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I'll take this as a teaching opportunity Here's who can't practically afford that: Someone with 3 kids working 80 hours a week in service or truck driving. Or

I'll take this as a teaching opportunity Here's who can't practically afford that: Someone with 3 kids working 80 hours a week in service or truck driving. Or someone that is disabled. Or someone that has severe mental health issues. There are quite a few prerequisites that you assume exist that just don't in a poor American household and the primary one that doesn't exist is time. Beyond the time you need to plan, shop, cook, clean, you need: -Motivation to do so -Pots and pans -Knowledge of cooking and nutrition -A grocery store nearby (39.5 million Americans live in food deserts) -A way to get there (Many can't afford cars or can't drive) -Working water and electricity TENS OF MILLIONS of Americans have none of the above And whereas in other countries you may live in a multi-generation home or otherwise be able to do subsistence farming, that's not really possible without land of some sort which almost no poor people in America have.

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
Thank you for explaining this. Normal people who are used to cooking at home see it as no big deal to whip up a simple meal. Some of the rest of us encounter insurmountable obstacles in our own kitchens. Personally, I haven't prepared a single meal at home since last October. I've been ordering delivery at an extraordinary markup. Several bad experiences last year put me permanently off home meal preparation. I've tried all the alternatives. I'm desperate to save money; I'm desparate to eat better. I have been left with no other choice. Basically 100% of my paychecks go to fund those meals because the alternatives are absolutely intractable, due to several of the above factors.
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  I appreciate your vulnerability and candor and hope that your situation improves soon
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  I'm very curious what your insurmountable obstacles and bad experiences with home meal preparation are. Most people can't imagine being unable to use the microwave or boil water.
  - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
    For starters, I'm not incapable of nuking a frozen meal, reheating leftovers, or hard boiling eggs, things like that. Those are backup strategies still employed. It's difficult to explain succinctly what the barriers are, and without getting in a big debate about my abilities and limits. But in a nutshell: Start with intractable problems with pest control. If I eat delivery, I get no bugs. If I prepare fresh meals, the cockroaches, gnats and other pests immediately descend. I can't avoid standing water/dirty dishes, and so the longer I try my hand in the kitchen, the worse the bugs get. I'm a renting tenant and 100% reliant on the landlord to do the pest control, and it's ineffective. If I want a deep treatment, I have to shut down my entire kitchen, tear it apart, and put it back together afterwards. So I am roundly cursed for even trying this. Fitness - I'm not a young man anymore and as a beginner, my time in the kitchen is very inefficient. I could spend 2-3 hours at a time for one meal in a day. I couldn't sleep or rest enough to make it up, and living with this deficit took its toll, especially if stopping to rest meant I wouldn't eat or empty the dishes from the sink, and we're back to cockroaches. Comptenence - since I never learned how to really cook or put recipes together, I find it amazingly hard to plan out meals and produce stuff that is appealing or even normal. I found it very difficult to collect recipes and work from them, especially when trying to manage fridge/pantry inventory, and oftentimes I wound up with something edible but really weird-tasting because I put together the wrong flavors. Or, my hunger would militate against knowing what I am doing and make it incredibly frustrating to remember all the steps in cooking. Cooking meals from scratch requires planning and organization, which I found it hard to adapt into a kitchen context, and it was crazy-making if I was hungry for breakfast now and there was nothing but dirty dishes in the sink and I didn't know where to start. I went to the hospital multiple times last year, because I was extraordinarily exhausted and I truly felt that my heart could fail any moment if I kept that all up. It was truly traumatic. If I could merely find a middle way to preparing simple meals once in a while, just to keep delivery costs down, I would do that, but for now, I'll follow the path of least fear and trembling.
