One Long Island and a big cookie.

That is a lunch.

[$7 + $3]

Here in Italy 7 euros would get you

- 2 home made meals (pasta+meat+vegetables... and you'll still have spare pasta for at least 2 more meals)
- 1½ medium fast food meal
- 1½ - 2 takeaway pizzas

Heavy lunch: 2 croissants (1.7€) = 4 lunches
Normal lunch: two slices of bread + cheese or meat (0.6€) = 11.5 lunches
Light lunch: two pieces of fruit (0.6€) = 11.5 lunches

$9.99 won't get me two lunches, but it is good enough for one and plenty of change left over. It's enough for any one of:

A plate of the best carne asada fries in San Diego and a glass of jamaica.

A Hawaiian kine plate lunch with kalua pork or laulau, and enough left over for a shave ice.

Indian take-away with raita, naan straight from the oven, and if you have a serious sweet tooth, mango lassi.

A typical fast-food lunch for me is a Taco Bell $2 meal, with a large drink (extra $0.20) and a cheap burrito ($1), so $3.25 for me, which multiplies out to 3 meals.

If we're talking about how much food $10 can buy in different countries, it's interesting to take a look at the Big Mac index. Check out the difference between the Ukraine and Norway for the same product.

Edit: I'm not sure why they lump together the whole Euro area, as I'm sure the prices can be quite different between countries that use the Euro.

...
Are you serious ? That would basically mean that soda is roughly 10x more expensive around here 0.0.
OTOH - I heard American drinks actually substitute sugar with HFCS, which makes no sense...

The US has quotas on the production and importation of sugar, and subsidies on corn (maize), which is the leading crop. Thus HFCS is more plentiful and less expensive than sugar. In the EU, the economics are reversed: maize is not a major crop, and there are quotas on HFCS.

The $0.20 that boct1584 is referring to, though, is just the difference between a "medium" soda included in the package price of the meal, and a "large" soda, which is simply more of it in a larger glass.

(OT: Regional use of "soda", "pop", "soft drink", "coke" (as a generic term), etc. in the US is so noticeable that linguists actually study it. See [url=http://popvssoda.com:2998]http://popvssoda.com:2998[/url]/)

Yeah, I know the reasoning behind it. That doesn't make it any less nonsensical ;P.

So it's, basically, "supersizing" the meal. In other words: "$0.20 for a large drink" as in "instead of a medium one" not "instead of none at all". Ambiguous.

I have yet to find a single person on the Internet that uses "pop" ;P. "Diet coke", OTOH, sounds fairly natural... unlike "a coke" :\. Then again - I'm a foreigner, so my intuitions might be even more bewildering...

Having and drink with actual sugar is considered a luxury item in the US. Though Pepsi started selling throwback pepsi and mt dew that have sugar recently at the same price point. I heard somewhere that those drinks actually use beat sugar rather then cane sugar but I'm not exactly sure what the difference is.

finding any cheap food in this country that isn't infused with some distorted form of corn is pretty difficult.

There isn't any difference between beet and cane sugar; cane sugar is just more heavily promoted, and for most Americans, beets aren't associated with sweets.

HFCS is used because it is promoted by powerful economic interests, the same ones that promote corn ethanol and GMO corn. Not because it is in any way a better product. HFCS, cane sugar, and beet sugar are all HGI empty calories. (There's some, admittedly controversial, evidence that the excess fructose in HFCS (the usual formula is 55% fructose) is particularly unhealthy because it is preferentially metabolized to fats.)

The $2 meals at Taco Bell include a 20-ounce (medium) fountain drink. I usually spring for a 32-ounce (large) one, which is the extra 20 cents I mentioned. Drink fountain syrup is dirt-cheap, to be sure, and I imagine the restaurants that use them clear a huge profit on the drinks, but hey.

Ah, I always wondered that. There's a definite taste difference between sugar soda and HFCS soda at least. When I went to finland a few years back and then returned to the USA I had to retrain myself to drink american soda. All the sodas tasted so awful here. I probably should have taken that opportunity to just stop drinking soda altogether. Oh well...

what doesn't make any sense about it?

Depends where you go. One big pizza in an average restaurant, a treat for two at McD (if you want to go there for some reason* ), and three good meals if you have some student's coupons. But you could eat quite a lot if you took that money and go to the store, pick cheap but nutritional food, vegetables and the sort. 3-4 regular and 5-6 for the "I just don't care what as long as it's food and will fill me up".

*usually you had to wait five to ten minutes to get your full order at a McDonald's in our country, or at least that was the situation a year ago when I last went there. Fast food my ass.