The Wondering Mind

Apparently, The Cancer Project, a nonprofit cancer prevention organization, has produced a study listing the five worst items you can buy on the “dollar menu” at a fast food restaurant.

The items on the list are not that surprising. That these particular restaurants serve such unhealthy items is not, or should not be, all that surprising either, no matter how much the “media relations manager” at Jack in the Box tries to dance around the issue.

So all in all, nothing new here, although a nice reminder for people to think carefully about how they might substitute items in their daily menu to help meet tightened budgets. (We’ll ignore for the moment the inconvenient fact that the NY Times reading demographic groups probably avoid, as much as possible, most of the restaurants mentioned.)

What is not particularly helpful or informative is what was written in the last couple of paragraphs of the article.

But Alice H. Lichtenstein, director of the cardiovascular nutrition laboratory at Tufts University in Boston, questioned whether the declining economy would have much effect on people’s eating habits.

“It would be nice if they decided it was better for their budget to start preparing food at home more often,” she said.

This last statement completely ignores the fact that much of the modern eating habits are related to, if not a result of, the modern life-style. This relationship often cuts across a family’s wealth, with families both rich and poor often too busy to prepare fresh meals from scratch on a regular basis. This change in life-styles over the years has resulted in a significant change in the way we are supplied with food, such that it is now extremely time-consuming and difficult even for moderately busy people to find, purchase, and prepare fresh food.

Perhaps more pertinent, my personal experience is that it is often not necessarily cheaper to prepare food from scratch at home. This appears to be the experience of many people I know as well. The reason is that while it may be cheaper preparing some foods at home rather than dining out, this is not the only option open to the consumer. Another option is to purchase foods which have been pre-prepared at a supermarket. So the correct comparison Ms. Lichtenstein should be making in this case is preparing foods versus supermarket purchases.

And in many cases, preparing food at home is no cheaper, and can often be more expensive than, purchasing prepared food at the supermarket. This is partly because healthier ingredients can often cost more. It is also the result of the changes in the food supply due to changing life-styles I mentioned earlier.

(The food companies use industrial production methods, have economies of scale, and have large purchasing power to obtain volume discounts on the purchase price of the fresh ingredients. These factors can help make the total cost of food and its preparation much lower for them than for an average family, especially when one takes into account opportunity costs.)

This is a prime example of policy analysts making high-minded and nice sounding policy recommendations which are, in fact, completely divorced from everyday realities. Fact of the matter is that unless modern society and life-style becomes very different from what it is today, people will not spend more time preparing food at home on a regular basis. The other demands of life on families simply do not allow this option.

The realistic policy options are then clear. You can continue to call for people to spend more time preparing food. But then you have to realise that what you are advocating is a whole-sale change in the modern way of life. You cannot tell people to spend more time preparing food but have no idea how the people would, or could, achieve this goal.

The other, more realistic and easier, option is to try to make the prepared foods sold in supermarkets and restaurants more healthy. This will probably involve significant changes for the suppliers of these products, but this will probably be easier than changing society to make more time available for individual food preparation.