The Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue covers
The Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue never had much to do with sports, unless sex is a sport. Which I suppose it is for some people. But it used to feature conventional models of the “beautiful face and very trim figure” type, preferably airbrushed.
I have no problem with that. Models are models, and they’re there to be eye candy and to display the clothing to advantage.
But now various woke messages have taken over – not entirely, but certainly quite often – and the current swimsuit issue features some interesting cover choices (for what I assume are copyright reasons, I’m having some trouble transferring the photos, so I’ll just link them).
First we have Elon Musk’s mom (hey, this is my second Musk post of the day) – who has been a model for much of her life and is now 74. She says:
“My first reaction was, I could never dream up something like that because why would anyone have a 74-year-old on their cover, especially in a swimsuit,” Musk joked with PEOPLE of her covergirl moment. “I do think it’s going to make women feel more comfortable in their seventies when they swim, as well as women in their twenties and thirties.”
I respectfully submit that magazine covers haven’t traditionally been designed to “make women feel more comfortable,” and if that is the point of this one I’ll have to point out that Maye Musk does not have the typical body of a 74-year-old woman. Her face – which does look fairly age-appropriate – has got those great bones, and her body doesn’t seem to have been visited all that much by gravity or by adipose tissue. To start out as a model means you start out with an advantage anyway, and I’m not knocking Maye Musk. More power to her. But her cover is not really going to make most 74-year-old women (or even 24-year-old women) feel better about themselves.
You can find all of the covers here. Two of the women, Kim Kardashian and singer Ciara (I’ve never heard of the latter before, but I don’t really have my finger on the pulse of popular culture), are more conventionally young (or youngish; Kardashian is 41, but has apparently been helped along body- and face-wise by medical science) and more conventionally pretty and fit. However, both are rather unusually callipygian, which I suppose is A Thing these days.
Which brings us to plus-size model Yumi Nu, who I suppose also fits the “POC” bill by being half-Japanese. You can find her photo at that link, too. I’ve seen outraged discussions of it around the internet, and it’s certainly true that most people don’t consider plus-size models to be eye candy – although there is a small contingent of men who find them especially attractive. This particular woman seems to have aroused additional ire by supposedly not being pretty enough in the face, but to me her face looks pretty enough, and I believe that if it had been transposed to a more conventional model’s body no one would have any special complaints about her.
I’m not a man and I’m not the target audience for all of this, but as a woman I have to say this about the swimsuits chosen for Maye Musk and for Yumi Nu: ugh, in different ways. Musk has a sleek and sophisticated vibe and her swimsuit is at variance with that instead of highlighting it. The ruffles are too sweet and girlish and the color is unflattering to her (and would be to most people). As for poor Yumi, that swimsuit does her no favors at all. It would be exceptionally difficult to wear well even for the slimmest and most model-ish of models, with all the cutouts and the boob-flattening top.
What were the people who chose these swimsuits (I assume it’s not the models themselves) thinking? I could dress those women better.
At least all of this is a respite from politics. Except that it’s not, because the choice of an older woman and a plumper woman for swimsuit covers is all about politics these days.
Don’t forget all the WNBA players.
Ciara is a has been singer that hasn’t had a hit in a decade but happens to be married to NFL QB Russell Wilson which has greatly elevated her profile.
It is virtually impossible to imagine her being involved in this without her being married to a famous athlete. Feminism.
Yes on Maye Musk. A sleek one-piece in black and white would look much better on her.
Yumi Nu’s face is pretty. The suit is ugly, and she’s too heavy for good health.
And thanks for a new word, callipygian.
Far worse than the celebration of Yumi Nu (somewhat overweight, but not outrageously so) was the billboard two years ago in NYC of the truly obese Jari Jones, remarkably fat, but also black and trans (ergo, not to be criticized), as well as the appearance of the equally obese (not to mention extremely annoying) LIzzo on the cover of Vogue. To the “wokesters” and the “wokerati”, the very existence of standards is an offense, especially if such standards can be castigated as “Eurocentric”.
Kate:
I agree about a black-and-white suit on Musk.
But I don’t agree that Nu is necessarily too heavy for health. She’s hardly morbidly obese although she’s significantly overweight. But being overweight to that degree does not have a simple relation to health. Plenty of people that weight are very healthy, and plenty of underweight people are unhealthy. It’s complicated, and we know less about it than we think we know; see this.
