Why and how processed food is cheaper than healthy and unprocessed food?
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Processed food swaps out some of the more expensive parts for cheaper fillers. Like taking adding bread crumbs/flour to a meat mixture.
Sometimes that complete healthy unprocessed food can make more money to the manufacturer by selling it in two parts. Just like skimming milk and selling as milk, plus cream, that can be done to many foods.
There is a lot that goes into this. Things like which crops are subsidized, what additives are used, transport cost, shelf life, product buy backs, and a lot of others factors. For example, fresh vegetables are harder to transport than canned vegetables, because they go bad easier. The supplier is usually liable for any product that goes bad, so to protect their profit they use climate controlled trailers to transport them, so the transport cost is already higher than for canned vegetables.
Other than being very close to a farm, or growing things in the backyard, there is always the problem of keeping food safe, palatable and also transportable. All of this reduces wastage.
Processing does not equate to unhealthy. And properly processed food can more easily be transported, is less prone to spoilage and waste and can be done at scale – all of which although more costly up front, results in lower prices to the consumer.
One of the big reasons is that unprocessed food spoils faster. Without a preservative or two, it can’t just sit on a shelf for a month. When your inventory becomes worthless in a shorter amount of time, you lose money to spoilage and you have to sell your stuff for a higher price to make up for that.
Processed food can use cheaper ingredients and it isn’t just the filler.
Bananas are a great example. The EU classifies bananas as Class A, B or C. Despite what idiots might tell you class B and C aren’t banned and the differences are almost entirely cosmetc, but when you put class B bananas on the shelf next to class A the class A bananas all get bought, while the class B are left on the shelf to rot.
So, class B bananas are cheaper than class A. However if you are making smoothies then you have no need for the nice looking bananas and can buy all the cheap, wonky ones. This then applies to all the ingredients. Cuts of meat, eggs, fruit, vegetables.
Combine that with swapping out ingredients for filler, the fact that pre-cooking (in the case of a ready meal) removes nutrition, long term storage removes nutrition and so on you end up with a cheap meal that has much lower nutrition than if you cooked the same meal yourself.
Much of the cost of fresh produce and meat is to cover the costs for product that spoils or gets damaged in transport. Processed foods are baked, canned, cured, injected with preservatives, etc. that prevent loss from spoilage. Additionally, the best looking, most perfect product is sorted for sale to consumers while the uglier, misshapen, etc. can be used in prepared foods. Lower quality meats can be ground and mixed with fat to reach desired ratio or injected with marinades, etc. to tenderize them. And ultimately the costs to process foods are small because of the huge economies of scale involved.
Processed foods are physically or chemically altered to make them easier to store or transport, or simply to increase their value. Some of these processes do not impact nutrition, like homogenization of milk. Some substantially impact nutrition, like removing the germ and seed coat from wheat in flour production.
Healthy food can be cheap, but you won’t hear much about it because everyone is trying to maximize profits by pushing expensive foods. You will never see a commercial for dried beans, nor a tv show explaining how to prepare them.
“Processed food” is a very big category, but many processed foods are combinations of grains, sugars, and vegetable oils.
And those ingredients are cheap with a capital “C”. That makes them very profitable for those companies, even after they spend a lot of money on marketing.
Economies of scale. Processed food is often mass produced (hence the processed part in the name) in some factory. Mass produced stuff is easier to buy and often sold at lower prices than batch or one-off produced stuff.
The companies that make processed food are also scaled up to make A LOT. They already have huge supply chains going. Your local town butcher does not.
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