this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2024
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I literally had avocado toast today. You know what made me start? I did the math, and avocado toast costs about as much as a bowl of cereal. They've been gradually hiking the price of all the essential items like cereal and milk, but the luxury goods haven't gone up as much. There's no such thing as "cutting corners and saving up" anymore.
If you make the bread at home it'll taste even better.
I switched from cereal to oatmeal to Red Mills hot cereal. The hot cereal is great, I add honey and it's very nice.
...well there's always rice-and-beans but with the way finance, insurance, and real estate are going these days you'll need rice-and-beans just to survive, not to save up...
What a rich guy mindset, have you tried skipping meals and save up for rent? Tip your landlords.
Costs and nutrition estimates
The internet tells me that 125ml milk to 30g cereal is the proper ratio. In freedom units, that's ~30 servings per gallon or $0.10 of milk per bowl, and 30g is a little over an ounce, so $0.10-0.20 cereal per serving, leading to about $0.20-0.30 per serving. For avocado toast, a slice is about $0.11-0.12, so avocado toast is about $0.61-0.87.
Looking at nutrition (taken from MyFitnessPal and Walmart websites):
In total for my area, for an average serving:
Normalizing for cost per calorie in my area, I get:
In other words, avocado toast is something like 2-5x more expensive than cereal, depending on where in that range your meal falls. If you're buying regularly priced cereal (more like $0.20-0.25) and if milk is more expensive in your area, then it's a lot more competitive, but still cheaper than avocado toast (something like half the price).
That said, neither is a particularly expensive meal, and you're not poor because you're eating avocado toast. However, if everything you do is 2-5x more expensive than alternatives, then we have an issue.
You're also forgetting that cereals contain almost no vitamins or fiber, but avocado does. So, to make up for it, you should eat a salad to your cereals. Then calculate the price again. You will find (I guess) that avocado can compete with cereals+salad.
Well, a multivitamin costs a few cents...
But yes, cereal is certainly less healthy than avocado toast, but it doesn't really need to be if the rest of your diet makes up for it. Also, there are also breakfast cereals with higher fiber and vitamin content (e.g. most granolas), and oatmeal has 4g fiber in a 140 calorie serving and is cheaper still than most breakfast cereals.
My point here isn't to decide which is the best option for your breakfast, but to challenge the idea that avocado toast is somehow about the same price as breakfast cereal. There are a lot of options for breakfast that can fit into a balanced diet. The important thing is to find something you like that supports a healthy lifestyle and fits into your budget, and there are a lot of options to get there.
The bit about avocado toast is not making one for yourself at home for $2. It's about going out to eat for every meal and ordering an overpriced item at a hipster brunch bar in a liberal city. It has nothing to do with the fact that a piece of bread and an avocado are fairly cheap on their own.
Not defending the out of touch piece of shit that said it, just trying to give context.
So it's okay to do in a conservative city?
Avocados are $3 each here and half the time they're bad. Must be nice living somewhere with affordable avocados.
Do you use an entire avocado for your toast?
Where I live it's $5 a gallon for milk (let's assume 1/10 gallon for breakfast cereal so $0.50 per bowl)
Then it's like $1.00 /100g of cereal, so you're probably looking at $1.50 for a bowl of cheerios.
Where I live I can get avocados for $1.20 each and a loaf of bread for $4.50 (14 slices?) so if I use half an avocado for my slice of toast that's less than $1.
Even with avocados at $1 each it's still way more expensive than a bowl of cereal. Unless you buy brand name cereal at MSRP or something.
The price of cereal shot up in the last year, heh.
I noticed healthier food getting cheaper than manufactured "food" products years ago. Everyone talks about McDonald's in 2024, but nobody remembers the discomfort around a $6 box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch in 2014.