10 ms·

The Food of My Youth

160 points by axiomdata316 8y ago

sctb 8y ago
We've updated the link from https://longreads.com/2018/07/18/defined-by-want/ https://longreads.com/2018/07/18/defined-by-want/, which points to this.
teddyh 8y ago
Again, I find myself obliged to link to this excellent article: The 5 Stupidest Habits You Develop Growing Up Poor http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-5-stupidest-habits-you-develop-growing-up-poor/ http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-5-stupidest-habits-you-devel... #5 You Develop a Taste for Shitty Food
- maxerickson 8y ago
  I know quite a few kids that are at least "comfortable" financially and they prefer boxed mac and cheese and simple hot dogs and cheese pizza and so on because that's what they get at day care and school.
  - AdmiralAsshat 8y ago
    My mother is an excellent cook, but to be honest it took me until my 20's to prefer homemade mac and cheese over the boxed kind, simply because I had developed a taste for it as a child. And my mother, ever the pragmatic one, wasn't gonna waste her time making something from scratch when her worthless children preferred the cardboard crap. I've done a full 180, and now I'm the pretentious hipster who refers to it as "Elbow macaroni with bechamel sauce".
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- nightski 8y ago
  Then you grow older on a professional level of income, learn to appreciate great food and realize your food budget averages $1000/month. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - codeafin 8y ago
    As Misao Okawa who reached age 117 said, eating delicious things is the key to longevity - though western "delicious things" are way different to Japanese "delicious things", I still like to lie to myself and proceed to order the bread pudding.
  - thatfrenchguy 8y ago
    If you cook, no.
- perlpimp 8y ago
  I was an exchange student who became Canadian after some time , later traveling to outside of north america I found Aunt Jemima's was not what people are thinking of what is maple syrup(something that the host family was buying as a staple and sometimes adding to corn and barn flakes). For me this is the only kind I would put on pancakes.
- 52-6F-62 8y ago
  God that whole article struck close to home. I was lucky with food, though. While my parents would stock up how they could, we lived in an agricultural community and there was plenty of fresh vegetables around. My mother also grew them in the back and we learned young to love raw, fresh vegetables instead of eating [too much] candy or other stuff. Even when we did have something like boxed mac and cheese, there was almost always broccoli in it. We didn't get a lot of meat, let alone good meat, and to this day I suffer a B12 deficiency partly for it, but I still love getting my fresh greens, raw or cooked. Lucky that way.
  - nicholas73 8y ago
    Do you suffer a deficiency because it takes a long time to build up B12 levels, or because you are used to not eating much meat?
    - 52-6F-62 8y ago
      To be honest, I'm not sure what caused it. I eat a fair amount of meat now. I haven't had my blood done in a little while and I'm probably due. The last time I had it done was a couple of years ago and it was noted that I had low hemoglobin as a result of low B12/Iron. My doc suggested I eat more red meat and take a supplement. I never used to be able to afford much in the way of beef so I got my protein through other means. Anemia runs in my family, so it may be related to that—though I'm not anemic myself.
- thatfrenchguy 8y ago
  Culturally interestingly though, he mentions needing a new dryer right now, when you can just air-dry them.
  - teddyh 8y ago
    That isn’t an option if you either have a small enough apartment that you don’t have any space to hang clothes, or don’t have enough presentable spare clothes to be able to wait until the washed clothes are dry.
taion 8y ago
This was such an unexpectedly powerful piece of writing. Thanks for sharing this.
- DoYouEvenLFTR 8y ago
  Man, this is really depressing to read.
xutopia 8y ago
This hits me in the feels. My parents weren't the richest in the world but I was fortunate enough to have food on the table without resorting to the equivalent of food stamps in my country. The struggle is real for some people and we just don't know how much it hurts us years later. Even today whenever I have access to cereals other than the cheapest kind I have this uncomfortable feeling like I shouldn't eat something that expensive.
hprotagonist 8y ago
And when the Man handed over our food stamps, we were called moochers, a drain on our country. It’s no different now—worse even, as those people on the Hill try to pass a bill that would make people earn their food stamps. Tacking on work requirements—implying that foster kids are too lazy to pay for their own food, that mothers like mine, whose husbands went off to serve and never came back quite the same, are just not trying hard enough to make ends meet. Ow.
sharadov 8y ago
That was powerful, made me tear up.
joefourier 8y ago