It is also another sad reminder of how so many great entities have just collapsed. As a kid that was obsessed with sports my parents got me a subscription to Sports Illustrated (and The Sporting News) when I was just a wee lad in about 1980 and I kept that SI subscription non stop until about ten years ago and when I did stop it was because the magazine was declining greatly (they cut the number of editions consistently) while the price was increasing.
Industries and technologies change and adapt but that doesn’t mean it’s always for the better.
The swimsuit issue was always just silly to me not because I don’t like beautiful women but because there were always many other places to go to see them beyond this one issue of the magazine.
Well, Neo, she’s borderline as to health. Her chances of developing health problems related to weight will increase as she ages. I certainly don’t favor the unhealthily skinny standard for many models, or the trend for buttock implants, either. On weight, it may be an advantage to be slightly overweight. One has a few pounds to give to a high fever and remain safe.
j e, I was going to say that Yumi Nu is a considerably better choice for the category than Lizzo. If only they’d given her a flattering swimsuit!
Kate:
She’s not necessarily borderline as to health. It really depends a lot on her heredity and her activity level. We can’t come to any conclusions about the health of an individual based on general statistics that are so iffy. If she weighed 500 pounds, it would be much more certain that she is in line for health problems. But she doesn’t.
Could be, Neo. She’s certainly not morbidly obese, like Lizzo or Stacey Adams. People with a BMI of 30+ (with all the caveats about BMI) are at higher risk for complications from COVID-19, for instance. But she does look fit.
The choice of an older woman and a plumper woman for swimsuit covers is all about politics these days.
Could be worse: the cover could have featured “Dr.” Jill and Kamala– and if you want someone older than Maye Musk, how about Pelosi?
Just looked at Yumi Nu’s stats, per some online source. 5’11”, 242 pounds. To stay under the 30 BMI, she’d need to be about 200 pounds. I speak as a woman close to her stated height. When I was too heavy for my taste and was pre-diabetic, I didn’t weight anywhere near that.
Kate:
That’s pretty much meaningless, as I already explained. Your heredity, age, general health, exercise level, etc., has little to do with hers.
By the way, she doesn’t look like she weighs quite as much as that in the photo. I wonder whether she’s lost a bit of weight.
Kate:
By the way, I just looked up her height and weight and got quite the variety of answers. Everything from 5’6″ to 5’11” and from 160 to 242, with many other numbers along the way.
If she’s 5’11”, she’s way over 160. If she’s 5’6″, maybe. So I guess we’ll have to file this under “I dunno.”
Exercise would make a big difference. I weigh more now than I did in part because I have a lot more muscle mass than I did when I was a stick. I don’t think the stick profile was particularly healthy. It’s hard to tell from the SI photo. I don’t see signs of the sculpting which would indicate she lifts regularly. And it’s true, of course, that some ethnicities tend to be “rounder” than others, all within healthy limits.
You’re not going to get me to agree that she represents a “healthy” profile, but then, that wasn’t SI’s intention.
These are all lovely beautiful women, I like Maye looking rather fine, my wife is two years older than Maye and she is beautiful and I had no idea how beautiful older women could be until the years passed on by and here we are. As for the larger woman, she appears to be an attractive almost six foot plus size woman and that’s that. I never gave the SI swimsuit issue much thought, perhaps a glance on line when the issue comes out and they have done a great job getting a lot of publicity and discussion with their choices this year so maybe that was some good selection of models this time.
Why is Kim Kardashian wearing gloves with her swimsuit? Is that really a thing now?
Just looked it up. Apparently it’s her thing. https://www.distractify.com/p/why-does-kim-kardashian-always-wear-gloves
Once again the Left rejects human nature. The powers that be at S.I. have decided to continue the process of emasculating their readership. When sales of the swimsuit issue continue to decline, the wokeness will be inculcated into the regular issues. That will lead to a similar decline in readership.
I suspect that the poor choices in swimsuits for Maye Musk and Nu may have been intentional. If so, most likely a quiet protest by internal elements at S.I.
It goes with the abolition of the sonnet the tearing down of traditional views of beauty
Miguel Cervantes:
Depends on which traditional views of beauty we’re talking about. For much of Western history, the ideal of beauty for a woman was considerably heavier than it is today.
Fair point certainly in the baroque period rubens maybe the early enlightenment hogarth into the time of georgiana
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/223280093995660223/
I found the film portrayal by knightley unplausible
Let’s not forget that wealth aids the fight against gravity and age.
