8 ms·

Why are stereotypical American "low-income" foods largely processed meats and junk food (e.g. boxed macaroni and cheese, spam, Vienna sausages), instead of stap

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.
    - dbcurtis 8y ago
      Because it isn't taught any more? Not by parents, not by schools. My upbringing would be considered strangely quaint by most here on HN, I believe. When I was in high school, there was still a home economics teacher. The class was elective. The school also had a very formidable wrestling team, and the home ec teacher was the mother of a former student that had gone to a Big 10 university on a wrestling scholarship, so she new the life, and the health impacts of the constant struggle to make weight while doing strenuous physical activity. She went out of her way to recruit wrestlers to her food & nutrition class. Argument 1: I promise cooking labs will be on meet days (you weighed in at 7:00 AM and could eat all you wanted the rest of meet day). Argument 2: Lots of girls in class. (She was a natural salesperson, this pitch was a great closer). Along the way she taught a lot about nutrition, health, and meal planning. The homeworks were hard and meaningful -- I remember these half-starved guys obsessing over their menus, calorie counts, and nutrition analysis when by rights they should have been doing algebra. She was a wise and wonderful teacher. Where do kids learn to cook and meal plan any more? From parents who don't know how to cook or meal plan? There are certainly foodies around, but obsessing over baking your home-made biscotti is not the same as managing the family's daily nutrition on a budget.
      - moate 8y ago
        This is a worthwhile point. Eating is just as cultural as the food itself. Rice and pork are both staples in Asian and Mexico, but the way the meals are prepared and served are so completely different because of a range of influences. Why do people in the US eat the way we do? A combination of having a massive number of people living in our country, the ability to produce an enormous amount of food (especially meat), a larger GDP than anywhere else and a culture that's always trying to do things quickly/while on the go. The culture is complex and the reasons are many, but people not learning to cook while also having specific expectations of what food should be is definitely a large part of the equation here.
- moate 8y ago
  Fat is just calories. Fat doesn't care about vitamins, or minerals. It doesn't care about anything but calories in vs calories out. Your body can absolutely handle calorie dense, low vitamin/mineral foods and not get fat, but there's a whole bunch of other factors that play into it. Lower income obesity can be linked to the quality of the food, but OP asking why the US seems more interested in processed packaged food vs "simple staples" that other countries cook. The answer there is availability and cultural perceptions (both of what the people should be eating, and of what the observer thinks the people in that culture are eating)
tbomb 8y ago
I think the reason is 2 part. Part 1 being often these "junk" processed foods are cheaper to buy for more quantity. eg. a box of macaroni and cheese can feed a family of 4 on $2USD. Possibly mix in a couple hotdogs which on the cheaper end can cost under $5USD for 16. in the end your feeding a family of 4 dinner for under $5. Part 2 being time. Typically in lower income families (I grew up on the low end of the "middle class") both parents are working. my mother didn't have the time or energy to come home from and 8-10 hour work day and then cook for the next 90 minutes. that same box of macaroni and cheese (with hotdogs) can be made in ~30 minutes with little attention to it. and once my sister and I were old enough to help out, it was something we could do for her. Thats my anecdotal and oversimplified answer anyway :)
- joefourier 8y ago
  You don't have to buy 20kg of rice for it to be cheap. You can buy a 1kg bag of potatoes for $0.50 - $1.00, and cooking them is as easy as putting them in the microwave for ~10 minutes. A single kilo of rice can be had for under $2.00 by itself, and cooking rice is quick and easy. Add a can of beans on top, some spices and you got yourself a dirt cheap vegetarian meal. Outside of the USA you have plenty of families surviving on less than $10 a day, they don't wait for their paycheck to accumulate to buy food. It sounds more like a cultural issue, or perhaps such staples are not easily found in most of the USA and/or are marketed as "health foods" and suffer a corresponding price increase?
  - mieseratte 8y ago
    > It sounds more like a cultural issue, or perhaps such staples are not easily found in most of the USA and/or are marketed as "health foods" and suffer a corresponding price increase? Culture definitely sounds like a component, I wouldn't be surprised to hear a crass criticism of your rice-and-beans meal as something eaten by "those starving children on TV." There's also the issue that a lot of folks simply don't know how to cook. The benefit of a lot of those box meals is the hand-holding, instructions included nature. I buy a box, it tells me what I need to buy, and how and how long to cook each component. I'm a bit embarrassed to admit, but if you handed me a sack of rice and beans I'd have no idea how and for how long to cook it. I simply never learned those skills. In the past several months I've realized how poor my culinary skills are, and have been working to address that deficiency, but for many folks in the US we simply pick the path of least cost and effort.
