinks? I just had three energy drinks to help me through my 8 hour work training class after waking up at 4 to feed my kid. I needed those energy drinks to make it.

In reality a lot of these concerns about poor food stamp people is just a smokescreen to try and limit the costs as much as possible without directly saying that we don't want to help people eat.

Those numbers just look off.

2 scoops? 3 scoops of protein? Let's say 3, that's like 360 calories for about 2 dollars. Another 1000 calories on just brown rice and oatmeal for let's say a dollar. Fill the last 600 calories with chicken breasts and you're already at $7 for 2000 calories. My guess is because you were a student you had free calories elsewhere. It's not impossible but you're talking about a professional model level of diet discipline.

Same thing with the Trader Joe food unless you're telling me you guys literally never get food elsewhere (free or paid) and never go out with coworkers. Unless you guys eat lots of pasta (or some other cheap carb) and olive oil (or some other cheap fat), which current diet orthodoxy says is bad for you. Common sense approach.

Let's say your 4 meals come out to 4k calories total. How are you paying for the last 10k calories with $50? 5k calories on pasta for $5? Then what? Another 3000 calories on chicken breasts would be about $20. Let's say 8 dollars on cheap fat (oil/bacon/whatever) and some fruits for the other 2k calories and seasoning and misc cooking goods. That's assuming zero slippage and you're left with about 2 dollars a day to get your vegetables which have basically no calorie. It's not impossible but you're pushing the boundaries pretty hard.

That brings me to another thing that I don't think people in good jobs realize. We're surrounded by free food because our employers hate letting us leave the office to get food.

https://www.soylent.com/

just send everybody a jumbo bucket of powder once a month. what u want? chocolate flavor? we out. we only got banana. you gotta send in a form wb7-1b by february 15th if you want chocolate flavor

Does it take much/any more time to cook at home than it does to go out to eat?

Soylent and Huel are cruel and unusual punishment on normal people who haven’t convinced themselves that healthy food should not taste good.

Judging by the behavior of working parents all over America, even stay at home parents, yes. If not time, then effort and mental energy.

There is also this thing with giving kids money to eat out because parents are at work or that kids are away from home.

I am not trying to prove that eating healthy on 300 a month per person is impossible. I'm trying to show getting healthy food costs that low, even just down to 600/person/month involves a lot of sacrifices and has significant opportunity costs, especially to families with limited means where parents are more likely to work unstable and long hours.

I'd put cooking on the leisure side of the leisure and work chart even if it isn't an exactly a leisurely activity. So, yeah, I wouldn't put it above zero in terms of trade offs.