And to add to that, these companies hide addictive processed sugars and additives in such you that can be psychologically if not physically dependent on things without realizing it.
This is an interesting point. It's definitely easy to switch to cheaper calories. Candy bars have high calorie counts and are cheap. Even today in the UK, you could buy 2000 kcal worth of candy bars for about £1.60.
And the inflation will push some people toward such food choices. Maybe not that extreme, but switching to cheaper food generally means eating less nutritious food (unless you were over-spending), which is awful.
Being pushed into single-digits spending on food daily isn't outside the realm of reality. £10 a day is about £305 a month. This is a lot of money for some vulnerable groups, like large single parent families, retirees, students, some young adults, and similar.
The inflation also harms people's diets in a several ways: you must buy less food or less nutritious food for the same amount of money, and you have less money for food as other expenses have inflated. What is worse, less healthy food demand has long-term consequences to do with its supply going down and prices going up further.
What kind of candy bars are those? That's like 10 candy bars. A US Hershey bar is only 220 calories which is pretty standard for a candy bar. The real MVP for calories at minimum price is peanut butter. A bottle of Walmart peanut butter apparently goes for $2.18 currently and is 2880 calories total.
I've been thinking about this for many years. I really think flour is the best ratio of calories to dollar. However, I've been unable to satisfactorily quantify the energy and time costs into equivalents.
In Germany I'm able to buy 1kg of flour for about 50 euro cents at Edeka. I don't know how much bread that makes, but it is A LOT. I'm certain that it is significantly more than 2880 calories.
Flour is clearly the winner vs. peanut butter when comparing price per calories. At Walmart.com it is $2.12 for a 5lb (2.26kg) bag which is about 8250 calories. But yeah, processing that into bread (home energy cost and time cost) is tough to calculate and probably depends on your situation.
Still there are in-between options - pasta for instance is more bang for your buck than peanut butter and is much easier to prep yourself than bread.
It's interesting this conversation evolved into one about the most cost-effective sources of calories. Unintentionally, it serves as a poignant reflection of how things are going in our times. Many people will need to consider cost of calories seriously soon, many already do so.
Cheaper food is cheaper for a reason. The human body doesn’t just require calories. You need other nutrients too: protein, fat, vitamins and minerals. Usual advice is to eat a balanced diet, but that is expensive. Even eggs are expensive.
If everybody starts eating even more trash than usual then that will cost the government more in healthcare costs.
You can eat a balanced diet just off of canned food and rice. The fact that people expect to be able to eat fresh bell peppers in the middle of winter is the issue.
Eating seasonal and preserved foods is how we survived before the age of refrigeration and global logistics chains and maybe we should reconsider what is normal.
> Eating seasonal and preserved foods is how we survived before the age of refrigeration and global logistics chains and maybe we should reconsider what is normal.
That we survived doesn't mean we had a balanced diet.
Expecting everyone to just give up meat and bread for rice and beans is nonsense. And eating too many calories is unhealthy, but who are you to decide. You're blaming the victim.
If the prices on hotdogs are like what I've seen at the store, no it is not. They're not priced quite like a steak, but it's close. And then you got the buns which are also like $5 for a 8-pack of the cheap store brand ones.
A lot of the basic foodstuffs -- dry beans, grains, milk, eggs, flour -- have all gone up in price significantly. I've seen prices double over the last two years on some of these.
You don't have to buy the buns lol. I remember using sliced bread instead of the buns because it's cheaper if you only use 1 slice to wrap the meat. I still see the $1.99 for a loaf of wonder bread or whatever it's called. That's plenty of slices for plenty of hot dogs lol.
They've gone up in price, but they still retain their status as the cheapest meat. The people who aren't buying steak are buying something else instead.
In fact, I believe that the price of hot dogs have gone up more than the price of steak has. Yet people are still buying more hot dogs and less steak.
