Reply #45: Rice, potatoes, & bread.

[distantearlywarning]

Cheap, yes. But also starches. Eating too many starches vs. veggies or protein causes sharp increases in weight gain, at least in some individuals (like me, for instance, a person with a metabolic disorder and a family history of insulin resistance). This is doubly true when you consider that most bread these days cpntains high fructose corn syrup. It's not "healthy" to make the largest portion of one's diet starches, despite what the USDA food pyramid wants us all to believe. Also, there is evidence that canned vegetables don't provide nearly the same nutritional value as fresh veggies.

And that doesn't even touch on the difference between living in the country where you have space and time to grow fresh produce and being poor in the city where you might have a 14 hour a day job and (maybe) a small concrete patio and very possibly no transportation to places like seed stores.

I agree that $11 garlic is excessive and not representative of what poor people should eat. But consider this: in my large city, we also pay upwards of $3/lb for apples. Not organic apples or fancy apples, just regular apples at the regular grocery store. Having one apple a day for a week for one person could cost over $10. Just for freakin' apples. (And yes, I could probably drive 10 miles somewhere and find a farmer's market for cheaper apples, but if I worked 2 jobs and had kids, how much time could you reasonably expect me to spend driving around comparison shopping????) If you have $20 to feed yourself and 3 kids for the week, are you going to spend half of that on apples for 3 days, or are you going to buy boxed mac & cheese at $.99 each?

I'm lucky now, because I can afford to spend the same amount as my mortgage payment every month on groceries (and that's literally what it costs these days to feed 2 people with 4 servings of fruits/veggies, fresh meat, non-HFCS bread & so forth). But I once was working two jobs without transportation in a very high COL town, and I remember vividly what I could afford to eat. Ramen, mac & cheese, and yes, some potatoes and rice. When I went on food stamps for about 3 months once, it was a serious luxury because for the first time I was able to afford fresh meat and veggies on occasion. Yes, I suppose I could have eaten lentils and beans, but when you have such a shitty life otherwise, the last thing you want to do is spend your 1 hour a day of free time cooking tasteless food and then eating it. Not to mention finding the time to learn how to cook lentils and beans. (How dare poor people experience ANY happiness in their lives, even if it's just a box of Kraft Mac & Cheese at night! Those lazy bastards! They should be eating bark and twigs until they learn to grow their own veggies on their concrete patio in the ghetto!)

Until you live that life for a while, you'll never understand. But perhaps you could at least try not to judge if you really don't know how it works.

BTW, since some people here seem to think that anyone who buys organic food and then bitches about the cost has invalidated their own argument, consider this: a few weeks ago, the husband and I each took a copy of our typical weekly grocery list to two grocery stores. No $11 garlic or special items, just fresh meat, veggies, dairy, etc - basically a high-protein, low starch, high fiber fresh food diet for two people for a week. One grocery store we went to was Whole Foods (aka Whole Paycheck) and the other was our neighborhood grocery store, a chain store which is in a relatively low-income neighborhood. We wanted to know if we were overspending on groceries by buying organic "fancy" stuff at Whole Foods. We comparison shopped the exact same foods (e.g., non-hormone meat at Whole Foods vs. regular meat at chain store; non-HFCS bread at Whole Foods vs. regular bread at chain store, etc.). We wrote down the cost of everything and then tallied it up when we got home.

You and others may be surprised to know that Whole Foods actually came out lower by about $3. So essentially there was no difference in cost between shopping organic at Whole Foods and our local store. And actually, we figured that we actually come out more than $50 ahead monthly by shopping at Whole Foods if you factor in the fact that the green produce and meats that we typically get from Whole Foods is typically MUCH fresher (non-moldy strawberries, day-old vs. week old fish, etc.) and thus we can actually eat more of it and it stays around longer.