&gt; <i>The food you proposed as an alternative would result in pretty bad malnutrition, so it isn&#x27;t really an alternative.</i><p>That&#x27;s kind of the point, and exactly the problem.  It&#x27;s cheaper to eat unhealthy food.<p>&gt; <i>Finally, note I didn&#x27;t say healthy food was cheaper than unhealthy food, only that healthy food is completely affordable.</i><p>Well, you were replying to a comment that started with &quot;To the best of my knowledge, healthy food is in fact more expensive.&quot;, and your comment made it seem as if you disagreed with that premise.<p>It is certainly true that you can eat healthily on a pretty small budget.  The USDA even published guides on this.  They have a low-cost and a moderate-cost (which is probably still low-cost relative to many peoples&#x27; budgets) plan.<p>A big issue often left out of these discussions is that it is also very time consuming to eat healthily if you don&#x27;t have lots of money to spend.  If you have the time to cook from scratch, you can make healthy food cheaply.  Finding time to cook from scratch is difficult for a lot of people, though, especially people working multiple jobs, or single parents raising kids and also working.  If you&#x27;re starting with raw veggies and dry beans, you&#x27;re realistically looking at an hour or more of prep and cook time, plus cleanup.  If you stop at McDonalds, you&#x27;re looking at 5 minutes.  :\<p>Another big issue is that a lot of people are honestly pretty bad cooks.  It&#x27;s hard to convince your kids to eat healthy food if you consistently make it taste bad, which is exceedingly likely if you&#x27;re trying to cook &quot;healthy&quot; by cutting out most salt and fat.  Hooray for dry baked chicken breasts and steamed vegetables.<p>All of this adds up.  It&#x27;s not <i>just</i> monetary cost, but when you factor all of this (and more) in, there are a lot of factors pushing people, especially poor people, toward unhealthy foods that are easy, fast, tasty, and pretty cheap.