The Rich Eat Healthy

Don't you love how people want you to eat healthy, but actually doing so puts an ulcer in your wallet?

Eating healthy... at least in America... at least in NYC... isn't exactly the easiest thing to do.

When you're in the hood, you got corner stores that have nothing but potato chips, sweet snacks, sodas, candy, etc. All of that is generally cheap and readily available for anyone to eat. In contrast, the fruit that you might see if you're lucky are generally more expensive and, more importantly I believe, need to be cleaned before you should ingest it. An orange, and those types of fruit have skin, so they're in the clear, but apples? Peaches? Pares? Grapes? I'm not eating those without cleaning them. And still, even the oranges are more expensive than the chips, the donuts, and the candy. Even the healthier drinks are more expensive. Orange juice and apple juice and grape juice always cost just that much more than the soda and the Arizona Ice Tea (I love Arizona Ice Tea, by the way). My wallet doesn't see the sense in eating healthy if it's gonna cost me that more to have that lifestyle.

When you're going out, there's McDonalds, Wendy's, Burger King. Nothing healthy about those places, but they sure do taste good. Same with KFC, Popeye's, your given pizza places, and so on. Fast food isn't healthy. And they don't care. There's hardly a "Salad Stop," a "Healthy Food Here," or any kind of fast food place that primarily sells healthy food. Okay, maybe there's Subway, but from what I here, Subway's food isn't all that healthy either. That would require research that, admittedly, I'm not willing to do right now. I do know, however, that even under the assumption that Subway is healthy, a five dollar footlong costs more than a Big Mac, a Whopper, a Bacon Cheeseburger, anything on the Dollar Menu of McDonalds or the Value Menus of Wendy's and Burger King. Disadvantage: healthy food.

When you go to a supermarket, the healthy food is outnumbered by the unhealthy food. And once again, the healthy food is more expensive than the unhealthy food. When you're out here counting pennies, every penny counts. When 5lbs of regular ground beef is less expensive than 5lbs of that organic, better treated ground beef, your wallet generally does the thinking for you.

And then of course, you have those organic food supermarkets that are just too far out the way to care about. And it's not like if you traveled to said out of the way organic food supermarket that you get some kind of deal on the food. Nope, similar prices... maybe slightly less expensive than the organic food at the run of the mill supermarket, but still much more expensive than the run of the mill food at the run of the mill supermarket.

So what's the hidden reason why diets fail? Diets are expensive.