The vast majority of the people repeating the irrational meme are doing it to fit into the groupthink; its an irrational meme, the whole point is its not supposed to make sense, you only know and repeat it if you're one of the cool kids who've observed its part of the local groupthink. Consider almost any discussion of politics or urban lifestyle here on HN, same issue. Magic dirt exists, strange creationism theories, cars are evil, etc. Given that almost everything here thats non-tech is a groupthink meme, it makes you wonder if any of the tech discussions are real, or are also just people meme-ing at each other. I know at least some of the tech discussions are real, maybe nothing else here is...

The meme probably should be banned because its racist in the same sense that anti-weed laws were invented to be anti-mexican before they branched out. A white woman buying a $6 pre-made organic salad is the theoretical ideal whereas a black woman buying $4 of take out soul food or a $8 bucket of fast food fried chicken is gross and disgusting and the people initially promoting the meme were not talking about the food as the topic being gross. For another example, McDonalds for a variety of reasons marketed sharply downscale a generation ago to swap their white customers for minority customers, and now McD are almost entirely full of minority customers, therefore the same food that was yummy in the 80s is for no reason we can admit in polite conversation, now gross and disgusting, of course the change is because the people buying it are now non-white instead of white. Complaining about diet as a thinly disguised dog whistle is literally the polite politically correct left wing equivalent of /pol/ complaining about black crime and black music. To be as clear as possible about what I'm claiming, most "progressive" diet complaints originated as racist dog whistles complaining about non-whites. No one ever complains about the conformist young white girl eating avocado toast, huh. Obviously NOT everyone involved in the groupthink, especially dozens of generations later is a klansman brother; but the origin of the meme surely was racist, thus the meme probably deserves the banhammer.

To some extent the meme is tired because its so one sided. Yes yes we get the idea, ya all don't like soul food or fried chicken or McD because of the black people who eat it and we'll get endless rationalization about how black people eating chitlins are evil while old white guys eat pork rinds which are some kind of manna from heaven. But its so boring to see the same tired one sided memes thousands of times with essentially no response. If meme jokes about casserole eating, mayo smearing, cheese eating, Panera Bread shoppin white people were even a thousandth as popular as the anti-minority-food memes, it would at least be entertaining, despite the tasteless racism.

There's also a side dish of humblebrag along the lines of, I'm not saying I'm rich, which means I want to draw lots of attention that I'm rich, but the only healthy food humans can eat is multiple pounds at a time of $25/pound beef tenderloin which I sous vide in my $499 dedicated appliance and the poor rabble will just have to eat (corn syrup) cake and die young after laboring ceaselessly to make me rich (insert Simpsons laugh). The point being look at me I eat well because I'm rich and most are not rich, look at me, look at me, look at me. Ironically with sane portion control, its cheaper to serve my family home made beef tenderloin than to pay for decent fast-ish food as a total meal cost, and food cost of homemade grilled burgers are practically a rounding error compared to an equivalent or even somewhat substandard fast food meal. A similar humblebrag for "Everyone needs to know that I like to appear very busy, far too busy to open my own pre-made salad container or pour a bag of salad onto a plate, instead I'll spend a half hour traveling and sit around for an hour each meal in restaurants while explaining how busy I am, and did I mention I'm really important because I'm so busy, only (lazy, aka minority aka yet another racist dogwhistle) poor people in foreign (more racism) countries have enough spare time to fry an egg or make a sandwich (gasp!) by hand at home.".

A third tradeoff aside from cooking labor vs money is flavor or monotony. The local progressive hipster organic market has take-and-go premade Chicken Ceasar salads fairly cheap, and from a purely nutritional standpoint I think a human could live on nothing but that single food item in perpetuity, perhaps with a daily multivitamin pill for the most obscure trace elements. Only maybe a billion of the world population spend more than a dollar per meal, and they don't seem to be dying off strictly due to not spending $200 at the steakhouse every lunch hour, although poverty meals are often incredibly monotonous. Stir fry veggies on rice or rice -n- beans are some other meals that will keep you alive a long time for practically no money although its terrifyingly boring.

Making it worse, is given the ageism, this dietary advice is mostly coming from a generation that famously thinks tide pods are gourmet food. Twenty year old kids can and will eat anything and be perfectly healthy ... for awhile, a short while, then they get fat, sick, die, etc. If you want to discuss healthy diet you need to talk to the village elders not recent high school grads who read something once on instagram.

To summarize my rant, the overall "HN" opinion on proper diet not supposed to make sense because its a tired overdone racist meme used as groupthink to show who's paying enough attention to fit into the "in" crowd by follower-like repetition of the groupthink. Once you figure out that if white people buy it from the progressive hipster market and eat it, then its good, and if minorities buy it from minority areas and eat it, then its bad, then you can use that carefully crafted scientific model to almost as a root password to figure out every discussion on HN about diet, and thereby fit in.