Strawberries vs. chicken fingers: the cost of calories

The cost of healthy food is a pretty hot topic lately. Even ignoring current economic issues (which is hard to do: it's tough to pick up a newspaper without reading about how the cost of ingredients and gas are making food prices skyrocket), fresh foods are simply more expensive than processed foods. If you stick to buying the healthiest stuff at your supermarket: fresh fruits, vegetables, fish, eggs, cheese, meats, that is, the stuff that the store displays on its outside walls, your grocery bill will be higher than if you select your items from within the aisles.

This is a much more involved issue than most people realize. Much of it goes back to the farm bill and subsidization to corn farmers. If you google for a moment you'll find articles in sources ranging from random bloggers like myself to the New York Times that focus on how Americans are so obese because a bag of chips (whose ingredients are heavy on corn) is so much less expensive, dollar-per-calorie, than healthier foods like fresh produce.

On a shallow level, I absolutely agree with that argument. People like my dad will say that chips are expensive. "$4 for a bag of snack food! How is that cheap?" But compare the number of calories in that $4 bag of chips (often over 1000) to the number of calories you'll get if you spend $4 on pears (200-400, depending on the season) and it's really obvious that the argument is valid.

But on a deeper level we should see that the argument, presented as I did above, isn't comparing apples to apples. The choice that lower-income families face isn't (or shouldn't be) pears vs. chips. There are numerous other aisles in the supermarket containing cheap pastas, beans, and other more convenient foods. People trying to save their earnings while staying healthy sure aren't taking a bunch of asparagus in one hand and a box of Oreos in the other hand and thinking, "Well, asparagus is far more nutritious, but dollar-per-calorie, I'm gonna have to go with the Oreos...." The contents of prepared pastas and boxed rice dishes aren't as pure as those in fresh produce, but there really is enough good stuff available to raise any growing boy without making him one of America's obese children.

And with that in mind, I am going to begin a series of articles comparing the cost of calories in different foods. My recent healthy eating kick has really opened my eyes to how expensive it is to live on foods like spinach, and I find myself looking back fondly at the days when I came closer to living on Banquet frozen foods, perpetually available at Jewel for $1 each. (Recently the discount went even deeper, to $0.88 each. Convenience food nirvana, let me tell you.)

This idea recently hit me hard when I was surprised by the nutritional information I entered for a couple of my meals (on fitday.com). Those two meals were: One pound of fresh strawberries (more like a big snack than a meal) and Banquet Chicken Fingers.

VS

Strawberries:
I buy strawberries when they are on sale. The sale is usually two pounds for the price of one (or, when the season is really high, four pounds for the price of two). Regardless, a half-price strawberry is a good find, if you can eat them fast enough. So one day I brought a pound-sized carton of strawberries with me to work. I ate the whole thing in one sitting. A pound of strawberries is more filling than I thought it would be. Fruits and vegetables are not very filling for me as a rule, which is one reason I've avoided them over the years. But strawberries did not disappoint. After being positive I screwed the pooch by eating the whole thing at once, I looked up the nutritional content of strawberries on nutritiondata.com and was surprised and somewhat alarmed to learn that one pound of strawberries contains only 144 calories. That pound of strawberries effectively cost me $2.50, so this large snack cost me $0.0174 per calorie. That's about one and three-fourths pennies.

Banquet Chicken Fingers:
Even during my current health food kick, I still consume a frozen meal about every other day. I prepare almost all of my food one way or another (as opposed to picking up food at a deli or McDonald's) so in order to eat all day long I have to resort to convenience foods at least once a day. For me, convenience foods mostly mean frozen meals, boxed pastas, and nutrition bars. Healthy Choice is my favorite frozen food brand but Banquet is the cheapest, so I stock both. (I should note that both brands are owned by ConAgra, so there is no violence in my freezer between the two related, not strictly competing, brands.) And when I grab a frozen meal out of the freezer, my mental calculator dishes up a caloric content between 300 and 400 calories, because that's what they tend to be. So you can imagine how shocked I was when I looked at the nutritional information on the package and learned that Banquet's Chicken Fingers boast a whopping 550 calories per serving. 550 calories! For $1! (I don't remember if I got this particular box for 88 cents, but that was a once-in-a-lifetime event so I'm going with the $1 figure.) The math tells me that this meal cost $0.002 per calorie. That's two-tenths of one cent. That is one cheap calorie.

The calorie deathmatch data:

Strawberries, one pound Calories: 144 Price: $2.50 Dollars-per-calorie: $0.0174 (1.74 cents)

Banquet Chicken Fingers meal Calories: 550 Price: $1 Dollars-per-calorie: $0.002 (1/5 of one cent)

To summarize: Banquet Chicken Fingers calories are so much cheaper than strawberry calories that you can buy 8.7 times the number of Chicken Finger calories as strawberry calories for the same amount of money.

Want it even more simply?

Spending the same amount of money*, you could live on strawberries for about one day, while you could live on Banquet Chicken Fingers for nearly nine days.
*In this case, that amount would be about $35, based on a 2,000-calorie diet.

Get it? Talking about fractions of pennies might not be as clear, but the above statement should hit you. The strawberry calorie, she is an expensive one.

This, my first article in the calorie deathmatch series, isn't necessarily comparing apples to apples either. But I think it's at least a little bit more relevant than comparing fresh produce to corn chips.