First off, posts have gotten moved from thread to thread. I guess you didn't notice, but whatever study you linked earlier (I think the one about 'food insecurity') is not on this thread. I don't know which thread it's on now, so I asked you to provide the link again, because I assume you still have it somewhere and it would be easy for you to provide.
Second off, you are constructing an insane strawman.
Hamburger helper is still functionally cheaper than regularly eating out, and healthier too. I didn't recommend it myself though, I provided a step-by-step set of instructions for
extremely simplistic cooking of pasta. You have failed to prove how someone who has basic mental competency cannot follow such a set of instructions. If you want to claim that pasta is garbage food (it isn't), I can just as easily do the same thing with something you think is healthier, like a simple soup.
Now let's break down a few more of your points:
"Among many barriers to the poor is the ability to easily transport groceries, I presume you keep painting over this because you can't answer it."
1. Carry them in your bloody hands. It's something humanity has been doing for as long as we've existed, it's not that hard.
2. Carry them on the handlebars of a bicycle. A bit trickier, but bicycles can be had for cheap, and it's not too hard to use. Still, I recognize this isn't something
everyone can do, but it still covers a significant percentage.
3. Ride a bus. Also not available for
everyone, but for those living in mid-to-large cities, busses are often a very affordable option.
4. All of these can be augmented with backpacks, satchel bags, etc, etc, that enhance your effective carrying capacity. I lived for years without a car, and for more than a year of that time I didn't have a friend up to regularly driving me around, so I had to carry my groceries.
I'm not claiming these factors make it easy for everyone to carry groceries, I'm saying they make it
manageable for
the vast majority of people to
get groceries in a reasonable timeframe. Yes, there are some people for whom life
really is that hard, but that is a
miniscule proportion.
" Further the lack of easy transport means having to make frequent trips for small amounts of groceries, which raises the time, energy, and monetary cost of getting them to higher than McDonald's."
If you live a significant distance from a grocery store, there may be some limited truth to this. But again, this is only actually
true of a small number of people. Even if you can't bike, don't have public transport available, and don't live close to a store, you can get a wagon. They aren't that expensive, you can sometimes even find them for super-cheap in garage sales or the like. And of course, there are people who do have friends or family willing to drive them for a big grocery load once a week or so.
Yes, there are some people for whom this is true,
but it is an extremely small minority, not even 1% of the full population, much less over 10%.
"Lastly neither spaghetti nor Hamburger Helper are
actually decent cooked meals."
Contrary to what food blog fads like to say, Carbs/calories
are a needed part of your diet, and if you're actually working a hard, physically demanding job, that's all the truer. Even if that were
not true though, carrots are extremely cheap, and are cooked the same basic way.
"You've had to spend what, thirty minutes preparing it? Plus a minimum of thirty minutes to and from the grocery store shopping for it, more likely an hour counting travel times. Then another twenty minutes cleaning dishes. "
Complete bullshit. When I was walking or biking to and from a grocery store, round-trip for one load that would get me meals for 3-10 days would take me perhaps an hour. Let's assume someone in much harder conditions takes two hours, or even
four. That's still at least 15 meals when they're
not aggressively planning ahead to be much more time-efficient. This is assuming that the grocery store is
not somewhere that they can stop at on the way to work.
Still, taking this
insanely pessimistic estimation, that's 16 minutes at the grocery store for a meal. Taking the 'soup in a crock pot' efficiency option, it's about 20 minutes of prep for ~5 meals, so that adds 4 more minutes. Let's make a basic meal plan:
Potatoes. 2.47 for 5 pounds. Notably, you can get a 10 pound bag proportionately cheaper.
Carrots. 0.97 for 1 pound. Let's say you get two for your soup.
Onions. 1.64 for 3 pounds. More than I'd want in my soup, but we're talking people desperately poor, so beggars can't be choosers.
Chicken. 18.83 for 10 pounds frozen. At 2$ a pound, it's the 'big money' cost of the meal, though I personally prefer beef, that's about 50% more expensive. We're putting ~3 1/3 pounds in because meat isn't your primary ingredient, so this is good for 3 batches of soup. That gives us about $6.24 for the meal.
Finally,
Salt. 3.88 for enough salt to last you for months to a year. Let's round
up on the fraction of that cost for this one batch of soup, and say it's. ~25 cents worth.
All together, that's 10.47 for the soup. Speaking from personal experience, you can get all of that into the crock pot in about 30 minutes. Assuming someone is inexperienced, we'll be extremely pessimistic and say one hour. To be specific, that's scrubbing the vegetables, chopping them, chopping the meat, and throwing it all in the crock pot with some water.
A quick google says that about 1 pound of food will make a person feel full, and this reasonably coheres with my own experience eating food, so I'm going to use it as a reasonable approximation for now. This 10.47 $ meal that took 1 hour of actual preparation, comprises about 13 pounds of food, discounting the water mass, and so that's 13 meals.
Even physically infirm people can carry 20-30 lbs of mass fairly easily, so if we assume the insanely pessimistic estimate of 4 hours for a grocery trip, 2 rounds of food preparation like this works, so that's 26 meals divided over 4 hours, or another 9.23 minutes added in. Add in the 60 minutes/13 meals gets you ~14 minutes per meal prep time. 10.47 dollars divided by 13 meals gets us .805 dollars per meal, or 81 cents.
Our net total cost per meal is 81 cents and 14 minutes of work, using insanely pessimistic assumptions about time costs. More realistic time estimates get us to more like 5 minutes of work per meal. Dish cleanup after soup is 1-3 minutes to clean the pot, and
seconds to clean the bowl and spoon you ate with.
All of these calculations are done using grade-school level math.
Yes, that soup does not have a fully rounded-out balance of nutrition. Other meals that are also fairly cheap can round that out (and keep you from getting sick to death of chicken soup), and you can get multi-vitamins at 20-30 dollars for over a hundred day's worth of them to cover other concerns.
I have not moved my goalposts. I have not changed my argument. I'm trying to present the same concepts in new ways to get the ideas through to you.
I could go through and list many more meals to make my point, but bluntly put, this one by itself proves my point. It's both cheaper and more time-efficient to cook your own food.