Why and how processed food is cheaper than healthy and unprocessed food?
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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.
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