OP-ED COLUMNIST
Is Junk Food Really Cheaper?
Published:
September 24, 2011
THE “fact” that junk food is cheaper than real food
has become a reflexive part of how we explain why so many Americans are
overweight, particularly those with lower incomes. I frequently read confident
statements like, “when a bag of chips is cheaper than a head of broccoli ...”
or “it’s more affordable to feed a family of four at McDonald’s than to cook a
healthy meal for them at home.”
Daniel Borris for
The New York Times
This is just plain wrong. In fact it isn’t cheaper
to eat highly processed food: a typical order for a family of four — for
example, two Big Macs, a cheeseburger, six chicken McNuggets, two medium and
two small fries, and two medium and two small sodas — costs, at the McDonald’s
a hundred steps from where I write, about $28. (Judicious ordering of “Happy
Meals” can reduce that to about $23 — and you get a few apple slices in
addition to the fries!)
In general, despite extensive government subsidies,
hyperprocessed food remains more expensive than food cooked at home. You can
serve a roasted chicken with vegetables along with a simple salad and milk for
about $14, and feed four or even six people. If that’s too much money,
substitute a meal of rice and canned beans with bacon, green peppers and
onions; it’s easily enough for four people and costs about $9. (Omitting the
bacon, using dried beans, which are also lower in sodium, or substituting
carrots for the peppers reduces the price further, of course.)
Another argument runs that junk food is cheaper
when measured by the calorie, and that this makes fast food essential for the
poor because they need cheap calories. But given that half of the people in
this country (and a higher percentage of poor people) consume too many calories
rather than too few, measuring food’s value by the calorie makes as much sense
as measuring a drink’s value by its alcohol content. (Why not drink 95 percent
neutral grain spirit, the cheapest way to get drunk?)
Besides, that argument, even if we all needed to
gain weight, is not always true. A meal of real food cooked at home can easily
contain more calories, most of them of the “healthy” variety. (Olive oil
accounts for many of the calories in the roast chicken meal, for example.)In comparing
prices of real food and junk food, I used supermarket ingredients, not the
pricier organic or local food that many people would consider ideal. But food
choices are not black and white; the alternative to fast food is not
necessarily organic food, any more than the alternative to soda is Bordeaux.
The alternative to soda is water, and the
alternative to junk food is not grass-fed beef and greens from a trendy
farmers’ market, but anything other than junk food: rice, grains, pasta, beans,
fresh vegetables, canned vegetables, frozen vegetables, meat, fish, poultry,
dairy products, bread, peanut butter, a thousand other things cooked at home —
in almost every case a far superior alternative.
“Anything that you do that’s not fast food is
terrific; cooking once a week is far better than not cooking at all,” says
Marion Nestle, professor of food studies at New York University and author of
“What to Eat.” “It’s the same argument as exercise: more is better than less
and some is a lot better than none.”
THE fact is that most people can afford real food.
Even the nearly 50 million Americans who are enrolled in the Supplemental
Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as food stamps) receive about $5
per person per day, which is far from ideal but enough to survive. So we have
to assume that money alone doesn’t guide decisions about what to eat. There
are, of course, the so-called food deserts,
places where it’s hard to find food: the Department of Agriculture says that
more than two million Americans in low-income rural areas live 10 miles or more
from a supermarket, and more than five million households without access to
cars live more than a half mile from a supermarket.
Still, 93 percent of those with limited access to
supermarkets do have access to vehicles, though it takes them 20 more minutes
to travel to the store than the national average. And after a long day of work
at one or even two jobs, 20 extra minutes — plus cooking time — must seem like
an eternity.
Taking the long route to putting food on the table
may not be easy, but for almost all Americans it remains a choice, and if you
can drive to McDonald’s you can drive to Safeway. It’s cooking that’s the real
challenge. (The real challenge is not “I’m too busy to cook.” In 2010 the
average American, regardless of weekly earnings, watched no less than an hour
and a half of television per day. The time is there.)
Multimedia
The core problem is that cooking is defined as
work, and fast food is both a pleasure and a crutch. “People really are
stressed out with all that they have to do, and they don’t want to cook,” says
Julie Guthman, associate professor of community studies at the University of
California, Santa Cruz, and author of the forthcoming “Weighing In:
Obesity, Food Justice and the Limits of Capitalism.” “Their reaction is, ‘Let
me enjoy what I want to eat, and stop telling me what to do.’ And it’s one of
the few things that less well-off people have: they don’t have to cook.”