deadmetheny 8y ago
It's largely a side-effect of the heavy marketing of processed foods post-WWII in America. Companies producing rations pivoted into producing processed food for the consumer market, which was marketed based on its speed and simplicity. The result is that the poor are either working so much that they value the speed of processed food, or they simply don't know any better and buy the processed food rather than cooking their own more nutritious food.
moate 8y ago
Alright, let's break this one down. 1- Because they're stereotypes? Because nobody actually understands how people eat. Poor Americans eat rice and oats and beans, but those aren't stereotypical American. Ask yourself, is rice an American food? Do you imagine Americans eating it? I'm sure poor Asian Americans and Latinxs are. Do you think about poor people in Louisiana sustenance hunting/fishing? The US has an image, and that influences what people show/are willing to see. 2- Food Deserts. The US has large urban populations where the vast majority of the food available is canned/prepared. You can't cook over an open fire in a city because of regulations. You might live in a high rise apartment where you can't really cook much of anything because of the lack of space available. In those types of situations, it's easier to get a 1 dollar cheeseburger from a restaurant to meet your immediate food needs than try to buy a 20 LB bag of rice, carry it through downtown, and then store it in your living room. 3-When you're dealing with food, most people's immediate desire is calories. Your body is stupid, and when it has nutritional needs it often expresses them as just blanket hunger. People are able to get cheap calories in the US, but many of them are nutritionally minimal. 4- Relative value of money. You grew up somewhere that was poorer than the US, but there was likely deflation of the price of goods consummate with that. Poor in the US is not the same as poor in China or poor in the Sudan. They each come with their own special flavors of terrible options available to you.
dbatten 8y ago
1) Cheap junk food is marketed, whereas cheap staples aren't. Basic white/brown rice is a commodity. There's no differentiation, and ultra-slim margins, so nobody's trying to market it to you. Easy Mac on the other hand... 2) Taste. To us adults (and mostly upper-middle class adults to boot) on HN, rice and beans may sound more appealing than cheap mac and cheese with mystery meat. Take a poll of 3-year-olds and you may get a different result. 3) Ease. Staples like rice and beans are only really cheap when you're buying them in dry form, bulk. This means you need to season them and cook them, which can be a long process. (My wife and I recently tried to save on black beans by cooking ourselves rather than buying canned. The result was good, but by the time you chop onions for seasoning, add other ingredients, monitor the beans, drain and cool the beans, and wash the crock pot, cutting board, knife, various spoons and measuring implements, etc., well, it ends up being a lot of work.) If you're a single parent working two jobs to support your kids, 5 minutes of preparation is meaningfully better than even, say, 20 minutes of preparation.
- felipemnoa 8y ago
  >Staples like rice and beans are only really cheap when you're buying them in dry form, bulk. This means you need to season them and cook them, which can be a long process. I don't know. You make it sound as if it were difficult to cook these staples. During my college years these were the easiest things to cook, along with pasta and tomato sauce. Basically it was just a matter of filling the pot with water, dropping the ingredients and then just wait. Similarly with tomato sauce, add the ingredients in a pot and just wait.
  - thebooktocome 8y ago
    Adding rice and water to a pot and heating it has about a hundred failure modes that make the result unpalatable and ruins the reagents. Even when it goes correctly, the result is pretty bland, particularly to someone used to packaged food. One cannot merely put the ingredients of tomato sauce into a pot, heat it in some arbitrary way, and expect the result to be recognizable as tomato sauce.
    - 8y ago
Kalium 8y ago
Time, energy, and infrastructure. People experiencing low income in the US aren't generally just low on money. They're also low on time, energy, and often infrastructure. It's hard to buy staples in bulk and cook healthy meals with them when you don't have the time required or a place where you can reliably and safely store the staples. And, at this point, a lot of it is cultural. Not all people value healthy food.
- mythrwy 8y ago
  It seems in the US eating well is less valued than some places. Not sure why. This seems to propagate through generations, i.e people growing up around fast food and prepared food don't place value or learn to cook. Also (and this is probably an "insensitive" opinion) yes, sometimes people really are too stressed and busy to properly prepare food. Other times (perhaps more frequently) they are just too lazy.
  - thebooktocome 8y ago
    Have you ever successfully changed someone's behavior by calling them lazy?
  - Posibyte 8y ago
