I am currently nursing a 5 month old baby and don’t even need to eat that many calories. 1800 is fine for me, and 1400 when I’m not nursing. (I’m a 5’4, 145 pound female). My husband who is 6’4 only eats about 1800 calories a day as well.

And, then one day, it hit me with a big “DUH”!! We grew 90%+ of our food and the folks would send us out in the summer and go to all our neighbors in a 4 block area who had fruit trees going to waste. We would offer to pick them for half. With all that gardening and fruit picking and canning, etc., we also got tons of exercise. I am overweight but have always been extremely healthy. At almost 73, I have very mild diabetes, cholesterol (from genes), and some hypertension. All this because, when I overate it was not sweets or high cal foods. I overate on everything – fruits, veggies, starches, etc.

With all the semi-tech we have now, even people in large cities can have gardens of good stuff – remember the hanging baskets that you can hang from the porch with tomatoes or strawberries or other items. Also, maybe we can get the nursuries to do those rolls of seeds with veggie seeds instead of flowers. Wouldn’t that be helpful?

And yes, we do have bananas (NEMO)that cost 29-33 cents a pound often. I eat one every day I eat dry cereal.

I am a vegan myself, so if I implied that eating healthy meatless meals was crazy and time consuming, I apologize. That was not AT ALL my point. I think brevity was my enemy for that comment. The point I was trying to make was that consuming 2000 calories *fresh fruits and vegetables* each and every day is time consuming and unreasonable for most people and is, therefore, not what the authors of the study were suggesting (that was the part of my thought I failed to articulate.)

Eating vegan is not the same as eating only low-calorie density fresh fruits and vegetables. I think you are confusing “vegan” with “low-fat raw vegan”.

Eating vegan can be health, quick, and delicious :)

The idea that cooking healthy, meatless meals is some kind of crazy, time-consuming burden is as much a canard as the idea that healthy food costs a lot.

My current planning will be to try to avoid grocery stores at all costs, except for shopping for my employers. A soy milk maker is next on my list, to be able to purchase low-cost soybeans, make my own milk and tofu, and eventually maybe even add those to a garden plan if I ever have land again.

Seems like we should all just ask our grandmothers or aunties… Many of the cultures that make up the US come from food traditions that make much out of little: beans and rice, red beans and rice, black eyed peas with ham hock and greens, stir fries over rice, pasta with a mostly-tomato sauce.

So if we could revive that knowledge, we would all eat better AND cheaper!

The rest of your points are well-argued, but it looks like about half of what they call ‘low calorie’ food can be frozen and/or canned. Certainly the peppers, tomatoes, and beans they list can be canned and/or frozen. Further, calories by weight? Really? By that measure, sun dried tomatoes (72 calories/oz) are higher-calorie food than canned tomatoes (9 calories/oz), because they lack water. Nutritionally they’re practically identical, but not by weight… by the amount of fresh tomato you started with. The canned tomato will be more filling than the dried tomato, but not more filling than the dried tomato plus a glass of water.

Your last paragraph shows that we’re still talking past each other. I don’t think (and never did) that they meant “you must spend $36/day to eat a healthy diet”. I’m still arguing that “a diet consisting primarily of low-calorie food costs $36.32 a day” is simply not true, and cannot be extrapolated from the cost of low-calorie food. (Whether by ‘primarily’ they mean more than half of the weight of the food one eats, which is likely, but not really consistent with the rest of what they write, or whether they mean more than half of the calories comes from low calorie food)

Rather, a diet consisting primarily of low-calorie food will also still consist to some degree of high-calorie food. So, if the diet is 50.1% out of the basket of goods that they call low-calorie, then the other 49.9% will be from medium or high-calorie foods, and likely cost very little per calorie, giving you a cost per day MUCH lower than $36. The more of the diet that one postulates will come from the low-calorie group, (that is, the closer a theoretical daily meal cost gets to $36) the more ridiculous the amount of food one has to consume.

First, “the lowest-calorie foods were mostly fresh fruits and vegetables” does not actually mean “the lowest-calorie foods included every fruit and every vegetable.”

Second, I find it totally believable that their “low-calorie” category really did include mostly fresh fruits and vegetables, as opposed to frozen or canned, because of the fruits and vegetables that it includes. When’s the last time you saw canned or frozen lettuce? Or watermelon? Frozen broccoli and spinach might be included, but your can of corn would probably be in the next tier up.

Third, I really think they were just trying to be helpful in translating the quantities into a 2000-calorie diet, figuring that that’s the amount of calories that most people would be most familiar with. Maybe they should have anticipated that some people would read “a diet consisting primarily of low-calorie food costs $36.32 a day” to mean “you must spend $36/day to eat a healthy diet,” but when you look at what they actually wrote, rather than what you originally thought they meant, I don’t think they actually said anything wrong.

Our local high schools don’t have Home Ec. They DO have classes called “Culinary arts: cooking”, “Family and Consumer Science”, or “Food and Fitness”.