It's really shocking to see the disconnect between middle-ish class and everyone below them. The same way I find it shocking to see how the same group almost wo

It's really shocking to see the disconnect between middle-ish class and everyone below them. The same way I find it shocking to see how the same group almost worships millionaires/billionaires thinking they can easily enter those classes if they just work hard, I find it shocking to see how little critical thinking is applied to seeing the problem from someone else's perspective. My family was poor, but luckily due to a number of circumstances, we had a place to live and we had access to a gas cooker and grandparents that could provide the raw ingredients for food - the beans, flour, meat that people keep quoting. Without those, we couldn't have made it through many months of me growing up. I was also fortunate enough to have access to those as I know the importance of a healthy diet for a child growing up. None of the vegetables we got from them or the meat was processed, filled with pesticides or other chemicals or any growth hormones or antibiotics. Remove this safety net which was obtainable through hard work (it's a lot and I really mean it, a lot of work to grow plants and vegetables when almost all farming is done using manual tools) and I might've suffered from the same problems some of my classmates at the time - overweight, underweight, etc... While most raw ingredients can be cheap, even cheap is relative. Through an even darker period in life, I had the chance to see first hand what it meant to not have enough money to even get to the next month. When all outgoings are 120-125% of your monthly income, there is nowhere else to go. I used to smoke (a lot) smuggled cigarettes (couldn't afford buying them at the shop) because it was cheaper than eating and they are appetite suppressants. So instead of spending money on buying food (let's say 5 dollars per family in my part of the world per day) we'd smoke (1 dollar per day) and live of whatever we could get for free. It generally meant one meal per day (not nutritious at all because surprisingly most foodbanks aren't filled with organic avocados). This then brings me to the last point which is - you might not know how to cook it, you might not have time to cook it (I had worked a job at a point where I would start at 6 AM to 10 PM to make enough to get some food) and you might just not have money to buy those things. A recent scheme to place immigrants in the UK places them in modified hotels. Your average hotel room doesn't have a kitchen so that means you can at most cook something in a microwave. Pot noodles (one pack per day in a good scenario) is what most people eat in that scenario. Your 50 cent organic bananas each can be a pack of instant noodles (36 cents at walmart for beef noodles) which can hide your hunger and maybe leave you enough for your children or to pay those pesky electricity/heating/gas bills. Never forget the fact that having a shelter, food and safety are privileges. We like to think that they are rights, but if that's the case, we failed more than half the planet. Be happy for being able to sleep with a full belly, in a warm room and a locked door, a lot of people can't afford those things.