Letters to the Editor
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If I had a coupla minwage jobs and a double commute
I'd have almost no time to PREPARE food. You see it's a time problem. Poor = strapped for time. Ergo fast(er) food. Certainly one could eat cheaply from scratch with a somewhat spartan diet albeit a healthy one. But it's awfully plain and it takes time. And who seeks out a PLAIN diet anyway?
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ANON @12:56:
No, you're not goofing at all. Canned tomatoes and beans are inexpensive, and add substantial nutritional value to your food. And they're quick and easy when you're in a pinch. And tasty.
I use dried beans when making lentil or split pea soup, but use then canned for making hummus, chili, tacos, burritos, etc.
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I've been poor
On welfare, even. Admittedly, only for about six months while my family got on its feet after immigrating to the US, but yes, we were on welfare and food stamps. How did we spend those food stamps? On the ingredients to cook the food that we cooked back in the home country. Borscht is really cheap. So are cabbage rolls. Meatballs, the way my mother makes them, are really cheap. Potatoes are cheap. And as far as cooking goes - none of the foods my mother made take more than 20 minutes to prepare.
I think this whole "fast food is the only food the poor can eat" argument is nonsense.
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hang on, here Laurel,
You write: "I was also lucky in that I had a mom and old-world grandma who taught me how to cook from scratch, and I went to school years back when girls were sent to Home Ec classes and learned to do "girly" stuff like plan meals or figure out nutrition or count calories." I could have written the same thing. Did you grow up in the south??? And you're wrong that none of the posters have been poor. I grew up dirt poor, with a total absence of hope. I must have been 20 before I realized that there were parents who didn't look at their children as just another mouth to feed. Give us some credit.
The whole country needs to learn how to plan and cook food better. The good news is that the poor, just like the rest of us, can learn. As I wrote in my other post, I've worked with budgeting and meal planning with poor families. With help and knowledge, they can learn to eat better. God knows, they're going to have to do it themselves - no one else will do it for them.
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Chili
Anon at 12:56, that's a very common healthy meal for me also, except I add chili powder, chopped onion, and skip the sweet potato. Canned tomatoes & beans are fine to use.
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WHO CARES HOW THE POOR SPEND IT
They will. It will be better for the country. And it won't result in $200 Billion loss because some RICH PEOPLE made a bunch of shitty loans.
That's what's so fucking funny about the sanctimonious decries of the poor and whatever their behavior might be.
At least the poor never started a war on lies, or sold weapons to Iran, or had a subprime meltdown, or an S&L bailout.
How many poor people lose $5 Billion in a day like the "rouge trader".
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Great piece Andrew...
This certainly holds up the emperor...and his tiny...uh.
anyway. I found your last couple of lines most salutary.
Just as in the distribution of medical care in this country, there is no incentive for *mass-market* producers to make healthy food. Just as there is no incentive for insurance companies to pay for more and better care.
Fast food joints make more money destroying people's bodies, and insurance companies make more money paying for *less* medical care when the lousy food catches up with those bodies and they develop expensive chronic illnesses associated with lousy diets.
Sure, people have a choice. But, as is the case with the homeless (where it's cheaper to house and feed them in decent conditions than let them live on the street), sometimes people make choices with expensive consequences. If we can't stop those choices, the least we can do is make them less expensive for all of us once those choices are made.
The right would rather the poor get sick and die. That's been clear for a long time.
Jesus. The right-wing in this country is so greedy, cruel, and stupid, I just can't fathom it. They'd RATHER see people suffer, and have all of us pay more for that suffering, than actually do something about the problem--ameliorate the suffering, and make it less expensive.
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My family lived on food stamps when I was small
Count me also as someone whose family collected food stamps when I was small. My mom stayed at home when I was a baby, then I went into daycare and she took work as a home health aide while my dad alternated between working as a delivery truck driver and going to grad school.
We also didn't eat fast food or junk food, since my parents were quasi-vegetarian hippies who wouldn't let that stuff through the front door. Mom cooked everything whole grain, whole food, from scratch. We're not fat, in fact all of us are very slender people. The trick was finding markets that would sell in bulk, and fortunately we lived in a suburb of Boston when I was very tiny and then moved to the whole-earth-hippie shangri la of Western Mass. when I was about three, so that type of food was available. The local co-op also issued their own form of food stamps, so we were still able to eat healthily even once we had too much income (!) to qualify.
I think we were lucky, though in that in both cases we were situated in areas where a large portion of the population was *really* into that lifestyle. If we'd lived in, say, Oklahoma City I'm not sure how long my folks would have been able to maintain.
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had enough & go bucks:
Well said. I've spent my whole life fighting against these callous, cruel, mean-spirited bastards, and I'm so fucking tired. Everyday there seems to be more of them.
Please, please, could we all just put aside our differences and register as many people as possible and vote for whomever the Democratic nominee is (no matter how flawed)?