Can you eat healthily on a budget?
I wrote the other day about my $50 weekly food budget – and how hyper aware I've become about how much food costs. I'm only shopping for one, I work from home, love cooking and have time to shop around. How hard must if be for families on tight budgets to eat well?
I really struck me how difficult it must be for families when I saw this in my local Aldi store:
That's just $3 for a big pizza. Assuming you'd need two to feed a family of four that's $1.50 per person for dinner. Preparation time is zero and cooking time less than 20 minutes.
Contrast this with a healthy paleo meal? Let's say a large free range chicken: $12, some steamed kale $5 and spinach $3 and some $4 cauliflower made into rice. That's $24 – so $6 a head. For families living on tight budgets there's a huge difference between spending $6 on dinner and spending $24.
And how about lunch? You can buy an entire loaf of bread for about 85 cents and some cheap processed meat for about $3. That's a cheap lunch, well under a dollar a head. Contrast that with a typical paleo lunch – that wouldn't even cover a decent cut of meat, never mind salad or veggies.
As for breakfast I doubt anyone could make an free-range egg and veggie omelette for less than the $2.2o an entire box of cornflakes costs.
So what's the answer?
Wouldn't it be good if fresh whole food could be subsidised? Unfortunately I can't see how that could ever be implemented, since everyone has such wildly different ideas about exactly what is healthy and what isn't.
Do you think families struggling to make ends meet are priced out of eating healthily? What do you think the answer is?