    I think there's a glimmer of truth to this. And it's not that people are lazy because they're bad people. It's because the situation you're in is soul sucking. It's horrible. Imagine every day of your life living knowing that you may not be able to make the electric bill, pay your medical bills, worry about missing work or any of a million tiny little things that make life harder when you're poor. Then convince someone that they need to spend an hour cooking healthier foods that requires more effort for most likely no benefit. Being in that position, I thought that a lot. It was easier to get McDonalds and then sit down in front of the TV/Computer and distract myself from the problems. I think the problem isn't that people are lazy, that's a symptom of the real causes: anxiety, depression, and their ilk; from being in a situation that makes it all too easy to nest inside of and accept.
nightski 8y ago
Far more nutritious? Hardly. Rice, Oats, Beans, Lentils are all just pure carbs just like the junk food (or worse, because the junk food contains fat which will make you feel fuller). Will spike your insulin hard and not keep you full long term.
- everythingswan 8y ago
  Lentils and most beans are low on the glycemic index and have a balance of protein in them. As a T1 diabetic for 10+ years, I personally find that glycemic index is the leading indicator for how large and sustained my insulin spikes are GI Info from ADA: http://www.diabetes.org/food-and-fitness/food/what-can-i-eat/understanding-carbohydrates/glycemic-index-and-diabetes.html http://www.diabetes.org/food-and-fitness/food/what-can-i-eat... GI info: https://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/glycemic-index-and-glycemic-load-for-100-foods https://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/glyce... Lentil Macros: https://www.myfitnesspal.com/food/calories/macro-organic-green-lentils-461000915 https://www.myfitnesspal.com/food/calories/macro-organic-gre... Black Bean Macros: https://www.myfitnesspal.com/food/calories/publix-dried-black-beans-sprouted-cooked-32445467 https://www.myfitnesspal.com/food/calories/publix-dried-blac...
- moate 8y ago
  None of what you just said is entirely true. Beans, Lentils, Rice and Oats all consist mostly of starches, which are broken down slowly over the digestion process and contain many indigestible starches or fiber to fill you up and promote body health. Not to mention that beans and lentils are about 2:1 carb to protein content and they all contain some level of other micro-nutrients (vitamins/minerals). Not all carbs are the same, and many junk foods are spiked with glucose/fructose sugars that break down quickly and create the spike you're talking about.
vorpalhex 8y ago
When you're poor, you can't afford to buy massive bags of rice and store them airtight to keep out insects, so instead you buy small portions which are much more expensive. You can't afford the time to cook the rice, and you don't have anything decent to season it with. Instead you buy a microwaveable rice dish. It's about the same cost as actual rice (just a bit more expensive), far quicker to cook, tastes better than unseasoned undercooked rice, and is usually pretty unhealthy. When it comes to spoilable things like meat, it's difficult to know ahead of time when you'll be able to cook a proper dinner and therefore plan your purchases. You might well end up just catching a burger at a fast food place and never get a chance to cook the $8 of meat you bought. Now I'm in a place where I cook all my meals. I can go to the store twice a week and buy nice cuts of steak or chicken. I can take two hours to make a fancy meal. I have no shortage of things to season with (imported oil, foreign spices, etc). I eat much better now for less total cost, but I have more upfront costs and much more time invested.
- dionidium 8y ago
  > When you're poor, you can't afford to buy massive bags of rice and store them airtight to keep out insects, so instead you buy small portions which are much more expensive. You can't afford the time to cook the rice, and you don't have anything decent to season it with. This sounds like it was written by an alien trying to reason about poverty from first principles. I've been poor. Nothing prevented me from buying big bags of rice. I wouldn't have had any trouble keeping insects out of that bag. And, despite myths about the noble, ever-working poor man, I had more than enough time to cook it. I mostly bought shit food because I liked eating shit food. There's no reason to imagine further impediments. That one's sufficient.
  - vorpalhex 8y ago
    I grew up poor as dirt on the east coast. We couldn't keep flour on hand more than a couple of weeks because it would almost certainly be infested with loaches in the summer. I had many cases of opening bags of rice to the same (extremely unappetizing) surprise. I didn't lack time to do cooking because I was working constantly. I lacked time to do cooking because my work schedule was all over the place and the buses in the DC metro area are never on time. Between working and trying to get classes in (or working a second job, or watching your kid) you don't really have time to watch rice cook for an hour. I'm sorry my experience growing up poor as dirt doesn't align with your preference for eating shitty food. Obviously I'm the one in the wrong here.
teddyh 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. […]? To quote from (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...): Fresh food […] takes forever to prepare. Rice, for instance, takes about half an hour to make. If you’re poor, you most likely work all the time, and are constantly tired. No way are you going to waste half a hour to make rice (just plain rice!), when you can get something much more tasty and almost as cheap which takes five minutes at most to make? > We'd […] often cook meat over wood fires to save money on gas for the oven. That is not a possibility in urban environments.

