5 ms·
That was a long read, but very much worth reading. This part really stuck out to me: > A few years ago, a friend of mine, in a well-meaning attempt to underst
by hilom 4y ago
That was a long read, but very much worth reading.
This part really stuck out to me:
> A few years ago, a friend of mine, in a well-meaning attempt to understand the impoverished diets of poor people, ate a Food Stamp diet for a week. On the last day of the diet, he talked about what he had learned and spoke philosophically about his renewed appreciation of healthy food as he prepared to end his restricted diet with his first good meal of the week: homemade vegetable pizza. He thought about what he had learned as he kneaded the pizza dough. He had already sliced the vegetables, and they sat piled high on the cutting board. While he had the best of intentions, what he said made me sad. He had misunderstood.
> In his week of eating like poor people, he had missed two crucial ingredients: fear and shame. While he was looking forward to breaking his fast that night, poor people don’t get to do that. They don’t get to look forward to the end of impoverishment, to a good meal. My friend would eat a healthy meal that night, and he had known throughout the week that he could stop whenever he wanted, that all he had to do if he missed healthy food was open his refrigerator. Poor people never know when their next good meal will come. They look in the refrigerator on the 25th and maybe they only have enough food for a couple more meals but they don’t get paid for a week. And vegetables are expensive. Most poor people can’t afford them. All of this causes great shame. Shame that they don’t make enough money, shame that they can’t give their kids decent food, shame that they must rely on government assistance, shame that they can’t afford the restaurant their friends want to go to on Saturday night. That shame never goes away. It is not my friend’s fault that he does not know this. He doesn’t know it because society does not talk about such things, does not want them talked about. The result is that my friend would never understand how poor people feel—never understand me—and I felt sad and alone.
It's a doublet of suffering: not just the material burden of living in poverty and being unable to provide for yourself and family, but the ideological burden of being shamed into believing it was caused by your own personal failure.
- kjellsbells 4y agoPulp called this out in 1999. There's a william shatner cover which is...surprisingly good. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People
- jl6 4y ago“If you called your dad he could stop it all” - the key line.
- ryan93 4y agoThis doesnt really square with the insane fraction of food stamps spent on soda. Im lowish income and can easily afford peppers, onions and garlic. bulk stuff like sweet potato is cheap. My rice and chicken stir fry would take like 20-25 min of work at a fast food job to afford.
- steele 4y agoYou got dependents? Does cooking require any utilities? Let's say you can only afford one. You going to sleep by the oven or do homework by candlelight? How many illnesses are you away from homelessness?
- monero-xmr 4y agoIs that a historical thing? In the US you get a SNAP card and can buy fresh produce at the store. I shop at a low-income focused grocery store (because it’s the same stuff but cheaper) and most people are using SNAP benefits and carts are always a mix of healthy stuff to unhealthy frozen junk.
- fbdab103 4y agoWhen you are poor, you have to be frugal in all things. Even "free money" needs to be spent judiciously. Junk foods will extend your dollar further and are typically faster to prepare than alternatives.
- monero-xmr 4y agoHmm… junk food is generally more expensive than rice, beans, canned veggies, frozen veggies. Look at the prices for a bag of chips and it’s pretty expensive.
- troupe 4y agoI sat down with someone who said their family was starving because they couldn't get enough food from their snap benefits. We went through how much they had and put together a healthy basic menu (rice, beans, etc.) that would make sure no one was starving and they still had about 50% left over to use for buying whatever nice to haves they wanted. I suggested the look for items that were on sale to add to their basic menu. We had even factored in buying pots and pans. They looked at what we had put together and said, "My kids won't eat that." While they definitely had financial difficulties to overcome, it wasn't a lack of resources that was their biggest barrier.
- mhuffman 4y ago>They looked at what we had put together and said, "My kids won't eat that." This is very common for people I know these days (including my own kids, sadly). It is interesting that when I was young (and we were very, very poor) we (the kids) never had an option. We could eat what we were given or not eat at all, that was the choice we got. And we mostly ate what we were given.
- dionidium 4y agoWhat sticks out to me is that it sticks out to you (and the author and so many others besides). I have actually been on food stamps. I never ate so well. Before I had food stamps I was just a typical working poor person. I had never spent as much on groceries as I was able to on food stamps. Food stamps are accepted at regular grocery stores -- the same ones you shop at. You can get anything you want, more or less. It's totally up to you. You can, of course, use them to buy vegetables. In fact, I was a vegetarian the entire time I was on food stamps! It's just so odd to me as someone who has actually been very poor that according you (and seemingly the rest of the professional managerial class) I was at that time completely without agency. Nothing I did or didn't do was in my control, apparently. I was but flotsam in an ocean of systemic effects. I have to tell you, that's not how it felt to me. I felt like a person making choices. Poor people typically know lots of other poor people. I knew a lot of poor people. Some of them made good choices. Many of them made very bad choices. The ones who made good choices are universally doing well 20 years later.
- bryanrasmussen 4y ago>I have actually been on food stamps. yeah, were you a family on food stamps? Two adults, one kid? Or were you a single person on food stamps? I was a single person and like you I did pretty well, I sort of have the feeling that the dynamic would be different for a family though, it seems from what I know of family life is more problems show up and then you don't manage to take care of it the way you can as a single young person.
- dionidium 4y agoThere's no doubt about it, which again underscores the importance of good choices. Babies aren't dropped off by a stork. You have to insert semen into a woman's body on one of like three days each month. Don't do that! And just to re-emphasize something I said in another comment: people make mistakes and this is an extraordinarily wealthy society. I'm a strong proponent of a welfare state. I don't want anybody to starve because they made bad choices. But getting pregnant when you're young and poor is correctly described as a bad choice! Ejaculating inside a woman who is ovulating isn't something that happens to you while you're sleeping. The correct message to somebody who has fallen through the ice in the middle of a lake on a winter morning is, "let me help you." The correct message to everybody else is that there are things you can do to avoid falling through the ice.
- civopsec 4y agoMakes me think of the “delayed gratification” experiments. Someone who is of means probably has an easier time delaying gratification because they have the means to figuratively “break the fast”. They also know that they have the resources to get somewhere in life. But what if you don’t? What if that “instant gratification” is all that you can expect to get for a good while?
- forgotusername6 4y agoRelevant Orwell quote "And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you"
- zimpenfish 4y ago> Makes me think of the “delayed gratification” experiments. Since debunked[1], mind you - "Celeste Kidd published The Marshmallow Study Revisited in which she disproved the conclusions made in the original Marshmallow experiment" [1] https://medium.com/21st-century-tidbits/delayed-gratification-what-it-is-and-why-it-is-overrated-d1c28290bdbd https://medium.com/21st-century-tidbits/delayed-gratificatio...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- opportune 4y agoMy girlfriend has EBT and she eats just fine. Vegetables are much cheaper than processed food. Maybe at one point in time it was true that processed food was cheaper and a necessity to get by on food stamps but these days it’s much cheaper to buy and eat unprocessed food like rice, bread, peanut butter, and lentils. Those are just things I eat because I’m not a great cook. My gf cooks things like pies and casseroles. Another thing that weirds me out is how many different kinds of junk and processed foods are EBT eligible.