Grocery Shopping Debate: Healthy vs Unhealthy $$$$

It's super interesting to see the differing feasibility for various diets, just based on geographical location alone. like. Wow.

 

It really is.

For me, spoons come into it too. I quite regularly buy a giant bag of Doritos and eat that in one sitting, because it has 750 calories and while it's not filling, the crunchiness is super satisfying. (I'm very oral sensory seeking, so soup alone doesn't work as a meal for me because there's not enough chewing, so my brain will want to carry on eating even if I can feel that my stomach is full. I think chewing is more important to me than volume of food when it comes to feeling sated.) The bag of Doritos tops up my day's calories to a decent amount - I don't actually know exactly how many I need per day, because I am very short and sedentary (thanks to chronic illness), but I'm at the top of the 'healthy' weight range and have quite a lot of muscle for someone who doesn't work out. So I figure it might be somewhere between 1500 and 2000, but I really don't know.

The local co-op has a guaranteed 'little, often' customer in me, because I usually lack either the spoons or the money to plan what to eat over the next few days (let alone a week or more) and buy that all in one go. They do two really brilliant ready meals that are reasonably 'healthy', tick all my necessary sensory boxes, and only cost 1.80 & 2.00 respectively, but they're both under 500 calories, which is great if you're trying to lose weight on a budget but not so great in the long term.

So, criteria for my groceries:

• Must be cheap
• Must require little to no preparation
• Must require as little clean-up as possible
• Must involve lots of chewing
• Cannot require stovetop cooking, as our stove doesn't work
• Cannot be spicy or contain bell peppers (the two of my sensory issues that are easiest to put into words)
• Must also fit around my harder-to-explain sensory issues
• Must be available near my apartment, as longer journeys are hard to convince myself to make

...which leaves me with relatively limited options. Including 'giant bag of Doritos'.
Veggies are relatively cheap, especially from the small independent shops, but those only take cash and I try to leave as much as possible in my bank account and anyway they tend to require more preparation than I'm capable of. Ditto raw meat. Tinned fish is very handy, but expensive here. I'm not currently vegetarian because even though I haven't been bulimic for years, I'm not yet in a place mentally where I can safely attempt a major dietary restriction without going nuts.

 

Oh and what I forgot to mention is I primarily eat a relatively fancy "flexitarian" diet because of my chronic illness for EXAMPLE:

• i'm not supposed to eat eggs if I can avoid it, but definitly should avoid the egg yolks
• i'm not allowed to eat pork regularly which is The Cheapest Meat (though having a lot of muslims living in the area means there are decent halal options if you know where to look.You wouldn't believe how often some food companies try to bullshit you with their "chicken salami, except not lol there is pork in here" in regular supermarkets :/)
• i'm supposed to avoid animal products in general but i can't go Full Vegan because Fish (Omega 3) and milk products (Calcium) unless i buy the more expensive vegan milk substitutes with calcium additions or take supplements which, yeah no.
• some veggies are disencouraged others are encouraged, the list is long, but i can't eat red beet or rhubarb for example.
• i technically shouldn't even eat too much spinach and i genuinely love spinach :(

what this means: i know for a fact it is possible to live vegitarian here super easily. I'm a vegetarian like 70% of the time if it makes sense? Vegan is harder but there is definitly the POSSIBILITY, mostly due to metropolitan area with good food prizes and several prestigious universities and a big food-blogger/health-nut scene being pretty active (same as why you can't walk ten steps without seeing a coffeeshops in some parts of towns, the low carb paleo raw vegan hipster brigade is everywhere. somehow starbucks is the only place that doesn't have a vegan dessert option. freaking starbucks.)

 

Euler: *boggles at relative distances*

Not necessarily because it would be possible to find a closer store, but that I can't imagine a 90 min drive being fortunate. I'll cycle 35 mins to get to Lidl, or 20 mins to Sainsbury's, but I expect bike travel to take time anyway.

 

Aldi is an hour or hour and a half trudge away and a few minutes' taxi ride back.

 

Super jealous. I wish I could afford taxis.

 

The taxi costs 5 to 8 dollars. Less than the amount I save by not going to Walmart. I've heard they cost more elsewhere though.

 

see okay when i say i can shop cheap groceries close by I mean i live literally 5 minutes down the street from a Lidl. what
the fuck. is that me being in a metropolitan area or is it because i'm not in the US?

 

We're about five minutes from a Winn-Dixie and ten from our favorite Publix (by car, though it wouldn't be more than a thirty minute walk to Winn-Dixie.) But there aren't any specialty stores around, and it ends up paying for itself especially if we have to head up to the big city for a different reason.

I would say we live in a pretty quaint tourist/college town type of area though, so its not metropolitan by any means.

 

In Brooklyn where I am, veggies are relatively cheap and easy to find - there's a small independent produce store about 7 mins walk from me (cheapest produce in the area), a Key Foods next to it (where I get non-produce), and various other grocery stores slightly further away. It's definitely cheapest to get things like large bags of rice, beans, etc, though, and vegetables, roots, fruits, etc all need to be used fairly quickly. I tend to spend about $45 on two weeks of groceries at once. That will go up a bit now that I don't have a food service job that gives me a free meal most days (plus things like free day-old bread). Meat and cheese are more expensive, and I rarely buy meat. When I do, it's often in a pre-made form (soup, chili, smoked sausages, etc).

I think it varies a lot. Relatively healthy mostly-vegetarian diets are generally less expensive than relatively healthy meat-heavy diets for someone with average dietary needs, in my experience, so I don't know where that often cited "fact" comes from about vegetarianism being more expensive. I also ate in a student co-op in college, and we rarely bought meat because of the cost. If a head cook wanted to buy meat for a meal, they actually had to propose it to the co-op ahead of time to approve it and make sure it stayed within the expected budget. However, that's not totally representative, because we only bought locally-raised meat from small farms, which adds a lot to the price tag.

 

Where I've lived, eating healthier means literally doubling your grocery budget.

Also spoon cost is a huge thing for me, there's a reason why my weight balloons during major depressive episodes. It's because the most complicated thing I can conceive making with massive amounts of executive dysfunction is spaghetti/cheese/butter. Even box mac n cheese has too many steps. "actually capable of making my own food and not just eating nothing unless I can eat it straight out of the container or have someone else make it for me" is actually a pretty big milestone in my recovery