Well dontcha know, those old standards of beauty were nothing more than tools for the patriarchy to dominate women. And they’re unfair to and hurt those women who don’t measure up to those standards. Because y’know, if we tear down those standards then everyone will be equal and no one will feel hurt. Viva La Revolucion!
True that Venus de Milo and baroque paintings show women heavier than is considered perfect today. Think also of Marilyn Monroe and her generation. The SI model is heavier than those.
The bottom line is that this magazine issue was always meant to get men to buy it. It appears to have a different goal now.
“The choice of an older woman and a plumper woman for swimsuit covers is all about politics these days.”
Side bar story: we are close friends with a family whose two oldest daughters are best friends with our daughters. Their youngest daughter has always been way overweight and by the time she was a senior in HS, was close to 300lbs though she is about 5’8″. Anyway, she wanted to apply to some higher level colleges despite her grades at the C level and SAT below 1000. She applied to my wife’s alma mater, which shocked my wife as it has fairly high standards. Girl goes for the in person interview and a few days later is accepted. My wife could not believe it, while I had predicted she would be immediately accepted based on her weight. My wife had never heard of the newer academic fad of “other bodied” which places obese people in a protected class along with blacks, etc. End of the story: she lasted just her freshman year due to failing grades and transferred back home to the local state community college. The elite school got to virtue signal at the cost of wasting a year of a person’s life, but such is academia now days.
I agree that the swimsuits are ugly and unsuited for the people wearing them. Which is really rather odd. It’s as if the goal is to make sure the swimsuit issue is the opposite of what it used to be. If the swimsuit issue is no longer of interest, or considered sexist or whatever, it would make more sense to just discontinue it. Instead they have to use it to do penance or something. Strange times we live in.
I also agree that you cannot tell how healthy someone is or is not just by looking at them and knowing their stats. A friend of mine was very overweight and her doctor was bugging her about metabolic disease etc. So she submitted to all the blood tests and whatnot and they all came back normal. Her doctor was so mad!
(She has since lost weight with a personal trainer because she was ready and she was tired of being heavy. Shaming fat people does not work.)
People are much more different from one another than is generally realized. Apparently even the way we metabolize vitamins is different among individuals — nobody ever thought to test for that until recently.
Yumi Nu is pretty. But that suit is a really bad choice. Ditto Maye Musk. I also think the Ciara suit is a bad choice, as well: “Look! Ginormous a$$!” But she is not as disserviced by her suit as the first two are by theirs.
Perhaps the suits foisted on them was a passive aggressive way of someone: the photographer, the person planning the shoot… to undermine the wokeness of using an older model and a plus size model. “You forced me to use these models, but I’m going to make you regret it.” I would think of they had more appropriate swimsuits that are more flattering to them, there would not be as much discussion.
I don’t they selected their suits themselves. NO ONE would willingly wear that thing on Maye Musk, and I would think Yumi Nu would know better than to select the suit she wore.
If they did select them themselves, I bet the other options were equally, if not more egregious
But it used to feature conventional models of the “beautiful face and very trim figure” type, preferably airbrushed.
Do you mean like this?
https://sicovers.com/featured/rebecca-romijn-swimsuit-1999-sports-illustrated-cover.html
Originally, I was going to post this as a tiny joke (and wasn’t going to), but look at the swimsuit. It is made from a somewhat fine chainmail, and the caption is “Rebecca Unchained.” It is not fitted very well either probably because chainmail doesn’t conform very well, but also perhaps because it would be damn uncomfortable if the straps were tightened much.
I think SI has had a habit of using extreme and downright weird swimsuits in these efforts, although the two mentioned by Neo don’t exactly fit that description. Maybe “attention getting” is the point.
The whole uproar about Jordan Peterson has really gotten me thinking. He said she wasn’t beautiful. Now, beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, but this is a case of the elites telling us that 2+2 = 5.
As someone 5″5′, and weighing a bit over 150 pounds (down from over 170), I don’t think my body style is ‘beautiful’ in a bikini. I’ve got curves in the right places, so I look decent, but the camera adds weight and can be unflattering for a swimsuit picture.
It appears that the left is no longer satisfied with controlling the words we use, but also our thoughts and desires. No surprise there, but they’re getting very blatant about it.
While she has a pretty face, I can’t fathom the typical red-blooded American male feeling very attracted to her. They can’t decree what is sexually attractive , so regardless of personal tastes, I’m with Dr. Peterson on this.
