made the con argument on debato. Sorry, was lazy the first time.

Thank you for taking your time to pay attention to my long comment.

I work as a social counsellor and come into contact mainly with people who live on social assistance, i.e. who are at the lowest end of their incomes. One might think that they save on food because they cannot afford to eat good and healthy food. However, it has little to do with income, because reasonably nutritious food can also be bought for little money, if you know how to properly house with money.

As I see it, it is not primarily about the small income, but rather about what you can do with the small amount of money you have. It is a question of the attitude to consumption and what one desires to weigh up against what one really needs. The fact is, a poor person is obliged to spend most of his money on food and the roof over his head. As a second mobility, as a third access to modern communication: the Internet.

This may favour a rather meat-poor diet, which one must catch by means of replacement proteins, but this is also possible. You only have to want to know the necessary information and train yourself in it. In modern rich societies, financial poverty is not a sufficient reason for an unhealthy diet. Everywhere one is reached by the health trend and one does not need to be a brainiac to understand this.

The whole thing is rather a mental matter, people with less income may feel shabby and poor, they may have a tendency to neglect themselves due to lack of self-esteem or other events in life, but this also applies to people with money. This indifference to food may also be due to the fact that modern civilizations tend to portray everything as fixable. Bad teeth are simply replaced or repaired, pain or other ailments are compensated by pills. All this is easy to have. Even people who can't afford it are urged by dentists to have expensive dentures made and people prefer to buy furniture on installments rather than to be interested in a simple but nutritious kitchen. Basically, the poor want to look less poor and more like the wealthy. The money would also rather be spent on the latest mobile phone - again in installments. And so on. I cannot confirm from my consulting experience that food and income show such a direct causal relationship as you suggest here, only an indirect but connected to so many other things. I didn't read the study, so I can't say much about it.

To put it somewhat mercilessly: you can sleep great on an old mattress, do without a decent couch and set up a few simple chairs and a table than save on food. Besides: if you look at how expensive a Mc-Donalds visit is and compare it to a cleverly bought shopping basket, where you buy the ingredients fresh and have to cook them yourself, I wouldn't put my hand on the fire that it makes a big difference in price.

Supply and demand is never the real problem. The real problem, if you want to call it that, is the inner attitude and attitude towards consumption and really "being" or just "appearing".