_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.
  - dbcurtis 8y ago
    Because it isn't taught any more? Not by parents, not by schools. My upbringing would be considered strangely quaint by most here on HN, I believe. When I was in high school, there was still a home economics teacher. The class was elective. The school also had a very formidable wrestling team, and the home ec teacher was the mother of a former student that had gone to a Big 10 university on a wrestling scholarship, so she new the life, and the health impacts of the constant struggle to make weight while doing strenuous physical activity. She went out of her way to recruit wrestlers to her food & nutrition class. Argument 1: I promise cooking labs will be on meet days (you weighed in at 7:00 AM and could eat all you wanted the rest of meet day). Argument 2: Lots of girls in class. (She was a natural salesperson, this pitch was a great closer). Along the way she taught a lot about nutrition, health, and meal planning. The homeworks were hard and meaningful -- I remember these half-starved guys obsessing over their menus, calorie counts, and nutrition analysis when by rights they should have been doing algebra. She was a wise and wonderful teacher. Where do kids learn to cook and meal plan any more? From parents who don't know how to cook or meal plan? There are certainly foodies around, but obsessing over baking your home-made biscotti is not the same as managing the family's daily nutrition on a budget.
    - moate 8y ago
      This is a worthwhile point. Eating is just as cultural as the food itself. Rice and pork are both staples in Asian and Mexico, but the way the meals are prepared and served are so completely different because of a range of influences. Why do people in the US eat the way we do? A combination of having a massive number of people living in our country, the ability to produce an enormous amount of food (especially meat), a larger GDP than anywhere else and a culture that's always trying to do things quickly/while on the go. The culture is complex and the reasons are many, but people not learning to cook while also having specific expectations of what food should be is definitely a large part of the equation here.
moate 8y ago
Fat is just calories. Fat doesn't care about vitamins, or minerals. It doesn't care about anything but calories in vs calories out. Your body can absolutely handle calorie dense, low vitamin/mineral foods and not get fat, but there's a whole bunch of other factors that play into it. Lower income obesity can be linked to the quality of the food, but OP asking why the US seems more interested in processed packaged food vs "simple staples" that other countries cook. The answer there is availability and cultural perceptions (both of what the people should be eating, and of what the observer thinks the people in that culture are eating)

