Am I totally out of touch with reality or is this a completely ridiculous remark? Only 1 procent of people is able to afford the most basic food?
> focusing less on meal replacements and more on whole fruits and vegetables from local farmers, in addition to occasional animal products from farms where those animals were “raised with sustainable practices.”
Which does strike me as advice for relatively affluent people (although "for the 1%" is a bit of a stretch....). It is indeed not that easy to buy fresh, locally grown fruits and veggies for many people. But I do take your point. I don't think money is really the barrier to people eating a nutritious diet of whole foods. The limiting factor is probably time and discipline. You need to shop for fresh foods every few days (real foods spoil!) and actually prepare meals, when the alternative of cheap, prepared foods that are mostly junk are readily available.
Around 19 million people in the US live in "food deserts", which are low-income places with poor access to transportation and no supermarkets within a mile (for urban and suburban food deserts) or within 10 miles (for rural food deserts).
Their choices for affordable day to day food tend to be fast food places and convenience stores. When the closest you've got to a grocery store is 7-11 your fruit and vegetable options are limited.
Bananas: £0.9/kg
Potatoes: £0.8/kg
Chickpeas in water 400g: £0.49 (£2.09/kg)
Black beans in water 400g: £0.49 (£2.09/kg)
Apples/Pears: £0.35-£0.45 each (£1-2/kg, depends)
London median salary: £44400/year
Fruits and vegetables are always cheap or very cheap, the actual cost is time (and knowing how to cook from scratch and having a kitchen)
Whole Foods (and the co-op in one of the towns I visited) is priced like Harrods, KaDeWe, or Galeries Lafayette:
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrods
Apples last how long, two weeks? Meanwhile pasteurized apple juice can sit for months at room temperature.
I eat apples up to a month after buying them. They're still edible even then but I don't like them when they start to get soft.
Apples last months as they contain pectin.
IIRC they tend to be quite a bit more sour so probably not to popular just because of that.
Most components can be prepped for the whole week (millet in the fridge, onions and herbs in the freezer etc), so net cooking time (where I actively need to do anything) is maybe 5 minutes - 2 minutes loading and starting the instant pot, and 3 minutes assembly of the bowl ingredients.
The worst thing about is prep time and requirement to have a big freezer and potentially need to shop fresh vegetables (but that can be skipped, depending on the frozen veggie mix).
In the UK (where I grew up) and Germany (where I live), you should be able to get the recommended 5-a-day for less than £/€ 2 per day if you need to keep costs down, and £/€ 8/day if you're being lazy and getting fairly fancy stuff.
Sure, the income here is lower than in the USA, but even at the higher end that's not so much as to make that "significant".