I just had Burger King at the airport the other day. I could have easily gotten away with spending $3 for an entire meal, with sugar water included. For a meal, that's pretty cheap. Especially if I work a 12 hours shift and don't have time to cook.

Also, I grew up in the midwest, and often fruits and veggies look like they were picked up off the side of a freeway.

Not saying that you're entirely wrong, but neither is the "it's cheaper to eat shitty food" camp. There's probably a happy medium: less sugar, less meat, less stress, better education, better prices...all things that would help.

Yes, when I eat fast food, it's always from the value menu. But if you're strapped for cash, $3 per meal on a consistent basis still adds up, compared to <$1 meals prepared at home and ready to grab from the fridge.

Certainly convenience & taste is a factor in these decisions as well, but if the primary pain point is raw cost for your baseline consumption because you have no money to spare, you really should be kitchen-based.

Of course, all of this assumes that one is being financially sensitive, and not just impulse spending without realizing how much is trickling out. Too many people I know who struggle with their meager finances (even if they make similar or more than I do) are entirely too flippant and just go for the $10 combo meal, not realizing how often they're "treating themselves" and how it's adding up against their monthly balance.

"compared to <$1 meals prepared at home and ready to grab from the fridge."

They're never "ready to grab". They take time and effort, and do require knowledge to prepare. They also require you to then do the dishes after. For someone who's working multiple jobs, that may be time they just plain don't have.

They're ready to grab if you sensibly prepare a bunch of food ahead of time, once or twice a week. Nobody who's strapped for time starts from scratch every meal, and our American fridges are plenty large.

Besides, if I may rant a bit: If you have no money, then time, effort, knowledge, and social currency is what you have to spend to get by. Either you're going to spend those things, or spend money you don't have which will make your immediate future immediately worse. This is a situation that sucks to be in, and the only way to have any sense of even partially managing this is discipline. Many of us have grown up in and/or lived through these sorts of situations as adults, and you simply do what you have to and try to be smart about it. Obviously you need to put in time and effort, and do the dishes. But you can buffer things a bit to match your schedule, or establish specific routines, and any little lessening or organization of crunch is a huge affirming step. If you step back for a bit you also see that maintaining your health (including having mental and physical energy) is super important when you have no money and are working hard, and so making food at home hits multiple critically important facets. It does not matter that it takes effort, what matters is that you put forth effort commensurate to what you're facing.

And to position this back to the initial contentious point, it reaffirms my position that it is not an issue of healthy groceries being somehow priced higher, but rather that of stressful life situations that people turn to convenience food (with the time sink of shopping/shorter-prep/cleanup or driving/ordering/waiting at restaurants still intact).

I think this is a bit out of touch. People in the situation you're describing are generally coming from a place of desperation, not of careful contemplation. And yes, it would behoove them to plan meals and pinch pennies, but when you and your spouse are working 50+ hours a week each to make ends meet, the type of self-reflection it takes to make those decisions is in very limited supply.

I've not been in a working-poor situation since my late teens, but I can say that there are times when I was working 60+ hours a week, and I did not have any energy to think about meal planning or healthy eating or investing in my future besides dumping some extra money in a savings account. Luckily, I did have the money to eat healthy, and luckily my wife was (sometimes) in a position where she could meal plan for the both of us, but oh man...if I was in the same situation and making < $30K/year, I would NOT have been able to even think of these things.

It's not about being intelligent or even about resource management, it's about having the energy to think about it, and if you're working your fingers to the bone, you don't have the energy. So it's easy for us to sit around on a forum while there's a lull in our cushy jobs ranting about how poor people should manage their time better, but I can tell you that it's not easy.

Let me state this absolutely directly, for all other responses as well:

I'm talking about me and my life, and my family, and my friends. In various desperate situations, without money or time or car, working multiple jobs, and things in life going bad on top. Some made reasonable decisions about life, others not thinking and just muddling through, and others just checking out. Nobody's "meal planning", you grab whatever's cheap at the store (and that'll be grains, vegetables, and some meat) and make a pile of it at home to feed from or take along to work, so you don't have to cook often or go out much.

I don't know why everybody jumps to "You don't understand the people you're talking about!" Lots of people (even here on HN) have been there, or know people who have been there. There are tons of ways that life plays out, and having horrible situations is not some guarantee that your life is cemented into a perpetual downhill and that any other thinking is "out of touch".

It's just a lot harder, and sucks a lot more. But it becomes the new normal in your life. You do what you need to do, and you'd better figure out what you need to do, because tomorrow is staked on it. Plus, any little progress is still progress; even if you're not a millionaire at the end, at least it's not as bad as it was last year, and work to continue that at any scale for the next.

"They're ready to grab if you sensibly prepare a bunch of food ahead of time"

Families with parents who work multiple jobs are laughing their asses off at this idea of having time to do that.

"Besides, if I may rant a bit:"

Only if you want to show how out of touch you are.

Then I truly and seriously feel sorry for them if they consider managing their situation to be a laughable absurdity.

But be careful not to project that as the expected case, and ignore the reality of others' lives (yes, like mine and family & friends around me, if it's even necessary to state). That's dangerous tribalism that normalizes failure.

"I truly and seriously feel sorry for them if they consider managing their situation to be a laughable absurdity."

No, they just have to laugh at people like you telling them that all they have to do is "manage their situation", because otherwise they would have to cry at exactly how out of touch everyone else is with what they're going through.

"That's dangerous tribalism that normalizes failure."

Do you remember what website you're on? This is the community that praises and lauds failure, but apparently only when it happens to certain people.

I don't think you read my rant at all. Times like that suck, and you have to work hard. Stating "I have to work hard!" is just a tautology in that situation. "Managing their situation" is even in the little baby steps, not some silver bullet to turn it into a cakewalk.

I don't know what exactly you're projecting on me (or how I'm somehow different than "them", giving "them" more of a voice), but I was certainly talking about being in the miserable times, with no available money or time, not casting down edicts from an ivory tower of disconnected comfort.

You can eat shitty food and still be healthy. It won't be optimal, but just because you're eating burger king does not mean you have to eat to excess.

You aren't accounting for the time and focus investment required to turn raw groceries into a meal that your children will actually eat. In a family where all adults are working (perhaps even several jobs) out of necessity, time and focus are awfully scarce.

I intended all that be lumped under "high stress".