Due to spoilage concerns grocery stores price food based on shelf stability not just production costs. Processed foods are generally shelf stable enough for this not to be a major concern.
Similarly economies of scale apply in many situations. Slow cooking beans takes more energy the smaller the batch size due to surface area to volume ratios etc.
Combined with the opportunity costs associated with cooking + cleanup means there’s very few healthy options that can compete with highly processed foods.
I bought over a pound of steak the other day for $5. (Yes, it was on sale. But it is frequently on sale.) Along with a potato for 50 cents, that's cheaper than a bag of Doritos.
This canard again [0]? You're comparing one piece of beef with a massive bag of Doritos. The banana's irrelevant, but last time you compared it to an enormous block of chocolate [1].
From experience a microwave meal should take about 3 minutes to cook so I don't know how you're taking more than 10 minutes unless, like your food item comparisons, you're cooking enough of them to feed an entire town.
This is possibly the craziest goddamn conversation I've ever seen on HN. Michalena's swedish meatballs are like $1.50 for 350 calories[0].
It's been a while since college, but I would guess they are delicious when compared to Walter's shoe-leather brand steak. Mac-n-cheese of various offbrands also cheap, and potato flakes ridiculously cheap.
Marie Callender and Stouffer's are not cheap, they are convenient.
Steak takes me like 45 minutes, gotta season, let it sit. On stovetop need a cast-iron skillet, 5 minutes to heat it, etc.
Also cooking time doesn't really matter a lot, I'd use a toaster oven because the meatballs tasted better, and would be studying or whatever waiting for the timer.
A pound of fresh ground pork is ~$1.25 and it's 1100 calories.
Throw in all the other stuff to make the swedish meatballs and you are coming out way ahead.
The "poor tax" in processed food is that they are paying double to triple the underlying food cost to have someone else make the food for them.
I'm confident that if you meal prepped Swedish meatballs, you would be able to make something 10x healthier for 1/3 the cost. Even at a "rock bottom" $1.50 per meatball package.
You didn't specify frozen - I'm looking at a meal taken out of the fridge, which still has a shelf time of ~a week. You're not comparing to a frozen steak either, which will also need an extended cooking time.
If you're concerned about cooking time then don't buy frozen, or let them defrost, and they take less time to cook. Since you're comparing to preparing a whole piece of steak and a potato, that shouldn't be too hard to do.
Also, your example is $3.34 [0] i.e. less than your $5 steak and 50 cent potato.
The potato requires prep, 10 minutes in the microwave ~= 1/4 kWh, and presumably a little salt and butter. A microwave meal is a more complete nutrition source and takes less time, making them more complex point of comparison.
Wait why are you guys cutting the potatoes up before putting them in the microwave? Steps:
* Wash in water
* Cut out any bad parts
* Stab the whole potato with the fork a bunch of times
* Nuke until gushy
A few medium sized potatoes will take maybe 8 minutes to cook all at once here. That's not really an issue of course, as you'll cook a small piece of meat in a pan, which takes about the same time. EG, you start the pan heating, while taking 2 min to defrost the meat, and you're prepping the potatoes. Then meat in pan, potatoes in microwave, they're done mostly at the same time.
Note you don't need to completely defrost the meat. It doesn't matter if it's -5C or +5C. A "little" frozen is fine, especially for steak which can be rare inside. Anyhow. Sorry to interject, but the potato thing is weird to me.
The article, I just noticed, does cite the fork.. but talks about exploding? No, it won't explode, the fork instead allows for an evener cook.
Smaller pieces cool faster without the need to cut up a very hot potato and it’s obvious you’ve done it correctly. The fork approach generally works fine, but it’s not obvious when you mess up.
Same deal with hotdogs, cut it with a knife and it’s really obvious it worked, get a little lazy with a fork and you get uneven heated and the occasional pop.
correct stab a few times with a fork and it doesn’t pop.
They do want you to let them cool, but that’s true of anything you heat to a cooking temperature in a microwave. Potatoes have the same limitations, but most people don’t include the “don’t be an idiot” instructions in recipes just cooking times.
If that’s true you should be able to provide actual evidence of a 10 min 30 second cooking time listed on their box art.
However it’s clear that microwave meals are generally designed to have shorter cooking times for simple convenience and the underlying physics involved.
When I was a grad student, I pointed this out to my poor neighbor with lots of health problems (5 pills a day!) who was shocked that I ate such expensive food despite being poorer still.
15 years later she's 50 lb lighter, takes no daily medication, and we have a mortgage and three kids. That's right, I fixed her up and married her.
It has been my experience, as a general rule (so it may not apply here), that people who grow up in the city are the worst at this.
People with strong rural roots, or who grew up in rural areas, tend to have lived in houses, have freezers, space for long term storage of items, and may have personal knowledge of canning, and food storage. If one grows up in an apartment, there may not be space for a shelf with canned food and bags of rice and potatoes.
I find that during harvest times, last year's canned foods are marked down. The logic being, I think, clear out their warehouses and get people to take last year's stuff home. And if you have space, you can take advantage of such things, and save, save, save.
For food, poor rural people often have better outcomes than city folk, due to the ability to store when sale items are found.
So when I read stories such as yours, I always wonder. City girl? Country boy? And as I said at the start, this is not a hard fact, just something I've noticed being a common reason why some people just "don't know".
Microwaving takes less attention and less skill, though. And less cleanup. And you don’t need to own a pan. And you don’t need to own spices (steak is a bad example ofc). And you don’t need to think about the side dishes. And you don’t need to agree on what’s for dinner. And I think it’s worth repeating, you don’t need any skill and can’t really screw it up. And you don’t need to worry about it going bad because you were too lazy to cook it. Etc.
Processed food may not be cheaper, but the flavor:effort ratio is waaaaaay higher.
You can microwave a meal by tossing it into the microwave and walking away, you need to actually participate in cooking a steak and then clean up several surfaces. The stake is conservatively 10x as much effort and time is money, plus microwaves use far less energy.
Processed food isn’t a single unified thing, the prices definitely overlap but the minimum and maximum prices for processed foods are lower. That’s why our food supply ended up looking like it does, economies of scale beat home cooking. That’s true even going back thousands of years where communal cooking drastically reduced the fuel needs in warm climates.
Due to spoilage concerns grocery stores price food based on shelf stability not just production costs. Processed foods are generally shelf stable enough for this not to be a major concern.
Similarly economies of scale apply in many situations. Slow cooking beans takes more energy the smaller the batch size due to surface area to volume ratios etc.
Combined with the opportunity costs associated with cooking + cleanup means there’s very few healthy options that can compete with highly processed foods.