Letters to the Editor
-
How Relieved
How relieved I am to see that my dear Lucky Ducky has not vanished from the pages of TDB. Hurray!
-
Eat Your Veggies Lucky Ducky
That's the point here. The poor have plenty of money, but they are still hungry. Why is that? Food is available, however a balanced diet is out of reach for many. Many people don't eat vegetables. Poor nutritional quality processed food has become a staple of the poor, hence more obesity, and diabetes, putting more pressure on healthcare costs, making food less affordable. You don't need a think tank to see what is happening.
-
Poor maybe, but not hungry.
Obesity rates among the poor are far higher than obesity rates among the rest of the population. Therefore, it is a false assertion that your "Lucky Ducky" stand in for the poor man would be hungry in 2007.
Also, as of the 1990 panel in this, if lack of food is really the problem, why doesn't he sell his TV and VCR to buy some chow? It looks like this may be Luck Ducky's brother Dumbass Ducky.
Other than my brief criticism here, I love Tom the Danding Bug. Keep up the good work!
-
Fast food is cheaper is a myth
Fast food is not cheaper. It costs more to feed someone fast food instead of shopping and cooking fresh. I'd really like to know where this fairy tale started. At most you could say that fast food is.....fast. That is, in a time crunch it's the lazy way to go. But that's it. Poor people are in part poor(er) because they make poor choices about spending what limited resources they have e.g on expensive fast food. Try this experiment yourself. Cut out all fast food from your family's diet for a month and see how your budget looks. And don't tell me about transportation or cars or heavy bags of groceries or whatnot. A sack of groceries is no heavier than a sack of Chinese take out.
-
Many people don't eat vegetables....
....and for 90% of the poor, it is a choice. The concept of a "food desert" is a valid one for inner city poor who don't have ready access to a market that carries fruit. As small Latin supermercados have sprung up, the problem has become better, but it is still an issue.
However, a vast amount of poor people live outside your stereotypical ghetto belt. The Aldi has vegetables, as does the Food-4-Less, as does the Super Wal-Mart.
We've got no Whole Foods or Wild Oats here in the part of the Hoosier state where we reside. We grow some of our own vegetables, and laugh when we do go to the store, how much better selection we had then when we were young.(Both my wife and I grew up rural poor).
Sometimes, people make bad choices by their own volition, and it ain't The Man's fault.
-
Welcoming the return of Lucky Ducky
You should return to putting in the first panel, "Wall Street Journal Comics Presents". Let 'em sue you. They were the ones who coined the phrase referring to poor people, after all. Good publicity for you, deservedly bad publicity for them.
-
Food Poverty Luxury and Nutrition
What's the point of the cartoon? That the poor are just really bad at managing their money? I mean, for what ever else you want to say, the Rich Dog is right, Lucky Ducky has chosen to spend his hard earned money on luxuries as opposed to necessities, so perhaps his status as a poor person is less the fault of the shrewd hard working dog, and more to do with Lucky and his families tendancy to put short term gain over long term stability.
It should be noted that in the past in order to get social services one had to show that they did not have a radio, and later a television, and social workers would inspect your home to ensure that you did not have other visible means of support (say like men's clothes in your closet).
It is good that we don't do this any more, but making the receipt of services more onerous does keep people from relying on it, as perhaps Lucky Ducky's family has for too long.
As to the nutrition issue, The poor tend not to eat out, and eshew large potions of solid muscle meat which are highly nutritious in favor of carbohydrate lodaded grains, and fats which are far cheaper due in part to government subsidies.
Eating vegtables is great, but hardly more nutrious than lean rare muscle meat, and far less efficient since most of what vegtibles are (cellulose) is undigestable by human beings. The real problem is that Americans (and humans around the world) over cook their meat, and eat far too many grains. Take an animal, feed it local grasses, eat the animal, and you transfer the calories and nutrients from the unusable, but sustainable grasses to you. This is far better for your health and the environment than trying to grow enough vegtibles to feed the world. Because meat is more filling far less raw tonage of meat needs to transported than to transport an equal ammount of calories transported in the form of flour, grains, vegtable oils or vegtables.