By Beth H. Watson, CFP®
In a survey by the Cleveland Clinic released last year, 46 percent of respondents named cost as a barrier to healthy food choices.
The idea that it’s expensive to eat nutritious foods is a common refrain.
After being challenged recently at a community health advisory meeting for suggesting bananas were affordable snacks, I decided to dive into the data.
Let’s look at our local discount grocer’s options for a Monday in March 2024.
For each of the following categories, I priced the most reasonable, economical mix of about 10 pounds of fruit.
Fresh Fruit - $10.40
3 pounds clementines
3 pounds apples
4 pounds bananas
Canned Fruit - $13.36
4 cans pineapple
2 cans mandarin oranges
2 large cans peaches
Individual Fruit Cups - $22.70
4 pounds peaches
3 pounds oranges
3 pounds mixed fruit
Frozen Fruit - $23.41
3 pounds blueberries
4 pounds strawberries
3 pounds bananas
Rolled Fruit - $136.80
The only choice at our local store contained a mix of apples, pears, and raspberries. These are not the popular “fruit snacks” made mostly of corn syrup, or fruit roll ups. This is a brand that presses fruit together with carrot juice. Thankfully, my kids do not like these!
For fun, I also checked the price of 10 pounds of store-brand potato chips. Of course you have to buy 20 bags, so it was $39.60. If you go the individual-serving route with 1 oz. bags of chips for variety, 10 pounds costs nearly $70!
While the cost of nearly everything has gone up in the last few years, we can see from the numbers that eating real food in its raw form—at least in the fruit category—is not nearly as expensive as making other choices.
Bananas are more expensive than they used to be, but they still aren’t as expensive as fruit can be in other forms.