The Trappings of Spaghetti

I'll start by explaining in full the meal I prepared. I made dinner for my girlfriend and I, late on Friday after we had gotten home from school. I decided to make spaghetti with sauce, and beef mixed into the sauce. To what extent I was "free" to make this choice was quite limited by many factors. First of all, I need to come to a consensus with my girlfriend on what we eat, which can have anything to do with what tastes good to what might be healthy to eat (her concern, I don't care). If I were alone I would've added shrimp instead of beef and sauce, but I also probably wouldn't have made pasta alone. Pasta is a decision we both might be trapped in making because we both like it, due to the fact that both of our families made it a lot while we lived with them. I don't know about her family, but for mine I think it's because pasta is cheap and my mom was poor. And guess who's poor right now; the college student that consistently buys pasta for $1 a box at Cub. Economically I am trapped into making this decision, although I don't object much. Even the beef we used is cheap due to its corn-fed and mass-produced nature. It's a choice for us more frequently than chicken or shrimp, which I have to buy on sale. I think the pasta can be so cheap because it's a basic staple product, not much value-added perks as Pollan would say. I think there's a politics and ethics of why these basic foods are so cheap too. Basic items like bread, milk, sugar, etc. are usually cheap, I'm guessing so that our poorest families in America have options to feed themselves with, although these choices are very limited and require much more time to turn into an actual meal.