Three factors that influence unhealthy food choices (they have nothing to do with being rich or poor)

(updated December 2, 2025)

Back in February 2017, I woke up one day and read a Twitter conversation sparked by an article written by award-winning food writer Jane Black. Since then, I have thought a lot about the article and the conversations that followed in the Twitterverse. Jane’s guest column, on the website of the Stone Barnes Center for Food and Agriculture, points out how elite foodies are fundamentally out of touch with the reasons behind why less-affluent, rural, and/or poor families hadn’t made a switch to healthier eating.

What struck me most about her essay was her observation that one of the main obstacles preventing less affluent people in red-state America from eating healthy didn’t have anything to do with ignorance, lack of desire, or rebellion against elite coastal foodie cultures. It did have to do with economics, but not in the way you might think: in fact, it had everything to do with the combination of lifestyle pressures and economic strain.

In other words, if you work two jobs and barely make ends meet, the last thing you want to do when you get home is cook a healthy meal. It’s easier, and relatively cheap, to head to the closest fast food joint instead.A big part of the reason so many working families choose ultra-processed convenience foods is that they simply don’t have the time or energy to make home-cooked meals. Right?

Well maybe, but it isn’t the only reason.

Why Eating Healthy on a Budget Is Still So Hard in 2025

From 2022 to 2024, food prices rose faster than they had in over 40 years. The USDA reported an 11% increase from 2021 to 2022 alone (partly driven by the global pandemic, supply chain disruptions, and the war in Ukraine), followed by additional spikes in 2023 and 2024. The prices of many healthy staples like fresh produce, nuts, beans, and fish increased faster than many processed foods. Even Walmart’s expanded organic offerings are often still out of reach for people with limited budgets or no physical access to a full-service grocery store.

Photo credit: paix120 via Visual hunt /  CC BY-NC

And food deserts haven’t gone anywhere. In fact, updated 2024 USDA Food Access Research Atlas data shows more rural counties losing grocery stores, not gaining them. Dollar Stores have rapidly expanded to fill the gap, but they rarely offer fresh foods.

Economic challenges are real, but here’s the twist: they’re not new. There have always been people in America who have worked hard, long hours and struggled to make ends meet. Not that long ago, most people who found themselves in that situation still managed to cook meals at home (yes, even in those families that didn’t have a stay-at-home adult who took care of the cooking and housework). Many of these households even grew small gardens to supplement their food supply.

So what changed?

Beyond Cost: The Hidden Lifestyle Barriers to Healthy Eating

To begin finding answers, I first turned to my mother, (who knows a lot about a lot of things and is generally considered a treasured source of advice by family, friends, and total strangers alike). Then I began asking random people of all economic backgrounds about why they chose to eat unhealthy food when they did. Finally, I did some research online.

This is what I came up with.

There are three major factors beyond economics that influence the eating habits of ordinary folks today. These three apply to all kinds of people, whether affluent, poor, or middle-class; rural, urban, or peri-urban; red state, blue state, or purple state; working 35-50 hours per week, or working 80 or more hours a week.

The three factors are priorities, food cultures, and social networks.

How Work, Stress, and Time Poverty Shape Food Choices

The connection between food and health is just not in the forefront of many people’s minds. In other words, eating healthy a majority of the time is not a priority. A 2018 study published in the journal Industrial Health confirmed that chronic stress, irregular work schedules, burnout, and childcare burdens dramatically reduce the likelihood of home cooking.

What’s more, many people don’t connect what they eat with their own personal health outcomes until they are faced with a crisis: someone close to them dies suddenly and unexpectedly from a heart attack, or their doctor tells them that they have to immediately change their dietary habits or will be facing a life-threatening health crisis.

Even that doesn’t always change people’s behavior, as Jane Black revealed in telling the story of Matthew Clayton, whose two brothers died of obesity-related diseases, who is obese himself, and who still eats a lot of fast food. Many people don’t stop and think about what might be in a fast food meal that only costs $3.99, as compared to a similar meal from a restaurant that costs $13.99. And others just don’t really care much, as long as the $3.99 meal tastes good and is easy to come by.

How Food Culture Has Shifted — And Why It Matters

Also there has been a seismic change in food cultures in the US (and many other countries) since the time of my mother’s childhood. For many people growing up in the 1940s and 50s, “eating out” meant going to a relative’s house to eat. Fast food was still a novelty, mostly catering to travelers.

Fast food history has always been tied to convenience. In 1921 in the United States, White Castle began serving burgers out of its Wichita, Kansas restaurant. Most people initially found the idea of this kind of food fare unappealing. Later, White Castle made efforts to change public perceptions of their food, using glass so customers could see it being prepared.

Photo credit: metamerist via Visualhunt.com / CC BY-NC-SA

Fast forward to 1940, when the first McDonald’s opened as a barbecue joint. It redesigned its restaurant in 1948, using assembly line technology. Burger King and Taco Bell followed suit in the 1950s, and then came Wendy’s in 1969.

Along with the growth of fast food joints came an explosion in advertising that was designed to make this kind of food more appealing to the average consumer. Back in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, there were relatively few advertisements. Where my mother saw a handful of food ads each week, today we face thousands on TV, billboards, streaming platforms, YouTube, and increasingly, TikTok and Instagram. This barrage of advertisements on billboards, tv, the internet and social media are constantly distracting us with enticing ads about unhealthy convenience foods.

See for yourself: get a stopwatch and then turn to a prime time station on your tv. Count how many minutes pass until you see a commercial for an unhealthy convenience food. Then see how many of these come up in an hour.

Kids and teens nowdays encounter more targeted junk food ads online than on television.