    - s1artibartfast 3y ago
      I know you didn't ask for advice, but here's some anyways. Start simple. Ramen costs about 50 cents at the market and requires only the ability to boil water and wait 5 minutes. If pests are a concern, wash and dry. dishes afterwards. Then you can start with pasta which takes slightly longer to boil and you can get a pre-made jar of pasta sauce to put on it. You can even put cold pasta sauce on a hot pasta and it will warm up. Neither of these dishes will harm you if you mess up cooking them, and both take less than 30 minutes. Practice makes perfect, so you can iterate and try new things. I've had pretty intense past problems in the past, I found the best ways to address them are keeping all food and sealed containers, preferably glass jars with a ceiling lid. Doing dishes and avoiding standing water also helps. The idea is the star of the bugs. If there is no food they won't come looking. As a side note not intended to be aggressive or attacking, if the idea of boiling pasta or Ramen induces fear or anxiety, you should seek medical help. Not everyone is typical, but everyone has the opportunity to learn and grow.
ltbarcly3 3y ago
This is the poor people are too stupid and helpless argument. It is not true. Your list of reasons is really just betraying how little you think poor people are like yourself. You are portraying them as helpless animals. Also, lack of motivation as a reason they can't boil an egg, so they just go hungry instead? Do you even care about reality or just scoring internet points?
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  These are not dumb people, they are my friends and neighbors who are being systematically oppressed. Unless you're working a blue collar job in America you don't see this
  - ltbarcly3 3y ago
    Right, I'm saying they aren't dumb. If what you are saying is true they would have to not only be dumb, but barely have human level intelligence. You believe that your friends and neighbors are completely incompetent at things that are trivially easy, and they have no hope of ever figuring it out on their own. You are actually claiming that there are tens of millions of adult humans, who have lived 20, 30 years, and are literally incapable of procuring one pot. You are saying they can't independently manage to acquire the cooking skills to boil rice. It's just absurd. Meanwhile those same people are statistically obese. Somehow despite living without electricity, money, pots, illiterate and 50 miles from the nearest grocery store they eat enough to be obese (can you explain how they get enough food to eat too much despite it being impossible for them to acquire groceries at all?) and yet it is unreasonable to think they might boil an egg.
    - wolverine876 3y ago
      The evidence doesn't match your theory that it's trivially easy. Which will you discard?
    - wizzwizz4 3y ago
      > and they have no hope of ever figuring it out on their own. It's not a case of not understanding, or not having the skills, or it being “unreasonable to think they might” do anything. https://butyoudontlooksick.com/articles/written-by-christine/the-spoon-theory/ https://butyoudontlooksick.com/articles/written-by-christine... https://cookingonabootstrap.com/2022/04/12/its-not-about-the-pasta-kevin-jack-monroe/ https://cookingonabootstrap.com/2022/04/12/its-not-about-the... I get not understanding, but can you try not to be so obnoxious about it, please? It's clear you don't have these problems. If they seem to you to be absurd struggles to have, read some Albert Camus.
wiseowise 3y ago
[flagged]
- wizzwizz4 3y ago
  Maybe they didn't. Maybe their sibling died and their ex left them with the kids from the last relationship and now they're looking after 3 kids they never expected to have to care for on their own.
- throwaway32908 3y ago
  This is everyone's problem if we ever hope to retire