Why are stereotypical American "low-income" foods largely processed meats and junk food (e.g. boxed macaroni and cheese, spam, Vienna sausages), instead of staples like rice, oats, beans, lentils, etc. which also keep easily but are far more nutritious, tasty and just as cheap, if not cheaper on a per-calorie basis? This is genuine curiosity, as I grew up in a region where the average income was much lower than the USA, but the food consumed by lower-income individuals was much healthier and fresher. We'd eat things like red beans and rice, curries, acar (a type of spiced pickle) and often cook meat over wood fires to save money on gas for the oven.
- _mrniceguy_ 8y ago
  Because processed foods are made in a factory. Two things this affords. 1. Massive automation, so more profits can flow to less people 2. Far more calories can be packed into processed food than what is natural. But it's far less nutritious. Your body can't handle it and that's why there's so many fat kids and fat Americans.
  - m_ke 8y ago
    3. Shelf life, which means no spoiled food and lost revenue for the stores. 4. Marketing / Branding, you can market packaged food and build a valuable brand. Hard to do that with fresh produce since you can't really control the supply.
  - nitwit005 8y ago
    The staples are effectively made in a factory as well, or at least industrially processed. You don't just hand people a bunch of wheat. While it's true that a lot of processed food is sweetened, if you look at the caloric density of traditional staples, it's usually pretty high. No one would have planted those crops otherwise.
    - CompelTechnic 8y ago
      Yeah the replies to GGP do not actually answer the question. Learning to cook from staples is very financially and nutritionally rewarding and more people should do it. I am not sure where the disconnect is. One thing I have observed with simple staple dishes (like beans and rice) is that if you don't know how to add fat, salt, and spices in good proportion you can end up not liking the the result. You end up resorting to convenience foods instead and shoot yourself in the foot health-wise, as an unintuitive result of not using enough fat and salt in your cooking.
_mrniceguy_ 8y ago
This food is disgusting. Cheese whiz in a cheetos bag? Processed crap like this is the invention of greedy opportunists and their factories built to feed people drivel. To long for such things is to long for suicide.
moate 8y ago
When I was a kid there was a time we were on food stamps. My sister used to make "poor man's ice cream" (basically chocolate milk poured over ice) and the food I remember the most is ALDI brand frozen burritos. Eventually we got more money because my mom got a job working in New Jersey for a large insurance company. After high school I went to culinary school because I wanted to cook, in part because poor people food made me feel poor. After I moved out, I was working in restaurants and wasn't making much by American standards, but I could make myself food that wasn't poor people food. This stuff clings to you. Some people fight it, refusing to go back. Other people remember the little comfort they were able to get from the foods of their childhood. Food is so fundamental to life in so many different ways. It's about being cared for. It's about showing someone else you care. It's about literally providing life to another human. There's so many strange cultural hang ups about what it should and shouldn't be. It's used as a way to identify people who don't belong to your group, to shame "the other" or to try and fit in when you don't feel comfortable. People convinced that there are right and wrong choices.
mirimir 8y ago
Damn, very moving article! I don't want to get into what I ate as a child. Too crazy. But I was for sure poor as a young adult in the US. So we ate lots of rice, beans, and whatever veggies were discounted or ready to trash. And for additional protein, eggs and beef heart.
wank 8y ago
> I didn’t like to eat food prepared by other people—I was afraid I would taste their emotions. > I feared I would taste the sweat and tears of a cousin or the impatient plucking of a woman who wanted to get home to watch soap operas.
Kagerjay 8y ago
Offtopic but the thumbnail was really misleading to me, because there is such a thing as a prison burrito and the process you make it is actually similar to the thumbnail (pouring something into junk food bag, and using it as a mixing container). Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSKpDwDhq24 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSKpDwDhq24 I wonder if the inspiration for these menu items came from similar recipes in low income areas? E.g. the prison burrito might have derived from "hot cheetos". Mostly, recipes born out of a desire for fancier food with limited ingredient choices / availability in food banks / nonperishables
leekyle333 8y ago
1. For children mac and cheese tastes better (and a lot of adults). It's highly palatable. 2. Rice and beans are cheaper but are small bags of rice and canned beans cheaper than some other highly palatable thing that's easier to make? (It takes a lot more time to make dried beans). 3. Decision fatigue- it's really hard to make healthier decisions when you're poor, overworked, and tired. When you go to the grocery store I'm sure your looking for something that will quickly release some dopamine. 4. America has a pretty sad food culture and while they're might be some amazing asian or Mexican grocery stores with good cheap stuff, a lot of non recent immigrant people have super negative stereotypes about these types of places.

