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> So wait, hold on, is cooking more expensive or not?

You spend more if you buy and cook fresh produce. You spend less if you only cook rice and beans. The latter is less healthy than the former.

> What major grocery chain doesn't carry everything needed to make dinner?

Not every store with food is a grocery store. Dollar stores and corner stores do not stock an abundance of fresh produce, beans, flour, etc. People may have to go to multiple stores to find the items they need.

> I thought we were talking about food cooking barriers?

Yes. Not having child care is a food cooking barrier. Not having money or the time to prepare school lunch is a food cooking barrier. Not having access to grocery stores or a car is a food cooking barrier. As is access to food assistance programs, not being paid enough, not having access to good public transit, insecure or unaffordable housing, etc.

In 2009, over 2% of the US population lived in a food desert, and in 2017, 11.8% of US households were food-insecure. Of that 11.8%, 4.5% had very low food security.

I guess part of the problem is comparing "unhealthy" processed foods with cooking "healthy" food?

I can cook food for a whole day for about €1. It will mostly be potatoes and lack any nutrients, but it will be a lot cheaper than any processed food I could buy. Or I can cook something with fresh ingredients and lots of fiber and nutrients, but those ingredients are expensive to buy in part because handling time sensitive squishy stuff makes every step of the supply chain more expensive.

I agree. I want to add the rumor that you can live on potatoes alone. At least one guy reported he did it for six weeks and the medical checks did not find any malnutrition. Don’t know how scientific that anecdote is, though.

Potatoes and milk was the diet that enabled the Irish population explosion prior to the famine.

https://www.dochara.com/the-irish/food-history/food-in-irela...

"The burgeoning population lived on a diet comprised mainly of potatoes and milk, which if eaten in sufficient quantity is a surprisingly nutritious, if monotonous, diet. It is also relatively tasty and easy to prepare."

Potatoes are a complete, if poor, protein source. You'll live. For a long while at least.

I think your basic point is dead on, but I'm pretty sure ramen is significantly cheaper than potato for the same amount of calories.

The large sacks of rice you get from asian shops might be cheaper still.

The advantage of potatoes is that there is a large number of recipes that consist almost entirely of potatoes (mashed potatoes, hash browns, roast potatoes, boiled potatoes, potato chips, etc.) so there's a lot of variety in a fixed budget.

Wheat and buckwheat is even cheaper if you go that way, but it takes longer time to cook.

Rice ultimately is cheap only because of labour costs. It takes tons of water to grow.

In the USA real food is extremely inexpensive. That 1 Euro will buy you 2-3 dozen eggs or at least half a kilo of beef or chicken. Potatoes are 1.50 USD for a 5 lb bag (2.26kg).

Processed food in the USA is very expensive. Frozen pizza, chips, cookies, frozen dinners, cereals, etc can cost more than Grass Fed Organic beef per lb. We have a Grocer called Sprouts that has Grass Fed Ground Beef for $2.99lb USD. A frozen pizza at Walmart is 4.99 USD. A bag of Potato Chips is $2.99 at Walmart.

If you get a chance check out any USA Grocery flier and you will be shocked at how little real food costs.

We could argue on the health level of what you call real food (pesticides, antibiotic and stuff)

But as a european (french) guy I must say that I was very surprised, when visiting 2 weeks in Brooklyn, to find that grocery was not as expensive as I was expecting. At all.

You are totally right.

We could eat real meals every night after a tourist day, for around same prices than in France.

Well actually potatoes provide almost all the nutrients one needs, including fibre if you eat the skin.

Produce should generally be the cheapest part of anyone's shopping experience. I can get an insane amount of fruits and veggies for 20 bucks. 20 bucks doesn't go very far with meats and prepackaged foods though.

The article is poorly written. Nothing is defined. What is highly processed? How much of it? Is this diet typical of a significant number of people?

Plus, benefiting a majority of people is worthwhile even if those at the periphery are not helped.

> So wait, hold on, is cooking more expensive or not? What are they eating that's supposedly healthier but significantly more expensive?

They might be "cooking" every night, but they're not necessarily cooking from scratch. A pack of ramen boiled on the stove with a flavor packet added is technically cooked by their definition of "cooking", but it's still ultra-processed: the amount of sodium added by the flavor packet is nearly an order of magnitude greater than if they had simply boiled some rice noodles from scratch and added their own seasonings of salt, soy sauce, etc. Not to mention any of the vegetables the package provided are freeze dried, and likely coated with stabilizers and preservatives. A "from scratch" version of ramen that paired the noodles with freshly chopped peas, carrots, or spring onions would be significantly healthier.

This is really the heart of NPR's argument, I think: there is a substantial hump that people must get over to think about leaving the can of marinara sauce on the shelf and buying canned tomatoes, an onion, and garlic instead. There's a time and labor investment, not to mention an initial loss of satisfaction when the recipe fails to come out properly the first few times.

'Cooking' doesn't necessarily mean making your own tomato sauce. It's making something instead of eating a frozen lasagna or pizza.

A big part of the issue is the food stamp or SNAP culture. When you get your allotment for the monht it's easy to just go fill your cart with bad choices.