tbomb 8y ago

I think the reason is 2 part. Part 1 being often these "junk" processed foods are cheaper to buy for more quantity. eg. a box of macaroni and cheese can feed a family of 4 on $2USD. Possibly mix in a couple hotdogs which on the cheaper end can cost under $5USD for 16. in the end your feeding a family of 4 dinner for under $5. Part 2 being time. Typically in lower income families (I grew up on the low end of the "middle class") both parents are working. my mother didn't have the time or energy to come home from and 8-10 hour work day and then cook for the next 90 minutes. that same box of macaroni and cheese (with hotdogs) can be made in ~30 minutes with little attention to it. and once my sister and I were old enough to help out, it was something we could do for her. Thats my anecdotal and oversimplified answer anyway :)

joefourier 8y ago
You don't have to buy 20kg of rice for it to be cheap. You can buy a 1kg bag of potatoes for $0.50 - $1.00, and cooking them is as easy as putting them in the microwave for ~10 minutes. A single kilo of rice can be had for under $2.00 by itself, and cooking rice is quick and easy. Add a can of beans on top, some spices and you got yourself a dirt cheap vegetarian meal. Outside of the USA you have plenty of families surviving on less than $10 a day, they don't wait for their paycheck to accumulate to buy food. It sounds more like a cultural issue, or perhaps such staples are not easily found in most of the USA and/or are marketed as "health foods" and suffer a corresponding price increase?
- mieseratte 8y ago
  > It sounds more like a cultural issue, or perhaps such staples are not easily found in most of the USA and/or are marketed as "health foods" and suffer a corresponding price increase? Culture definitely sounds like a component, I wouldn't be surprised to hear a crass criticism of your rice-and-beans meal as something eaten by "those starving children on TV." There's also the issue that a lot of folks simply don't know how to cook. The benefit of a lot of those box meals is the hand-holding, instructions included nature. I buy a box, it tells me what I need to buy, and how and how long to cook each component. I'm a bit embarrassed to admit, but if you handed me a sack of rice and beans I'd have no idea how and for how long to cook it. I simply never learned those skills. In the past several months I've realized how poor my culinary skills are, and have been working to address that deficiency, but for many folks in the US we simply pick the path of least cost and effort.

deadmetheny 8y ago

It's largely a side-effect of the heavy marketing of processed foods post-WWII in America. Companies producing rations pivoted into producing processed food for the consumer market, which was marketed based on its speed and simplicity. The result is that the poor are either working so much that they value the speed of processed food, or they simply don't know any better and buy the processed food rather than cooking their own more nutritious food.

moate 8y ago

Alright, let's break this one down. 1- Because they're stereotypes? Because nobody actually understands how people eat. Poor Americans eat rice and oats and beans, but those aren't stereotypical American. Ask yourself, is rice an American food? Do you imagine Americans eating it? I'm sure poor Asian Americans and Latinxs are. Do you think about poor people in Louisiana sustenance hunting/fishing? The US has an image, and that influences what people show/are willing to see. 2- Food Deserts. The US has large urban populations where the vast majority of the food available is canned/prepared. You can't cook over an open fire in a city because of regulations. You might live in a high rise apartment where you can't really cook much of anything because of the lack of space available. In those types of situations, it's easier to get a 1 dollar cheeseburger from a restaurant to meet your immediate food needs than try to buy a 20 LB bag of rice, carry it through downtown, and then store it in your living room. 3-When you're dealing with food, most people's immediate desire is calories. Your body is stupid, and when it has nutritional needs it often expresses them as just blanket hunger. People are able to get cheap calories in the US, but many of them are nutritionally minimal. 4- Relative value of money. You grew up somewhere that was poorer than the US, but there was likely deflation of the price of goods consummate with that. Poor in the US is not the same as poor in China or poor in the Sudan. They each come with their own special flavors of terrible options available to you.

