I think the disconnect here is that in the U.S. "poor" encompasses a whole universe of relative incomes and experiences. I grew up poor as a kid, but for the mo

I think the disconnect here is that in the U.S. "poor" encompasses a whole universe of relative incomes and experiences. I grew up poor as a kid, but for the most part never thought much about food. Some days maybe all I could scrounge together would be toast + butter, but I rarely if ever felt deprived. Except during one of our homeless stints, when we were staying with a family my mother met through (I think) a church program. We stayed at their house for only two weeks or so. My mother was working most of that time, and the wife made meals for her children, myself, and my little sister. It seemed like all we ever ate (or at least they let us eat--maybe they were worried we'd eat too much, though there wasn't much of anything else in the cupboards) was Bisquick pancakes. I was constantly hungry. I had never felt hunger like that before. And as a kid the situation felt so bizarre because this family lived in what seemed to me to be a beautiful, modern apartment (in retrospect, probably recently constructed public housing), yet they seemingly had no food. Also, the son was younger than me but weighed significantly more than I did--I was skinny but well within normal weight and height. Fast forward about 15 years and as a young adult working in SF I became acquainted with a struggling older woman with a teenage daughter, and I'd sometimes drive her around town if she needed a lift--e.g. needed to make an appointment. (I forgot how we met, but growing up there was never anything strange about strangers helping out, and somehow I found myself on the other side of the situation and just went with it.) One time she invited me over to her apartment for dinner to thank me, and out comes a box of Bisquick and a dinner composed of Bisquick-related dishes. Even today, in neither case can I really comprehend why Bisquick figured so prominently. I mean, from a dollar-and-cents standpoint, I can see the value, but I'm like 70% confident that in both cases neither families had no alternative but Bisquick. OTOH, you can't really second guess those decisions on the spot, and those periods are just snapshots in time. OTOOH, that doesn't imply people are making the most rational decisions. In any event, I guess the moral of the story is that there's an immense diversity of experiences even at the bottom of the income and wealth brackets, and we should be cautious drawing broad conclusions one way or another.