Aside from the onslaught of information enticing us to eat packaged, convenient, unhealthy, fast food, there is the issue of food sub-cultures. What kinds of food have people grown up eating? What are they used to and what do their palates prefer? Sometimes people don’t make the switch to eating healthy foods because they just don’t like these kinds of food (or they think they won’t). On the other hand, many people continue eating the foods they grew up with, even if it’s deep-fried, breaded, artery-clogging fare because it reminds them of grandma’s cooking, or Sundays around the dinner table after church.

When kids grow up eating healthy foods, they tend to crave healthy foods because their brains have essentially become programmed to like, and even prefer, this kind of food. I wrote about this in a blog post about kids and the Healthy Lunch movement in the US.

Advertising, Algorithms, and Fast Food: Why We Crave Convenience

Then there are the algorithms. Algorithms amplify what we already like. If you watch one cooking video on TikTok about fried chicken, you’ll soon find hundreds of videos featuring buttery, saucy, salty, energy-dense meals. Influencer food culture, from mukbang to “Skinny Tok” has made unhealthy eating even more appealing.

In other words: the modern food environment is designed to make unhealthy eating the default.

Photo credit: Ed Yourdon via VisualHunt /  CC BY-NC-SA

What the Latest Research Says About Food Deserts in America

Food reporting from 2022–2025 reveal that the problem of food deserts in rural America isn’t getting any better; in fact, it’s getting worse:

• Rural grocery stores continue to close at an alarming rate

• Dollar Stores are replacing full-service groceries in many counties

• Consolidation in the food retail industry has reduced supermarket access in many communities

• Transportation barriers have increased due to rising gas prices

• Inflation hit rural areas harder than major cities

• Policy changes in the accessibility of food benefits has led to more food insecurity in urban and rural areas of the country.

And when the nearest supermarket is an hour’s drive away, “eating healthy on a budget” looks very different.

Social Networks and Health: Why Your Friend Group Shapes Your Diet

Social networks also have a big influence on people’s eating habits. If the people you surround yourself with are overweight and unhealthy eaters, chances are you will be(come) overweight and unhealthy too. Social networks make all kinds of behavior, including unhealthy eating habits, feel more socially acceptable: it seems like everyone around you is engaging in them because, essentially, they are.

What’s more, in many social circles, it’s expected that people will get fat as they age, although there is no evidence that this trend is inevitable.

What is evident is that many overweight people don’t even realize that they’re overweight.

In the southeast region of the United States, thinness is an outlier, whereas it is more the norm in places like Los Angeles. Plant the average Californian or Coloradan in a major city in Georgia, Mississippi, or Louisiana, and physically speaking, her body type will stand out as being outside the norm. In other words, thinness is the outlier in the Southeast; on the West Coast, it’s commonplace.

While I agree with Jane Black that the conversation about food has become overtly political, and food-shaming is pointless, I think the reasons that people choose unhealthy over healthy food can’t be adequately explained by economics.

But like Jane Black, I agree selling (and advertising) more healthy convenience foods is a good way forward for food strategists. Turning healthy food into something that’s palatable for the mass market is no easy task, though. Maybe the trick isn’t to try to eliminate fast, unhealthy food – most of us will always crave some of that, sometimes.

How Can You Eat Healthy on a Budget? Practical Strategies That Work

There are some strategies that can help you eat healthy (or healthier); some of these require a little advance planning:

• Batch cook with slow cookers or Instant Pots to save time and money;

• Buy store-brand organics at Walmart, Aldi, and Lidl (all expanded healthier options in 2023–2025)

  Shop “loss leaders,” deeply discounted weekly specials or look for “manager’s specials” in your local grocery store: just keep in mind that this discounted food will need to eaten quickly to avoid spoilage

• Use frozen vegetables and fruits to reduce waste

• Grow low-maintenance foods at home, like herbs, salad greens, or microgreens

• Use SNAP Double Up Food Bucks at participating farmers markets

• Cook once, eat twice: plan leftovers intentionally

Eating healthy on a budget is possible, but it does require time, access, and support systems that many families simply don’t have.

Recent Policy Changes That Affect Food Affordability and Access

As I dug deeper into the question of why eating healthy on a budget feels harder now than it did a generation ago, I found that recent policy shifts play a much bigger role than most people realize. For example:

• 2024 SNAP pilot programs expanded funds for fruits and vegetables in certain states

• Farmers Market matching programs grew significantly in 2023–24

• School lunch nutritional standards were updated again in 2024, raising the bar for healthier foods; however, there have also been recent

• SNAP adjustments: when emergency pandemic benefits expired, monthly SNAP allowances dropped for millions; the Trump administration’s recent changes to SNAP benefits have further reduced the availability of these benefits to low-income families.

All of this points to the fact that policy shifts create real consequences for people trying to eat healthier.

What Needs to Change? Solutions for a Healthier Food Culture

I believe that the trick to encouraging more healthy eating and less unhealthy bingeing is increasing options for healthy fare at the same time that we address challenges like food deserts and tackle the problems with the commercial food industry. In so doing, we’ll be fostering a culture of healthy eating that involves, among other things, giving people the tools and hacks they need to get things started in a way that makes sense for their lifestyles.

So like Jane Black, I believe that selling (and advertising) more healthy convenience foods is part of the solution. But it won’t be enough on its own.

To truly foster healthier eating, we have to

• Address food deserts

• Support local grocery alternatives

• Expand healthy meal options in schools and workplaces

• Improve SNAP access

• Restrict the marketing of ultraprocessed foods, especially to children, and

• Give people practical, realistic tools to start where they are

This last point is crucial: people need easier pathways and cultural support in order to shift habits in a way that makes sense for their lives.

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