Comment by FeloniousHam | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FeloniousHam | Hacker News Reader

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> but good quality food is expensive (in the US -- many other parts of the world have their quality food cheaper but I digress

Let's digress.

I read this frequently in various forms on this forum, and it's always "just so" justification. My own heuristic thought is that "low quality" food (high energy, long shelf-life processed foods) is very cheap because it is produced at scale and can be stored, while "high quality" (fresh products) is not cheap for the opposite reason.

The US has the cheapest food in the world [1]. Expensive food is expensive, but I would bet quality food is cheaper here than anywhere else. The "problem" is that when presented with a cheap, easy, tasty, high calorie food option against a relatively more expensive "quality" option, consumers choose the former because it's cheaper, easier, tastier, and provides more calories. I would bet this is even true when the absolute difference in price is small.

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/91208387/food-grocery-prices-us-...

> Expensive food is expensive, but I would bet quality food is cheaper here than anywhere else.

Having lived in a few other countries with less industrialized distribution networks, no, this claim is dramatically incorrect. Fruits, vegetables, staples like rice, and basic forms of protein (fish, insects and sea critters, some chicken) are much, much cheaper relative to processed foods. Larger protein sources like beef, pork, or bushmeat is relatively more expensive, however, unless you opt for poor quality processing like cheap "corned beef" made from offal.

As an economist, I appreciate the difficulty of making apples-to-apples comparisons across countries for things like food prices, as even the acclaimed "Big Mac Index" assumes that a Big Mac has a similar relative status across countries (though the oft-misunderstood intent of the Big Mac Index is to more to compare consistent production costs). In some places a Big Mac is fancy, in the US it is considered fairly garbage but consistent.

For example, in a market in the Philippines, you have mostly cash transactions and informal capture for what the majority of people purchase. The purchasing is done more in these almost farmers-market style transfer versus grocery stores in the US. They _do_ have grocery stories, but almost uniformly for processed food distribution versus fresh food in the markets. It's much cheaper to eat healthier from the markets and through the informal distribution network of sari-sari stores versus equivalent nutrition from processed food from the grocery stores.

Also, consider the results of this recent study: https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/08/in-trial-people-lost-...

I'm not arguing whether fresh food tastes better or is healthier. What I want to see is evidence that "quality" food is (relatively) more expensive in the United States than it is anywhere else in the world. And then maybe some evidence that people buy junk food because "healthy food" is too expensive (my hungry teenager looks in the pantry and the refrigerator and says, "all we have is ingredients").

> I'm not arguing whether fresh food tastes better or is healthier.

Neither one of us pursued this.

> my hungry teenager looks in the pantry and the refrigerator and says, "all we have is ingredients"

Matches my experience. I too would contest that reasonable quality food is more expensive. In my experience it's actually somewhat cheaper by any metric except $/calorie and even then you could just add butter or oil to the "healthy" alternative to juice the numbers.

I think the primary differentiator is convenience. Grabbing an actually rather expensive box from the cupboard beats out spending 30 minutes cooking and another 10 cleaning.

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