Is Junk Food Really Cheaper?

Mark Bittman is among the country’s most widely respected food writers and an advocate of home cooking. His How to Cook Everything Vegetarian is one of my most used cookbooks.

In today’s New York Times Bittman provides a thoughtful rebuke to the widely held precept that poor people are fat because fast food is a cheaper source of calories than home cooked meals. In a country where half the population consumes too many calories, it makes no sense to measure the value of food by the calorie. A meal cooked at home will cost less money for the same number of calories, but these calories will be far healthier.

Unfortunately, people don’t want to cook. Cooking is work – people don’t want to work more. Even though there is time in the day to watch television, there is no time to chop onions, steam vegetables, scramble an egg or make a grilled cheese sandwich. Fast food companies spent $4.2 billion in marketing in 2009, much of it on television advertising. “Furthermore, the engineering behind hyperprocessed food makes it virtually additive.” The more fast feed that we eat, the more that we crave.

What should be done? Bittman has two concrete proposals. We must change our culture and celebrate real food by bypassing “fast-produced, eaten-on-the-run, high-calorie, low-nutrition junk.” We also need to make sure that real food is affordable and available to everyone. For almost all Americans there is a choice: if you can drive to McDonald’s you can drive to Stop & Shop. If you have time to push the buttons on the remote control, you have time to cook food.