Caseworkers should be assigned to help show people how to cook, give out kits with cutting boards and pans and such. Recipe cards, that kind of thing. Maybe even subsidize meal delivery options (like HelloFresh) for a few weeks to get people started.

> Maybe even subsidize meal delivery options (like HelloFresh) for a few weeks to get people started.

That was actually the direction I thought the article was going to go. Some kind of subsidized program to bootstrap the ability to cook decent meals from raw ingredients quickly.

> A big part of the issue is the food stamp or SNAP culture. When you get your allotment for the monht it's easy to just go fill your cart with bad choices.

People make bad choices whether or not they're on SNAP. Our entire food culture revolves mostly around bad choices.

>So wait, hold on, is cooking more expensive or not?

Just to answer this one part - the cooking itself is generally cheaper than eating out constantly.

But that's after you jump over the barrier to entry of pots, pans, utensils, stove, cleaning supplies, and materials in bulk. And once you've learned how to cook. The only thing worse than wasting money on a poorly prepared meal is knowing that you can't afford to not eat the garbage.

Any half way decent pots and pans will last you decades. I have a set of stainless steel pans that I bought nearly forty years ago that are in near perfect condition and in use several times a week now but every day when my children were growing up.

And really there isn't much to learn about cooking healthy food. Most of the fancy techniques don't apply. And you can get perfectly good utensils like spatulas and ladles, etc., for a dollar each or visit a charity shop (thrift store in the US).

> > First, it takes money. Healthier diets... generally cost more... They note that the unprocessed diet they fed participants cost 40% more than the ultra-processed diet. > And yet, a paragraph later:

> > Lots of families in our study cooked almost every night, in part because it was the cheapest option

> So wait, hold on, is cooking more expensive or not? What are they eating that's supposedly healthier but significantly more expensive?

The next sentence is: "But when their cupboards ran bare, they ate ramen and hot dogs, not a pan of roast chicken and vegetables, as food gurus recommend."

> > This means making healthy food more affordable, but it also means addressing the other challenges families face: for example, by guaranteeing workers a living wage and fair working conditions and by investing in families through universal free school lunch and subsidized child care, so that parents don't feel like they're doing it all on their own.

> Wait, hold on, what? I thought we were talking about food cooking barriers? I can understand the connection to free school lunch (make sure kids get one solid meal in them a day, if you can call government supplied cafeteria materials food), but, what?

All of these have fairly obvious connections to food preparation time. If you do backbreaking labor all day, or work two or three jobs because none of them individually pay enough to support you, you won't have much time or energy to spend on food preparation.

And there are the sentences just a few paragraphs earlier: "At a minimum, it requires a working stove and enough money to pay the electric bill to run the stove. One family in our book experienced homelessness during the time we spent with the family. Patricia Washington, her daughter and her two grandchildren moved into a hotel room after being evicted when they couldn't keep up with both the rent and the heating bill." Point being, economic barriers are food preparation barriers.

> So wait, hold on, is cooking more expensive or not? What are they eating that's supposedly healthier but significantly more expensive?

Cooking unprocessed meals is more expensive than cooking ultra-processed meals. Cooking at home, however, is less expensive than eating out, which appears to be the reference they are making in the second quote.

> What major grocery chain doesn't carry everything needed to make dinner?

For those shopping on a budget, going to multiple stores may be necessary based on pricing differences between stores (including consideration of sales or coupons for different products).

Depends if you're comparing like with like, surely?

At least here it is impossible to get say a prepared ready meal curry or shepherd's pie that works out anywhere near as cheap as cooking it yourself. Especially once you've allowed for portion sizes and the 5kg of potatoes, the carrots and onions covering other meals as well. Ready meals appear to only offer time.

I can probably find something that works out cheaper - noodles, unpleasant budget range 50p pizzas maybe. Tinned macaroni cheese will indeed be cheaper, as it's incomparable with home made. Tinned curries etc work out much more than making your own.

You can definitely find certain items/dishes where it is cheaper to buy already made instead of making yourself - rotisserie chickens in the US are a perfect example of that. On the whole, though, cooking at home is less expensive than eating out.

> Wait, hold on, what? I thought we were talking about food cooking barriers? I can understand the connection to free school lunch (make sure kids get one solid meal in them a day, if you can call government supplied cafeteria materials food), but, what?

I agree, I am in support of reducing income inequality etc but I feel like it is a bit dishonest to link these two issues so directly.

The low-income people I know cook at home more, not less. It's cheaper than processed junk if done correctly.

One can cook processed meals at home. The supplementary material has the diets: https://www.cell.com/cms/10.1016/j.cmet.2019.05.008/attachme...

Note that cooking often is not the same as cooking long. Some of the low processed foods are just offloading the processing onto you taking more time.

Salads don't make themselves. Veggies don't remove skin and wooden parts on their own.

You could eat many of the vegetables whole.

The best light processing that allows some of this to be offloaded and batched is freezing...

they mean cooking is cheaper than eating from a restaurant

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preparing a healthy lunch every day for your kid is difficult and time consuming and uses up family food budget

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You can get an entire frozen pizza for about $1, a box of mac & cheese for about $1, etc