Faith2014:
I actually disagree about Peterson. Had he written something like, “I don’t find her beautiful, and I don’t think most people would,” I think that would have been okay. But to declare as an objective and universal truth that she’s not beautiful, period, was both absurd and mean-spirited, very unlike him. I think her face actually is rather beautiful but her body is not and not a qualification for model status. But there is no question that some people would find her body beautiful and some of those people are men who like heavier women, and certainly in past cultural epochs those men were more numerous.
Kate:
By the way, here’s my post on the fact that Monroe wasn’t heavy at all, even by the standards of today. There are reasons that the idea that she was heavier persists, however – I go into it in the post.
physicsguy @ 8:38am,
That is simply astounding! Wow!
Neo I’m so glad you talked about the choice of those hideous swimsuits for these models—now I know I’m not the only one. Especially on the overweight model. And did you notice her pose? An almost straight-on camera angle, which is always unflattering for any body. I was trying to figure out why they didn’t have her standing a little sideways with that model pose that makes women look thinner and elegant instead of like a block of cheese. Then I noticed that her stomach-al area looks pretty round, and wondered if the nasty stretchy swimsuit would just make her look like a sad beer-bellied Santa if they were to photograph her with the stomach at any side angle.
It’s unlikely that any of the commenters here subscribe to SI, or will buy the issue.
The thread is not complete without this post.
https://freebeacon.com/satire/fat-man-sports-illustrated/
Andrew Stiles • May 21, 2022
“Representation matters: Full-figured, aesthetically challenged male bodies should be celebrated, not shunned”
There is the famous punch line from the joke about health and exercise; “round is a shape.”
Can we expect a SI cover with female Sumo wrestlers? Or a “trans-female” Sumo wrestler?
Elle MacPherson, Claudia Schiffer, Paulina Porizkova.
Nothing comparable has been identified since.
And this is one of THE best commercials, ever:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TSP5aqyUV8
Neo:
Posted on your linked thread, also:
I would take issue with Some Like It Hot as being her “most famous role”, first, given that it’s actually a Jack Lemmon/Tony Curtis vehicle, with Marilyn in a significant but secondary role.
Second — I assert to you, Neo, that her most famous role is virtually certainly The Seven Year Itch. The scene in it over the subway grate is so iconic it’s been redone, spoofed, and homaged more times than you can count.
As to her weight — I think she was quite normal for the time, when 36-24-36 was considered the ideal figure. Today, a bit more towards “Barbie” is classed as ideal (yes, “towards” Barbie… Barbie is absurd) — rib cage anywhere from 34-38, with a larger cup making the size, a smaller waist, with 22 closer to ideal, and I think, unless you’re the “big booty” fan, 34 is the ideal hip measurement.
Monroe was a bit steatopygious by today’s standards, but perfectly fine for those times. Women weren’t generally expected to be as lean, then, as today, either.
I’d also note she really does not appear to be that large in the chest, either. I’d guess at a large “b”, which is fairly average. She sold it well, however.
Personally, the best movie she was in was one of her first, a smallish role in Asphalt Jungle. In it, you can really see what made her catch men’s eyes at the time. And it’s a great movie, too.
Neo beat me to it on Marilyn Monroe, she was not heavy by the standards of her time, certainly not by ours. Her waist was a few inches smaller than average of her day and 12 inches smaller than the average of our day. I think the rumor to the contrary comes from dress sizing, and dress sizes today are nothing comparable to the 50s.
As for the “callipygian” Kardashian, “calli-” is “beautiful”, and de gustibus non disputandum, but “steatopygian” is I think the more neutral and accurate descriptor, not only for her but also for all those who aspire to her look but don’t have her resources for personal training, cosmetic surgery, wardrobe, etc.
Frederick:
Dress sizes did have something to do with it, but also the fact that in her most famous movie – “Some Like It Hot” – she was significantly heavier than usual because she was pregnant. Monroe tried to become a mother but had a number of miscarriages, unfortunately.
OBloody:
I repeat: “Some Like It Hot” was her most famous movie. The still photo from “Seven Year Itch” is well known, but most people don’t have a clue about the movie it came from anymore.
Monroe wore more than a B-cup. Take it from a woman. But she was not artificially enhanced and had a proportionate figure, bust-wise.
}}} It appears to have a different goal now.
Yes. it’s called “virtue signalling”.
I predict sales to be comparably in the toilet from a decade past. But that is part and parcel of “get woke, go broke”. The people in charge of these things don’t care about profits, which is why owning stock in many companies today is a total crapshoot. Somehow, management keeps getting put into place that does not think profitability is relevant to a company… and stays in charge, despite it being a traded stock company.
