$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.

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.

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.

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.

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..

Back in the olden days there were classes in “schools” that taught “home economics” and such. Probablly not taught now.

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.

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.

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