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago

Thank you for explaining this. Normal people who are used to cooking at home see it as no big deal to whip up a simple meal. Some of the rest of us encounter insurmountable obstacles in our own kitchens. Personally, I haven't prepared a single meal at home since last October. I've been ordering delivery at an extraordinary markup. Several bad experiences last year put me permanently off home meal preparation. I've tried all the alternatives. I'm desperate to save money; I'm desparate to eat better. I have been left with no other choice. Basically 100% of my paychecks go to fund those meals because the alternatives are absolutely intractable, due to several of the above factors.

AndrewKemendo 3y ago
I appreciate your vulnerability and candor and hope that your situation improves soon
s1artibartfast 3y ago
I'm very curious what your insurmountable obstacles and bad experiences with home meal preparation are. Most people can't imagine being unable to use the microwave or boil water.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  For starters, I'm not incapable of nuking a frozen meal, reheating leftovers, or hard boiling eggs, things like that. Those are backup strategies still employed. It's difficult to explain succinctly what the barriers are, and without getting in a big debate about my abilities and limits. But in a nutshell: Start with intractable problems with pest control. If I eat delivery, I get no bugs. If I prepare fresh meals, the cockroaches, gnats and other pests immediately descend. I can't avoid standing water/dirty dishes, and so the longer I try my hand in the kitchen, the worse the bugs get. I'm a renting tenant and 100% reliant on the landlord to do the pest control, and it's ineffective. If I want a deep treatment, I have to shut down my entire kitchen, tear it apart, and put it back together afterwards. So I am roundly cursed for even trying this. Fitness - I'm not a young man anymore and as a beginner, my time in the kitchen is very inefficient. I could spend 2-3 hours at a time for one meal in a day. I couldn't sleep or rest enough to make it up, and living with this deficit took its toll, especially if stopping to rest meant I wouldn't eat or empty the dishes from the sink, and we're back to cockroaches. Comptenence - since I never learned how to really cook or put recipes together, I find it amazingly hard to plan out meals and produce stuff that is appealing or even normal. I found it very difficult to collect recipes and work from them, especially when trying to manage fridge/pantry inventory, and oftentimes I wound up with something edible but really weird-tasting because I put together the wrong flavors. Or, my hunger would militate against knowing what I am doing and make it incredibly frustrating to remember all the steps in cooking. Cooking meals from scratch requires planning and organization, which I found it hard to adapt into a kitchen context, and it was crazy-making if I was hungry for breakfast now and there was nothing but dirty dishes in the sink and I didn't know where to start. I went to the hospital multiple times last year, because I was extraordinarily exhausted and I truly felt that my heart could fail any moment if I kept that all up. It was truly traumatic. If I could merely find a middle way to preparing simple meals once in a while, just to keep delivery costs down, I would do that, but for now, I'll follow the path of least fear and trembling.
  - s1artibartfast 3y ago
    I know you didn't ask for advice, but here's some anyways. Start simple. Ramen costs about 50 cents at the market and requires only the ability to boil water and wait 5 minutes. If pests are a concern, wash and dry. dishes afterwards. Then you can start with pasta which takes slightly longer to boil and you can get a pre-made jar of pasta sauce to put on it. You can even put cold pasta sauce on a hot pasta and it will warm up. Neither of these dishes will harm you if you mess up cooking them, and both take less than 30 minutes. Practice makes perfect, so you can iterate and try new things. I've had pretty intense past problems in the past, I found the best ways to address them are keeping all food and sealed containers, preferably glass jars with a ceiling lid. Doing dishes and avoiding standing water also helps. The idea is the star of the bugs. If there is no food they won't come looking. As a side note not intended to be aggressive or attacking, if the idea of boiling pasta or Ramen induces fear or anxiety, you should seek medical help. Not everyone is typical, but everyone has the opportunity to learn and grow.

ltbarcly3 3y ago

This is the poor people are too stupid and helpless argument. It is not true. Your list of reasons is really just betraying how little you think poor people are like yourself. You are portraying them as helpless animals. Also, lack of motivation as a reason they can't boil an egg, so they just go hungry instead? Do you even care about reality or just scoring internet points?

AndrewKemendo 3y ago
These are not dumb people, they are my friends and neighbors who are being systematically oppressed. Unless you're working a blue collar job in America you don't see this
- ltbarcly3 3y ago
  Right, I'm saying they aren't dumb. If what you are saying is true they would have to not only be dumb, but barely have human level intelligence. You believe that your friends and neighbors are completely incompetent at things that are trivially easy, and they have no hope of ever figuring it out on their own. You are actually claiming that there are tens of millions of adult humans, who have lived 20, 30 years, and are literally incapable of procuring one pot. You are saying they can't independently manage to acquire the cooking skills to boil rice. It's just absurd. Meanwhile those same people are statistically obese. Somehow despite living without electricity, money, pots, illiterate and 50 miles from the nearest grocery store they eat enough to be obese (can you explain how they get enough food to eat too much despite it being impossible for them to acquire groceries at all?) and yet it is unreasonable to think they might boil an egg.
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    The evidence doesn't match your theory that it's trivially easy. Which will you discard?
  - wizzwizz4 3y ago
    > and they have no hope of ever figuring it out on their own. It's not a case of not understanding, or not having the skills, or it being “unreasonable to think they might” do anything. https://butyoudontlooksick.com/articles/written-by-christine/the-spoon-theory/ https://butyoudontlooksick.com/articles/written-by-christine... https://cookingonabootstrap.com/2022/04/12/its-not-about-the-pasta-kevin-jack-monroe/ https://cookingonabootstrap.com/2022/04/12/its-not-about-the... I get not understanding, but can you try not to be so obnoxious about it, please? It's clear you don't have these problems. If they seem to you to be absurd struggles to have, read some Albert Camus.

wiseowise 3y ago

[flagged]

wizzwizz4 3y ago
Maybe they didn't. Maybe their sibling died and their ex left them with the kids from the last relationship and now they're looking after 3 kids they never expected to have to care for on their own.
throwaway32908 3y ago
This is everyone's problem if we ever hope to retire