dbatten 8y ago

1) Cheap junk food is marketed, whereas cheap staples aren't. Basic white/brown rice is a commodity. There's no differentiation, and ultra-slim margins, so nobody's trying to market it to you. Easy Mac on the other hand... 2) Taste. To us adults (and mostly upper-middle class adults to boot) on HN, rice and beans may sound more appealing than cheap mac and cheese with mystery meat. Take a poll of 3-year-olds and you may get a different result. 3) Ease. Staples like rice and beans are only really cheap when you're buying them in dry form, bulk. This means you need to season them and cook them, which can be a long process. (My wife and I recently tried to save on black beans by cooking ourselves rather than buying canned. The result was good, but by the time you chop onions for seasoning, add other ingredients, monitor the beans, drain and cool the beans, and wash the crock pot, cutting board, knife, various spoons and measuring implements, etc., well, it ends up being a lot of work.) If you're a single parent working two jobs to support your kids, 5 minutes of preparation is meaningfully better than even, say, 20 minutes of preparation.

felipemnoa 8y ago
>Staples like rice and beans are only really cheap when you're buying them in dry form, bulk. This means you need to season them and cook them, which can be a long process. I don't know. You make it sound as if it were difficult to cook these staples. During my college years these were the easiest things to cook, along with pasta and tomato sauce. Basically it was just a matter of filling the pot with water, dropping the ingredients and then just wait. Similarly with tomato sauce, add the ingredients in a pot and just wait.
- thebooktocome 8y ago
  Adding rice and water to a pot and heating it has about a hundred failure modes that make the result unpalatable and ruins the reagents. Even when it goes correctly, the result is pretty bland, particularly to someone used to packaged food. One cannot merely put the ingredients of tomato sauce into a pot, heat it in some arbitrary way, and expect the result to be recognizable as tomato sauce.
  - 8y ago

Kalium 8y ago

Time, energy, and infrastructure. People experiencing low income in the US aren't generally just low on money. They're also low on time, energy, and often infrastructure. It's hard to buy staples in bulk and cook healthy meals with them when you don't have the time required or a place where you can reliably and safely store the staples. And, at this point, a lot of it is cultural. Not all people value healthy food.

mythrwy 8y ago
It seems in the US eating well is less valued than some places. Not sure why. This seems to propagate through generations, i.e people growing up around fast food and prepared food don't place value or learn to cook. Also (and this is probably an "insensitive" opinion) yes, sometimes people really are too stressed and busy to properly prepare food. Other times (perhaps more frequently) they are just too lazy.
- thebooktocome 8y ago
  Have you ever successfully changed someone's behavior by calling them lazy?
- Posibyte 8y ago
  I think there's a glimmer of truth to this. And it's not that people are lazy because they're bad people. It's because the situation you're in is soul sucking. It's horrible. Imagine every day of your life living knowing that you may not be able to make the electric bill, pay your medical bills, worry about missing work or any of a million tiny little things that make life harder when you're poor. Then convince someone that they need to spend an hour cooking healthier foods that requires more effort for most likely no benefit. Being in that position, I thought that a lot. It was easier to get McDonalds and then sit down in front of the TV/Computer and distract myself from the problems. I think the problem isn't that people are lazy, that's a symptom of the real causes: anxiety, depression, and their ilk; from being in a situation that makes it all too easy to nest inside of and accept.

nightski 8y ago

Far more nutritious? Hardly. Rice, Oats, Beans, Lentils are all just pure carbs just like the junk food (or worse, because the junk food contains fat which will make you feel fuller). Will spike your insulin hard and not keep you full long term.

