It’s no secret that the the commercial food world is filled with unhealthy foods. At every corner sits either a Starbucks, with drinks filled with sugar, or a Taco Bell (which I’ve nicknamed Taco Hell), which has saturated fat totals off the charts. Everyone would love to be that person who just drives right past the hamburgers and fries and goes home to a meal of vegetables and healthy proteins, but for many, that reality is unreachable. Between work, school, and social hour, it’s increasingly difficult to find time to cook healthy meals at home, much less go to an organic or all natural grocery store to buy ingredients.

Yet even more of a road block between you and a healthy life than time management is the price. A Big Mac at everyone’s favorite fast food joint rings in at $3.99. Cooking a burger at home complete with the same toppings? $9.09- if one was to portion out the meal based on an individual hamburger, but it’s common knowledge that you can’t buy just one hamburger bun at the store. To buy all of the ingredients at a local Whole Foods Market to make just one healthy hamburger with wheat bread and lean beef, it would cost $19.67. For someone who makes minimum wage (in some states as low as $7.25), cooking things at home for a single individual seems both unrealistic and unsustainable. That’s because it is.

Fast food portion sizes are catered toward the individual and are accessible within mere minutes of pulling up to the towering outside menu. Additionally, the access to technology at our fingertips and the ability to have most things at our disposal in mere minutes, if not seconds, makes us impatient to wait for a healthy home cooked meal. Especially as the newest generation becomes more into fad exercising such as Spin, Jazzercise, etc., the time to make a home cooked meal is nearly nonexistent; the patient side of anyone can easily be replaced by the demon of instant gratification.

Even outside of fast food, most restaurants have upsized their portions, making it very easy for the average person to overeat. While the menu item may seem healthy, eating a lean steak slathered in butter and grease paired with buttery broccoli and asparagus isn’t a good substitute for making a meal in which one is omniscient to all the ingredients in it. Even when eating things like salads at many restaurants, one is consuming artificial sugars and ingredients in salad dressings and other ingredients.

So with this epidemic of unhealthy foods and portion sizing, what is one to do? It’s difficult to blame corporations for the price of healthy food; the competition in the food industry is stiff, with commercial farmers manufacturing foods with hormones and preservatives to cut costs and get larger crop yields. Moreover, the likelihood of a decrease in the price of organic food is slim to none, due to the rate at which consumers can purchase and eat produce and the cost to grow organic and healthy foods.

For young people on a minimum wage-based budget, the $7.25 an hour doesn’t allow for a lifestyle that perpetuates healthy eating. If organic and healthy foods are too much of a commodity for the price on them to decrease, then it seems to be high time that minimum wage increase so that young people, whose habits are so fragile and developing, can afford to establish a healthy lifestyle.

We only get one body, and it’s important to take care of it. The added sugars, chemicals, and preservatives can slowly poison your body over time and lead to high cholesterol, blood sugar, and worsened medical conditions. It’s partially a matter of choosing healthier foods, reading labels, and being conscious about what you’re putting in your body, but this issue is larger than just one person. It’s the nation’s problem, the world’s problem. With obesity being one of the nation’s largest killers, a cause of heart disease and diabetes, it’s crucial that the newest generation has access to healthy foods and the insurance that they will have the funds to be able to purchase them.