It’s not just about choice, however, and rational
arguments go only so far, because money and access and time and skill are not
the only considerations. The ubiquity, convenience and habit-forming appeal of
hyperprocessed foods have largely drowned out the alternatives: there arefive fast-food restaurants for
every supermarket in the United States; in recent decades the adjusted for inflation price of
fresh produce has increased by 40 percent while the price of soda and processed
food has decreased by as much as 30 percent; and nearly inconceivable resources
go into encouraging consumption in restaurants: fast-food companies spent $4.2 billion on
marketing in 2009.
Furthermore, the engineering behind hyperprocessed
food makes it virtually addictive. A 2009 study by
the Scripps Research Institute indicates that overconsumption of fast food
“triggers addiction-like neuroaddictive responses” in the brain, making it
harder to trigger the release of dopamine. In other words the more fast food we
eat, the more we need to give us pleasure; thus the report suggests that the
same mechanisms underlie drug addiction and obesity.
This addiction to processed food is the result of
decades of vision and hard work by the industry. For 50 years, says David A.
Kessler, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and author of
“The End of Overeating,”
companies strove to create food that was “energy-dense, highly stimulating, and
went down easy. They put it on every street corner and made it mobile, and they
made it socially acceptable to eat anytime and anyplace. They created a food
carnival, and that’s where we live. And if you’re used to self-stimulation
every 15 minutes, well, you can’t run into the kitchen to satisfy that urge.”
Real cultural changes are needed to turn this
around. Somehow, no-nonsense cooking and eating — roasting a chicken, making a
grilled cheese sandwich, scrambling an egg, tossing a salad — must become
popular again, and valued not just by hipsters in Brooklyn or locavores in
Berkeley. The smart campaign is not to get McDonald’s to serve better food but
to get people to see cooking as a joy rather than a burden, or at least as part
of a normal life.
As with any addictive behavior, this one is most
easily countered by educating children about the better way. Children, after
all, are born without bad habits. And yet it’s adults who must begin to tear
down the food carnival.
The question is how? Efforts are everywhere. The People’s Grocery in
Oakland secures affordable groceries for low-income people. Zoning laws in Los
Angeles restrict the number of fast-food restaurants in high-obesity
neighborhoods. There’s the Healthy Food Financing
Initiative, a successful Pennsylvania program to build fresh food
outlets in underserved areas, now being expanded nationally. FoodCorps and
Cooking Matters teach young people how to farm and cook.
As Malik Yakini, executive director of the Detroit
Black Community Food Security Network, says, “We’ve seen minor successes, but
the food movement is still at the infant stage, and we need a massive social
shift to convince people to consider healthier options.”
HOW do you change a culture? The answers, not
surprisingly, are complex. “Once I look at what I’m eating,” says Dr. Kessler,
“and realize it’s not food, and I ask ‘what am I doing here?’ that’s the start.
It’s not about whether I think it’s good for me, it’s about changing how I
feel. And we change how people feel by changing the environment.”
Obviously, in an atmosphere where any regulation is
immediately labeled “nanny statism,” changing “the environment” is difficult.
But we’ve done this before, with tobacco. The 1998 tobacco settlement limited
cigarette marketing and forced manufacturers to finance anti-smoking campaigns
— a negotiated change that led to an environmental one that in turn led to a
cultural one, after which kids said to their parents, “I wish you didn’t
smoke.” Smoking had to be converted from a cool habit into one practiced by
pariahs.
A similar victory in the food world is symbolized
by the stories parents tell me of their kids booing as they drive by
McDonald’s.
To make changes like this more widespread we need
action both cultural and political. The cultural lies in celebrating real food;
raising our children in homes that don’t program them for fast-produced,
eaten-on-the-run, high-calorie, low-nutrition junk; giving them the gift of
appreciating the pleasures of nourishing one another and enjoying that
nourishment together.
Political action would mean agitating to limit the
marketing of junk; forcing its makers to pay the true costs of production;
recognizing that advertising for fast food is not the exercise of free speech
but behavior manipulation of addictive substances; and making certain that real
food is affordable and available to everyone. The political challenge is the
more difficult one, but it cannot be ignored.
What’s easier is to cook at every opportunity, to
demonstrate to family and neighbors that the real way is the better way. And
even the more fun way: kind of like a carnival.