And, TBH, I would have thought for sure they’d have someone trans as the “cover (ahem!) girl” this year.
}}} Monroe wore more than a B-cup. Take it from a woman. But she was not artificially enhanced and had a proportionate figure, bust-wise.
And I’ve seen her nudes, several versions of the shot — different angles. She just wasn’t that big. Ergo, I believe you to be mistaken. Take it from a 45+ year connoisseur of beautiful women… 😉
}}} but most people don’t have a clue about the movie it came from anymore.
By that criteria, most people don’t have a clue about ANY movie prior to 1980.
I believe I’ve commented here in the past as to why, most modern people have never had the patience for pre-MTV movies, which are waaaaaaay too slow for them.
It’s good to be about my age, because you get a foot in both camps — you can enjoy the older, slower-paced movies and yet have no issues with newer faster-paced movies.
But I can also see some clunkiness in older movies, even classics like “Double Indemnity”. I just ignore it.
OBloody:
But I bet if you were to do a survey even now, a lot more people would have heard of or even seen “Some Like It Hot” than “The Seven-Year Itch.” It’s a very well-known movie, and even fits a little bit into the whole trans trend.
OBloody:
Do you think you’re the only person who has seen Monroe’s nude photos? Guess what? I’ve seen them too!
And as a woman, I probably have (a) seen more nude women than you, in dressing rooms (b) have discussed bra sizes with other women and bras in general; and (c) know from long personal experience how bras work, how their sizing works, and everything else connected with them – things that no man except perhaps a bra designer would know, no matter how long a connoisseur of beautiful women that man may be.
Marilyn Monroe did not wear a B-cup, which is quite small-breasted. Monroe was proportionate-busted, not huge and not small. I never said she was “that big” – but she wasn’t that small, either.
“Shaming fat people does not work.”
Shame, in general, does work. So does guilt and most of the other ways behavior has been regulated throughout the millennia. The problem is that they need to be consistently applied. They don’t work when, for example, someone puts on an extra 200 pounds and THEN you try to shame them. But a little shaming when negative behavior is in its early stages is how most human societies function.
Mike
MBunge:
But shaming fat people doesn’t work for the most part (although there is probably a small percentage of cases where it does indeed work) in a country with abundant food sources. I can’t think of a single country in any era that successfully shamed fat people into slimness when food was abundant.
Also, most societies in which food was not abundant were quite tolerant of fat people because to be thin often meant to be starving and poor and to be fat meant to be comfortable or even rich. Nowadays fat people are concentrated among the poorer, because we have abundance and fattening foods are often cheaper than supposedly more healthful foods.
If a person eats more when upset – and plenty of people both fat and thin do that – then shaming that person when the person gains weight tends to make the person eat more. Food is very often solace and consolation.
When you say shame works generally, that is true in honor/shame cultures, in which there is uniformity of the application of shame to change behavior. But I’m not aware of any such cultures using shame to change the eating behavior of fat people.
In fact, there’s already a lot of shame attached to being fat in our culture. That’s part of what this “fat is beautiful” campaign is meant to counter. But neither shame nor glorification helps, and the US grows fatter.
@neo:fattening foods are often cheaper than supposedly more healthful foods.
A little off-topic but totally worth unpacking. The cheapness is in time, I find, not money, and that’s the thing that is missing from the public discussion of “healthy” food, because what all the interests want is for tax money to be thrown at problems to benefit the bottom lines of the connected. Poorer people are lacking in time as well as in money.
An 8 oz bag of brand-name potato chips is about $3 – $4 (I checked Target online). The same source has 5 lbs of russet potatoes for half that price. You can buy 3700 calories of russet potatoes for the same price as 1300 from the 8oz bag of potato chips: much more protein and much less fat. (One potato has roughly the calories of an apple. If there’s such a thing as a “superfood” it’s potatoes.)
But you can’t take a potato out of a 5 lb bag and just chow down. You have to prepare it in some way. You can bake or boil it or whatever, and anything you do with that potato will probably be healthier than eating an 8 oz bag of potato chips, but it will take your time.
The same is true of virtually any prepackaged food: it is much more expensive than the same food’s ingredients prepared at home. But you have to put time in. (Of course you are paying for the time and convenience! It makes no economic sense to charge less for a manufactured product than for raw ingredients. I understand that there is little economic sanity in this public discussion, but what I can’t understand is people not knowing the prices of the food they shop for, they’re marked on the shelf for you.)
