It's quite a tired take that the obesity epidemic is because Americans have too much affordable access to good food. America has affordable access to terrible food and while people can keep their bellies full on that actually eating healthily is a luxury.
You're misinformed. Cheap healthy options are readily available at the grocery store. If you don't want to spend time on food preparation you can substitute canned vegetables for fresh which is slightly less cheap but still cheap.
In the extreme case you don't even need a proper kitchen - a microwave, a rice cooker, and some large bowls will suffice. You can reliably find all of those things at thrift stores in the US. You also have the option to purchase dry staples in bulk (rice, oatmeal, pasta, etc) in 10, 25, or even 50 lb sacks if you can find a local place that stocks them (costco for example).
This is provably untrue. It is such a tired trope to constantly refute. I guess I need to start a google doc with citations.
It is FAR cheaper to buy staples and cook your own food at home. And healthier. You do not need to eat farm to table veggies and local meat for this to happen.
Anyone who tells you it is cheaper to eat fast food and prepared junk foods is misinformed or outright lying with an agenda.
Just look at every single immigrant community that migrates here. They know how to prepare food for cheap.
Yes, it takes a time investment and skill. No, the trope of "single mother with 3 jobs" is not a thing. Those people are already feeding their family healthy foods for the most part since they have self-selected for caring and putting effort in. I lived in communities with many such folks, and the ones holding down three jobs in no way fed their kids fast food or microwaved meals on a regular basis.
If anything is a luxury it's being able to eat prepared fast foods for the majority of your diet. Growing up McDonalds was a twice a year treat for special occasions. Peeling potatoes and baking bread from actual flour and yeast was the daily chores.
People who can afford crappy fast food can afford chicken breast and rice with veggies store bought and made at home. Just easier to kick back with a Big Mac and fries after work. Personal responsibility is key
Personal responsibility is code word for "I do not want to look at causes of issues, just find someone powerless enough to be blamed." So you pile ever exceeding expectation on that most powerless people in the system and blame them for predictable society wide failure.
“Made at home” means time. I cook 3 meals a day in my house and it’s a significant dent in other things I could be doing. The more stress I take on from work, the less effortful food I make. I have taken years in my adult life to get good enough to “throw something together” that is healthy and is something I enjoy eating and would choose over a burger. I still eat a lot of burgers.
Personal responsibility sure but that often comes with utter ignorance of the systems that people find themselves in, especially poverty and mental health. The bottom 50% own nothing, have no security, and everything that makes their lives a little easier are things they’ll consider.
You don't need to cook 3 meals a day, eating 2 or 1 meal a day is perfectly doable. And cooking once and eating it over 2-3 days is perfectly doable.
Or you can just eat bread with 1-2 topics of choice. Perfectly viable and fine for a long work day. Its only a problem if you eat to much.
> and everything that makes their lives a little easier are things they’ll consider.
Consider it, but don't cry about cost when you door dash 5 times a week. This is actually pretty common. People Door Dash, pay with Klarna and then pay Klarna with Credit cards.
Great. So stop saying it's cheaper. It's more convenient, sure. Takes effort, yep.
I was obese most of my adult life. It absolutely cost me more to eat cheap (as in nutrition) shitty fast foods than prepare things from base ingredients. It was more convenient and it was the easy path for sure, but absolutely in no way a means to save money. It costs vastly more. I could only afford to get fat once I started making money. Growing up we were too poor to eat that horribly.
Your story is your story and nobody can say it isn't, but it reads strange to me to comment about cost when the crux of my statement was about the relative time and effort to cook rather than cost.
But since you'd like to speak about price it seems, I'd posit that for a good long while there, dollar menu items were genuinely about as cheap as you could get for food - $4 on the way home from work and get an hour of time back to unwind? It was worth it to me - heck, a lot of the time I used that time to be in the gym.
I'll grant you that pretty much any restaurant you'd sit down in where you don't pay at the counter is utterly more expensive - 3x the ingredient cost at least.
But we're not comparing steaks and chicken entrees here, we're comparing rice & beans and chicken breast vs a McDouble or $5 footlong. Weeknight roasts that you have to plan ahead for, Sunday meal prep days. Its all time - I recognize this because I choose to take that time on, and its time that I don't get to spend on other stuff.
Overweight/obesity combined: ~73-75% (nearly 3 in 4 adults) in the US.