Healthy Food Choices

Healthy Food Choices

David Sparks Ph.D.
David Sparks Ph.D.
An opinion on the affordability of healthy foods like fruits and vegetables coming from Hayden Stewart of the Economic Research Service. We could say how much it would cost to consume a cup of each of them given all of these products available at all of these different prices. And these recommendations for how much we should eat and what variety of products we should consume. Let's just put together some combinations to get an overall idea of how much it really cost to meet your fruit and vegetable recommendations. Hopefully Americans won't outright dismiss healthy foods like fruits and vegetables as expensive. Instead we can put an actual dollar figure to that. For example four different daily combinations of fruits and vegetables that could be purchased for between $2.10 and $2.60 per day. For example at the lower end of that range there is a basket which include a cup of orange juice, also raisins, romaine lettuce, carrots, tomato, corn and cucumber. So there would be an example of what someone could buy. Those with the most recent available data for about specific example was two dollars and 12 cents. That may be somewhat more than a lower income family might currently be spending. But I would hope that putting an actual dollar figure to it and understanding the importance of fruits and vegetables to their diet they would look somewhere in their food budget at maybe where they could reallocate some dollars and make room for those products.
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