160 points by axiomdata316 8y ago

sctb 8y ago

We've updated the link from https://longreads.com/2018/07/18/defined-by-want/ https://longreads.com/2018/07/18/defined-by-want/, which points to this.

teddyh 8y ago

Again, I find myself obliged to link to this excellent article: The 5 Stupidest Habits You Develop Growing Up Poor http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-5-stupidest-habits-you-develop-growing-up-poor/ http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-5-stupidest-habits-you-devel... #5 You Develop a Taste for Shitty Food

maxerickson 8y ago
I know quite a few kids that are at least "comfortable" financially and they prefer boxed mac and cheese and simple hot dogs and cheese pizza and so on because that's what they get at day care and school.
- AdmiralAsshat 8y ago
  My mother is an excellent cook, but to be honest it took me until my 20's to prefer homemade mac and cheese over the boxed kind, simply because I had developed a taste for it as a child. And my mother, ever the pragmatic one, wasn't gonna waste her time making something from scratch when her worthless children preferred the cardboard crap. I've done a full 180, and now I'm the pretentious hipster who refers to it as "Elbow macaroni with bechamel sauce".
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
nightski 8y ago
Then you grow older on a professional level of income, learn to appreciate great food and realize your food budget averages $1000/month. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- codeafin 8y ago
  As Misao Okawa who reached age 117 said, eating delicious things is the key to longevity - though western "delicious things" are way different to Japanese "delicious things", I still like to lie to myself and proceed to order the bread pudding.
- thatfrenchguy 8y ago
  If you cook, no.
perlpimp 8y ago
I was an exchange student who became Canadian after some time , later traveling to outside of north america I found Aunt Jemima's was not what people are thinking of what is maple syrup(something that the host family was buying as a staple and sometimes adding to corn and barn flakes). For me this is the only kind I would put on pancakes.
52-6F-62 8y ago
God that whole article struck close to home. I was lucky with food, though. While my parents would stock up how they could, we lived in an agricultural community and there was plenty of fresh vegetables around. My mother also grew them in the back and we learned young to love raw, fresh vegetables instead of eating [too much] candy or other stuff. Even when we did have something like boxed mac and cheese, there was almost always broccoli in it. We didn't get a lot of meat, let alone good meat, and to this day I suffer a B12 deficiency partly for it, but I still love getting my fresh greens, raw or cooked. Lucky that way.
- nicholas73 8y ago
  Do you suffer a deficiency because it takes a long time to build up B12 levels, or because you are used to not eating much meat?
  - 52-6F-62 8y ago
    To be honest, I'm not sure what caused it. I eat a fair amount of meat now. I haven't had my blood done in a little while and I'm probably due. The last time I had it done was a couple of years ago and it was noted that I had low hemoglobin as a result of low B12/Iron. My doc suggested I eat more red meat and take a supplement. I never used to be able to afford much in the way of beef so I got my protein through other means. Anemia runs in my family, so it may be related to that—though I'm not anemic myself.
thatfrenchguy 8y ago
Culturally interestingly though, he mentions needing a new dryer right now, when you can just air-dry them.
- teddyh 8y ago
  That isn’t an option if you either have a small enough apartment that you don’t have any space to hang clothes, or don’t have enough presentable spare clothes to be able to wait until the washed clothes are dry.

taion 8y ago

This was such an unexpectedly powerful piece of writing. Thanks for sharing this.

DoYouEvenLFTR 8y ago
Man, this is really depressing to read.

xutopia 8y ago

This hits me in the feels. My parents weren't the richest in the world but I was fortunate enough to have food on the table without resorting to the equivalent of food stamps in my country. The struggle is real for some people and we just don't know how much it hurts us years later. Even today whenever I have access to cereals other than the cheapest kind I have this uncomfortable feeling like I shouldn't eat something that expensive.

hprotagonist 8y ago

And when the Man handed over our food stamps, we were called moochers, a drain on our country. It’s no different now—worse even, as those people on the Hill try to pass a bill that would make people earn their food stamps. Tacking on work requirements—implying that foster kids are too lazy to pay for their own food, that mothers like mine, whose husbands went off to serve and never came back quite the same, are just not trying hard enough to make ends meet. Ow.

sharadov 8y ago

That was powerful, made me tear up.

joefourier 8y ago

Why are stereotypical American "low-income" foods largely processed meats and junk food (e.g. boxed macaroni and cheese, spam, Vienna sausages), instead of staples like rice, oats, beans, lentils, etc. which also keep easily but are far more nutritious, tasty and just as cheap, if not cheaper on a per-calorie basis? This is genuine curiosity, as I grew up in a region where the average income was much lower than the USA, but the food consumed by lower-income individuals was much healthier and fresher. We'd eat things like red beans and rice, curries, acar (a type of spiced pickle) and often cook meat over wood fires to save money on gas for the oven.

