Survey: Is Your Diet Deteriorating?
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto 
on 11.14.08
Sales at McDonalds are up; sales at Starbucks and Whole Foods are down. Yet Alan says "the one place people should be investing in more is the food they eat. Relying on the cheapest foods full of starches, fats, and sugars could end up costing you more by hitting you where you can afford it least...your health."
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We cook more and our meat intake has remained the same. The only thing we have cut back on is overall quantity. Where we would have consumed 700 calories per meal now we get around 600...
Generally, the more you cook (if you shop sensibly and plan ahead) the lower your food spending will be.
The one thing I am concerned about is the insane fruit prices over here in Japan. I just cannot justify $2 apples. Add that these are NOT organic and you are looking at one expensive fruit.
We're cooking a ton more and eating out a lot less as the result of wanting to control our food intake. It's been great and while the cost of fresh veggies is not cheap, we've been meal planning: we make enough to eat for a meal, freeze the rest for leftovers later in the weekand have hardly any wasted food, and look at weekly circulars to see what we can get on sale and make corresponding meals.
We're also eating more ground turkey instead of beef because of the cost. 3$ for 2 lbs in the Northeast of the US is great and 1/4 the price of ground beef.
for us, we are eating lower quality stuff - more pasta and rice, less fresh vegatables, fruit isn't an every day thing. Fruit and vegatables are expensive. we haven't changed our meat habits - we didn't eat much anyway, and we've used ground turkey for close to a decade.
i've been trying to get my husband to plant me a garden for fresh veggies, but he doesn't want to work in the yard at home - he is a landscaper by trade and good at his job, but tired when he gets home. i have never managed to keep a plant alive - can't even plant-sit, they die before the owner can return....
Anyway, it's not that we are eating more fast food, because if we eat out, we'd rather eat somewhere we really like so we go out only about once a month or special occasions, etc.