What our political class wants is to throw money at poor people to pad the bottom lines of places like Whole Foods. It will not work to help poor people eat better because poor people need time to prepare healthy food more than they need money to buy overpriced boutique healthy food. Hence poor people tend to get their calories from convenience food which is actually more expensive in money than buying vegetables and other ingredients to cook from scratch.
People who have time to do their own cooking (or make time is probably the better way to put it) have no trouble affording “healthy” food. All the talk of “food deserts” and whatnot is to disguise this problem, and make it instead a problem of needing to subsidize places like Whole Foods or even Walmart and Target. The “food deserts”, which rarely are real, are due to lack of demand, because the poor people who live in those areas do not perceive that they have time to cook from scratch. Poor immigrant neighborhoods on the other hand do not have this problem, because those people largely do cook at home.
The time/poverty/nutrition theory is interesting but is there any actual data or research to back it up or to assess other resources or factors?
Back in the olden days there were classes in “schools” that taught “home economics” and such. Probablly not taught now.
Frederick:
No, that’s not primarily what I’m talking about. I’m talking about noodles and white bread and tastycakes and doughnuts and fast food and stuff of that nature versus meat and fresh fruits and vegetables. It’s certainly possible to eat very well for little, though – as you say – if you do a lot of food prep and know what you’re doing (dried beans and soaking them, etc.). But fattening food tends to be both fast and cheap if you don’t want to buy the fancy quality pastry, etc..
It’s possible it’s becoming a cultural issue. As Frederick points out, some lower-income populations do have traditions of cooking at home, and that means their young people learn how to do it. They also learn to like home-cooked food instead of commercially-prepared food.
@neo: I’m talking about noodles and white bread and tastycakes and doughnuts and fast food and stuff of that nature versus meat and fresh fruits and vegetables.
Even so, it’s still primarily convenience and not cost.
Let’s take one item on your list. White bread is far cheaper to make at home than it is to buy at the store. Target online shows a cheap brand which is $1.19 for 20oz. The same source has 5 lbs of flour (80 oz) for $1.69. That can make much more than 4 times as much bread, so buying flour and making bread is at least 4 times cheaper. (Much more than 4 time because bread contains a lot of water, somewhere between 25% and 50% of bread by weight is water depending on the style; other ingredients are negligible. I make bread with flour, water, salt, and I don’t use store-bought yeast.)
Mind you that $1.19 for bread would have bought 2 1/2 pounds of potatoes, which would be much more food and much healthier–if you cook. As for doughnuts, a dozen doughnuts will be $10 – $15 (Krispy Kremes are nearly $2 apiece in my area). That’s 30 pounds of potatoes. You can live for a week off the money you spent on doughnuts!
Anything flour-based is going be cheaper than meat and green vegetables (except cabbage), sure, simply because it will be much easier to store and ship–but if your notion of vegetables includes potatoes and beans and carrots and onions and cabbage you’re going to be eating pretty cheaply if you are willing to cook; you won’t save much by living off white flour. Eggs can fulfill the meat function and are quite cheap, $1.39 for 12 if you buy normal and not free-range or organic or whatever.
When it comes to noodles you may be at the thing that is closest to being about the same cost to buy vs to make.
Frederick:
I’m not comparing the price of white bread to making it at home. I’m comparing the price of bought white bread to bought meat or bought fresh vegetables. It’s much easier AND cheaper to buy the former, slap some PB and jelly on it, and have quite a few calories in fairly short order.
I actually love PB and jelly sandwiches, but can’t eat them because peanuts give me migraines.
As for fast food, forget about it. Compare the price of something of the $1 value meal in terms of potatoes. There’s about 2.5 lbs of potatoes to the dollar and at McDonalds you are getting 140 calories worth of hash browns for that dollar.
It is simply not true, in terms of money, that fast food or prepackaged convenience food is cheaper than healthy food. It is true in terms of time, and until that is recognized the real problem will never be solved. Of course few people wish to actually solve it. I’m not in the business of making other people do what I think is best for them, so I don’t want to solve it for OTHER people, and most of the professionals want to direct tax money to subsidize big chains and agriculture.
@neo: I’m comparing the price of bought white bread to bought meat or bought fresh vegetables.
$1.19 = 20z bread = 2.5 lb potatoes = 12 eggs = pound of cabbage.
I think you are confounding the two things. The convenience factor is the majority of the price difference. You can eat healthy meals meeting all your nutritional and caloric needs much cheaper than even the cheapest convenience foods, though you won’t be eating fancy steaks obviously.