everythingswan 8y ago
Lentils and most beans are low on the glycemic index and have a balance of protein in them. As a T1 diabetic for 10+ years, I personally find that glycemic index is the leading indicator for how large and sustained my insulin spikes are GI Info from ADA: http://www.diabetes.org/food-and-fitness/food/what-can-i-eat/understanding-carbohydrates/glycemic-index-and-diabetes.html http://www.diabetes.org/food-and-fitness/food/what-can-i-eat... GI info: https://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/glycemic-index-and-glycemic-load-for-100-foods https://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/glyce... Lentil Macros: https://www.myfitnesspal.com/food/calories/macro-organic-green-lentils-461000915 https://www.myfitnesspal.com/food/calories/macro-organic-gre... Black Bean Macros: https://www.myfitnesspal.com/food/calories/publix-dried-black-beans-sprouted-cooked-32445467 https://www.myfitnesspal.com/food/calories/publix-dried-blac...
moate 8y ago
None of what you just said is entirely true. Beans, Lentils, Rice and Oats all consist mostly of starches, which are broken down slowly over the digestion process and contain many indigestible starches or fiber to fill you up and promote body health. Not to mention that beans and lentils are about 2:1 carb to protein content and they all contain some level of other micro-nutrients (vitamins/minerals). Not all carbs are the same, and many junk foods are spiked with glucose/fructose sugars that break down quickly and create the spike you're talking about.

vorpalhex 8y ago

When you're poor, you can't afford to buy massive bags of rice and store them airtight to keep out insects, so instead you buy small portions which are much more expensive. You can't afford the time to cook the rice, and you don't have anything decent to season it with. Instead you buy a microwaveable rice dish. It's about the same cost as actual rice (just a bit more expensive), far quicker to cook, tastes better than unseasoned undercooked rice, and is usually pretty unhealthy. When it comes to spoilable things like meat, it's difficult to know ahead of time when you'll be able to cook a proper dinner and therefore plan your purchases. You might well end up just catching a burger at a fast food place and never get a chance to cook the $8 of meat you bought. Now I'm in a place where I cook all my meals. I can go to the store twice a week and buy nice cuts of steak or chicken. I can take two hours to make a fancy meal. I have no shortage of things to season with (imported oil, foreign spices, etc). I eat much better now for less total cost, but I have more upfront costs and much more time invested.

dionidium 8y ago
> When you're poor, you can't afford to buy massive bags of rice and store them airtight to keep out insects, so instead you buy small portions which are much more expensive. You can't afford the time to cook the rice, and you don't have anything decent to season it with. This sounds like it was written by an alien trying to reason about poverty from first principles. I've been poor. Nothing prevented me from buying big bags of rice. I wouldn't have had any trouble keeping insects out of that bag. And, despite myths about the noble, ever-working poor man, I had more than enough time to cook it. I mostly bought shit food because I liked eating shit food. There's no reason to imagine further impediments. That one's sufficient.
- vorpalhex 8y ago
  I grew up poor as dirt on the east coast. We couldn't keep flour on hand more than a couple of weeks because it would almost certainly be infested with loaches in the summer. I had many cases of opening bags of rice to the same (extremely unappetizing) surprise. I didn't lack time to do cooking because I was working constantly. I lacked time to do cooking because my work schedule was all over the place and the buses in the DC metro area are never on time. Between working and trying to get classes in (or working a second job, or watching your kid) you don't really have time to watch rice cook for an hour. I'm sorry my experience growing up poor as dirt doesn't align with your preference for eating shitty food. Obviously I'm the one in the wrong here.

teddyh 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. […]? To quote from (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...): Fresh food […] takes forever to prepare. Rice, for instance, takes about half an hour to make. If you’re poor, you most likely work all the time, and are constantly tired. No way are you going to waste half a hour to make rice (just plain rice!), when you can get something much more tasty and almost as cheap which takes five minutes at most to make? > We'd […] often cook meat over wood fires to save money on gas for the oven. That is not a possibility in urban environments.