_mrniceguy_ 8y ago
Because processed foods are made in a factory. Two things this affords. 1. Massive automation, so more profits can flow to less people 2. Far more calories can be packed into processed food than what is natural. But it's far less nutritious. Your body can't handle it and that's why there's so many fat kids and fat Americans.
- m_ke 8y ago
  3. Shelf life, which means no spoiled food and lost revenue for the stores. 4. Marketing / Branding, you can market packaged food and build a valuable brand. Hard to do that with fresh produce since you can't really control the supply.
- nitwit005 8y ago
  The staples are effectively made in a factory as well, or at least industrially processed. You don't just hand people a bunch of wheat. While it's true that a lot of processed food is sweetened, if you look at the caloric density of traditional staples, it's usually pretty high. No one would have planted those crops otherwise.
  - CompelTechnic 8y ago
    Yeah the replies to GGP do not actually answer the question. Learning to cook from staples is very financially and nutritionally rewarding and more people should do it. I am not sure where the disconnect is. One thing I have observed with simple staple dishes (like beans and rice) is that if you don't know how to add fat, salt, and spices in good proportion you can end up not liking the the result. You end up resorting to convenience foods instead and shoot yourself in the foot health-wise, as an unintuitive result of not using enough fat and salt in your cooking.

_mrniceguy_ 8y ago

This food is disgusting. Cheese whiz in a cheetos bag? Processed crap like this is the invention of greedy opportunists and their factories built to feed people drivel. To long for such things is to long for suicide.

moate 8y ago

When I was a kid there was a time we were on food stamps. My sister used to make "poor man's ice cream" (basically chocolate milk poured over ice) and the food I remember the most is ALDI brand frozen burritos. Eventually we got more money because my mom got a job working in New Jersey for a large insurance company. After high school I went to culinary school because I wanted to cook, in part because poor people food made me feel poor. After I moved out, I was working in restaurants and wasn't making much by American standards, but I could make myself food that wasn't poor people food. This stuff clings to you. Some people fight it, refusing to go back. Other people remember the little comfort they were able to get from the foods of their childhood. Food is so fundamental to life in so many different ways. It's about being cared for. It's about showing someone else you care. It's about literally providing life to another human. There's so many strange cultural hang ups about what it should and shouldn't be. It's used as a way to identify people who don't belong to your group, to shame "the other" or to try and fit in when you don't feel comfortable. People convinced that there are right and wrong choices.

mirimir 8y ago

Damn, very moving article! I don't want to get into what I ate as a child. Too crazy. But I was for sure poor as a young adult in the US. So we ate lots of rice, beans, and whatever veggies were discounted or ready to trash. And for additional protein, eggs and beef heart.

wank 8y ago

> I didn’t like to eat food prepared by other people—I was afraid I would taste their emotions. > I feared I would taste the sweat and tears of a cousin or the impatient plucking of a woman who wanted to get home to watch soap operas.

Kagerjay 8y ago

Offtopic but the thumbnail was really misleading to me, because there is such a thing as a prison burrito and the process you make it is actually similar to the thumbnail (pouring something into junk food bag, and using it as a mixing container). Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSKpDwDhq24 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSKpDwDhq24 I wonder if the inspiration for these menu items came from similar recipes in low income areas? E.g. the prison burrito might have derived from "hot cheetos". Mostly, recipes born out of a desire for fancier food with limited ingredient choices / availability in food banks / nonperishables

leekyle333 8y ago

1. For children mac and cheese tastes better (and a lot of adults). It's highly palatable. 2. Rice and beans are cheaper but are small bags of rice and canned beans cheaper than some other highly palatable thing that's easier to make? (It takes a lot more time to make dried beans). 3. Decision fatigue- it's really hard to make healthier decisions when you're poor, overworked, and tired. When you go to the grocery store I'm sure your looking for something that will quickly release some dopamine. 4. America has a pretty sad food culture and while they're might be some amazing asian or Mexican grocery stores with good cheap stuff, a lot of non recent immigrant people have super negative stereotypes about these types of places.