Life's hard. But it's harder when you're stupid.  

I feed my self AND  my gf for $30 a week and we eat better than a 5 star restaurant.  Everything from scratch.  Pancakes n stuff in the morning,  pizza from scratch, gas grilling, roasting, deep frying, I make my own ice cream!  The stuff I make is not enumurable.  But here's the kicker.  It doesnt take time or hardwork, it takes brains.  I can whip up the most amazing food faster than a trip through the drive through.  Ppl that think they have to read labels need to start reading the recipes on the web. Am I right?

Ok i gotta ask what you are eating to get by that cheap.  My fiance and I eat very healthy food as well and i live in a cheap part of the US but i have to pay $50-$60 per week for the 2 of us.  We don't eat a heck of a lot, we're both fairly skinny.  I don't see any way i could cut the amount we spend in half without going to a ridiculously basic diet of rice, beans, and nuts or something.

NO NO NO NO NO NO NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

We need less government interference not more. What kind of a country do you want to live in? I prefer the kind with real freedom and liberty. Taxation is just another form of control. If I had my way the only thing taxed would be income and it would be a flat 10% for everyone no matter what. No loopholes and no way out of it. If you make a dollar you pay 10cents. that's it. But if I had my way the government would be a lot smaller and spend less so we probably wouldn't even need a 10% tax.

Drop all subsidies, get rid of nanny laws and taxes, and go back to the basics of government.

Yes it would have been better if I didn’t have it in the first place, but only in an ideal world. Hardships are necessary to encourage progression, and having acid reflux was no different. It turned me into a conscious consumer with respect to eating, and now I can pass on what I learned to help others. The great majority of people do not alter things unless they hit a critical point. That’s why I believe in incentives and disincentives. I only gave ONE example for how incentives works, and it was a personal experience. I had a health related incentive to change.

People are very ignorant and choose to stay ignorant. In this sense I believe the government should step in, but not with bans or anything coercive (back to incentives and disincentives). Give people an inventive to eat right and disincentives to eating poorly. Where I live taxes are considerably lower on green vehicles and light bulbs than on regular cars and the conventional light bulbs. As a result, people responded and bought more of the former. Telling them it is better for the environment or that it would save them more in the long run did very little, but the tax incentives helped tremendously. Again, just an example, but the concept is much broader.

Are you aware of the Big Mac Index and what it does? Okay … it may be relatively expensive where YOU live, but where I live it is VERY cheap. The cost of a meal from McDonalds is relative from place to place, and the combinations people employ are much different from what you think the average person may buy. I've seen people buy apple pies and a dollar burger for instance. This also extends to healthier foods. It may be relatively cheap where you live, but that doesn't suggest it is cheap in other places. And as I stated before calories (junk food in general) is much cheaper than nutrition, so it’s part of the reason why people consume them. By junk I’m not solely referring to fast food, but cheap processed food you find in the supermarket for next to nothing. I’m not suggesting all health food items are expensive since some are cheap, and I think this goes back to ignorance. People need to be conscious of the cheap healthy foods available. A lot of people are unaware of things like yams, beets and other unconventional foods.

Moderate additives in foods? Could you elaborate here? I don’t want to assume, but if it is what I think you are suggesting then I’m not sure I’d support that notion. My first degree is in nutrition, and I know the unintended health consequences that can bring.

why even tax...just regulate the amount of shit in this garbage. its already done with countless other ingredients that have been deemed unsafe at certain levels.  these foods literally become addictive to people because of all the filth in them.  

I'm not as extreme as you, I don't make my own ice cream, and sometimes I get expensive stuff (like pine nuts) to make food taste really special, but yea I agree wiith you 100%. I can't eat pasta sauce from a can anymore, and my deep fried fish is just as good as a restaurants (except smaller chunks because I don't have a deep frier).

The problem with people eating like us though is lazyness. People are too lazy to look up a recipe and spend 20-30 minutes cooking and cleaning. It's easier to sit in a car and drive to McDonalds, and fast food chains take advantage of that lazyness.

It depends on what type of food you eat. If you eat just pasta/rice/potato dishes, make your own sauces, and add vegetables, you can easily feed the both of you for $30 comined a week. I feed my girlfriend a lot, and yea.

If you eat a lot of meat, then things get a lot more expensive. I only eat meat about once a week, but I substitue the protein with lots of eggs, beans and some nuts.

Also $30 a week is true only if you cook everything you eat from scratch. I've recently been buying yogurt, and snack food like that brings the price of living up, but it's nice to have something which isn't a fruit, immediatly available, and I don't always want to make a salad.

P.S. A salad takes what 2-3 minutes to make? That's faster then the line at fast food, and with crutons, tomatos, and cucumbers, it's still only about $2 for a large salad in cost.

You sound like a pupil of Milton Friedman lol

If we all only paid 10% tax, then Doctors, and Landlords would just be accumulating wealth at ridiculous rates. If you were born into a rich family, own a large company, or just make a lot of $$$ you also have a higher responsibility to the poor. You already have mega-corporations in USA, Wal-Mart grosses more then Poland in a year, do the Waltons and Bill Gates really need billions of dollars? No.

Hardships are necessary to encourage progression, you do realize that obesity rates have doubled in the last 20 years right? Food Quality has been going downhill in North America since the 70's and the main reason is to cut costs so large company's make more $$$.

If you're making a case about incentives, I agree with you. We should reduce taxes on healthy foods (Produce has no tax in Canada), and increase taxes on junky food. That's my arguement.

Potatos and rice are two of the cheapest sources of carbs, they are cheaper then corn products, and much healthier. We could easily make sugar from beats (They use beat sugar in pops in Europe), and it would be a lot cheaper and healthier then corn products. Yes carbs in general are cheap, but we do need to make standards. My arguement isn't to get people to eat more nutritious food, just to push company's to make less junky foods. If we say remove the corn subsidy, HFCS and thus candy/pop will become more expensive. However if a compeditor came in am made a product with beat sugar, he could sell the healthier product for less. Win Win.

Plus, if we take junky foods because they have too much fat in them, we could also give a tax break (an incentive) on healthy foods. Crackers and humus cost about as much as chips, but they don't have their own Aile in grocery stores. If chips became more expensive, people would eat more crackers.

As for moderating addatives in food, salt is a good example. Adding salt to subway sandwiches, McDonalds Fries, or pizza doesn't alter the taste that much. In fact a lot of Europeaners can't stand our food because it's so damn salty, and there rarely is a no salt option. If you taxed foods with high salt, people would stop putting them on pre-cooked foods (or at least give you the no salt option, like at McDonalds), and this would be an immediate health benefit. To give you an example of how much salt there is in food, 2-3 slices of pizza cover 1 adult males entire daily salt intake.

Plus there is no reason to cook our food in so much fat, to the point where paper bags become clear.

i still couldn't do that.  We basically get mostly veggies, then some potatoes, 1 kind of fruit, frozen chicken, milk, eggs, one kind of beans.  I'm already well over $30 at that point.  Then there are all kinds of other expenses though, like honey, rice, cooking oil, spices, yeast, flour.  Nothing is packaged, everything is cooked fresh from the sauces to the bread.  I would say my diet is very basic, i avoid all of the expensive veggies and fruit.  I only eat the frozen chicken which is barely over $2 a pound.