Stolen shamelessly from Ace:
http://monsterhunternation.com/2018/02/12/fisking-the-stop-telling-poor-people-to-cook-doofus-with-special-guest-my-mom/
In the article, Larry Correia (sci-fi author and pretty nice guy in person according to people I know) savagely fisks an idiot "social justice reporter" who sneers at the idea that poor people can save money and eat healthier by cooking rather than eating fast food. Larry (quite correctly) points out that it is staggeringly obvious that this reporter has neither ever been truly poor, nor ever really had to shop in stores like Dollar General or Buy Lots (nor likely, in my opinion, would be caught dead doing so).
When I was a kid, my parents were wealthier by a good deal than my father's parents ever were, but never were sure they could afford to put shoes on all four of their children at the same time. Fast food was a rare treat, and yet they still managed to cook meals every night of my life. Why? Because that was how you fed a family of six without much money. Had they fed us fast food every night, I'm sure that they wouldn't have been able to afford shoes for us.
Personally, I'll admit, for many years I didn't want to come home after a long day's work and cook dinner, and I fully confess that it was a poor economic choice. I have since mended my ways and my meager bank account shows the benefits of doing so. And Larry is dead on, one doesn't need a full spice rack or vast array of utensils and pans in which to fix a good meal. Most of my cooking is done out of my favorite skillet and using a single knife and cutting board. And while I have a nice skillet, knife, and cutting board, I could go out to Walmart right now and purchase replacements for less than $20 (I just looked it up on the Walmart website). That's the same cost as a two-four person dinner at most every fast food place. So, as Larry suggested, skip a meal at KFC and have bologna sandwiches that night, and suddenly you can afford all to tools you need to cook (and yes, you can absolutely brown ground beef with no utensil other than a fork, I have done it myself).
19 comments:
I don't understand these people at all. Surely they were poor at least as students? Grad students?
They were on a Saga lunch program at their schools, and never saw the bill after the upfront payment?
Mumsy and Pop-pop bought their meals--or cooked for them while they did their school "work" in Pop-pop's basement?
Or, they got theirs, to hell with everyone else?
Eric Hines
Every couple years or so, there is a Congressman who tries to eat on what Food Stamps would pay him.Invariably, the reaction is that it is IMPOSSIBLE to eat on that budget."I was living on crackers and hamburger helper and canned beans and frozen dinners- it was IMPOSSIBLE" is a typical response from those poor helpless Congressmen.
For those who know how to cook, the money allotted from Food Stamps is more than adequate. (Canned beans aren't that expensive, but you can cook beans from scratch for a quarter of the cost of the canned equivalent.)
For those who say they don't have time to prepare food, a bread machine will give them a loaf of bread for five minutes of work. I mates a loaf a lot cheaper and tastier than store bought bread. You can get a bread machine at a yard sale or CraigsList for $10-$15. I once paid $5 because as I later found out, you couldn't remove the paddle. But it still made a good loaf of bread.
Food Stamps are supposed to help the poor. For eons, the poor have known how to prepare nutritious, tasty food at minimal cost. Those who believe that Food Stamps are not enough apparently believe the poor are too stupid to know how to cook.
Larry C is a member, active, of the Latter Day Saints, I found out recently. So are the Bundy clan vs BLM infamy, and Harry s Reid and that presidential Republican guy... what was his name, Mitt R I recall.
Also Glenn Beck converted.
Open source intel profile analysis, so free and good. Apparently almost no one can connect the dots.
As for food budgets, I've lived for 2.5 days eating 1-2 black cherries a day, plus water.
It's better than eating meat and steak everyday on a normal caloric intake, by far.
The problem with physical food is that after a few hours, the body needs more of it. The energy expended in digestion and purification doesn't come back either.
The benefit of spiritual sustenance is that one only grows in energy, not in losses. The problem is that one comes perilously close to the death of the mortal coil, as usually when someone does not feel hunger at all after a few days... they are dying.
A lot of my fellow grad students did not know how to cook on a budget. I spent between $35-50/week on all food and household supplies. They ate out once or twice a day, and probably had cereal for breakfast. A chunk of their student loans and credit-card debt went to eating out, because they didn't know how to prepare food ahead of time and then doctor it to change the taste enough to keep from being bored.
The one time I was truly broke, I lived in a town so small it didn't have fast food other than Dairy Queen. So I hung in there on beans, ramen, and deep-discount-expiring-yesterday ground meat. And oatmeal. I lived to tell about it, but I don't recommend it.
LittleRed1
Someone who is poor as a student or grad student believes his or her poverty is temporary: once he or she gets an education, good jobs and a good income lie ahead. Plus, so long as ones family is not poor, there is often a little financial help and always a safety net. When you're young, living with 3 or 4 or 5 roommates in a crummy apartment is an adventure. And if you don't have kids, eating one meal a day and that one from McDonald's is a real possibility.
So people who have been poor as students often don't have to sit down and think about how to bootstrap themselves out of poverty with no assurance of a good job in a few years, no help from (equally poor) relatives, and kids to feed. They can put off buying pots and pans and spices until they're making enough money so they don't have to scrimp and save to afford them and, therefore, that's the only solution they see for anyone who is poor, regardless of the circumstances of that poverty. They are narrow-minded in the most literal sense of the phrase.
For those who say they don't have time to prepare food, a bread machine will give them a loaf of bread for five minutes of work. I mates a loaf a lot cheaper and tastier than store bought bread.
Before we discovered that my wife has a dietary problem with grains (not just the gluten--the problem, too, is surprisingly widespread; any foodstamp program would need to have available foods other than grain-based, but that's a different story), I made our bread from scratch without benefit of any breadmaking machine. We tried one, too, and it didn't do as good a job as I could do. A three-loaf batch was dirt cheap--almost literally--and the batch took four hours from flour into the mixing bowl to finished loaves out of the oven. And 15 minutes of actual work; the rest of the time was letting the dough rise its several times. There's lots that can be accomplished around the house, whether chores or work-from-home stuff, in those four hours.
My own eating habits in grad school ran to cheap cheese, peanuts, and hamburger with store-bought Hamburger Helper. One or two pounds of hamburger (I've forgotten which) and a box of HH exactly filled my iron (I couldn't afford any fancy stainless steel) skillet, and the mix produced dinners good for 5 days.
Oh, and I did have a television set in those days. My parents had bought a new color TV and the store threw in an end-of-model 9", or so, portable black-and-white TV to sweeten the deal. I had that in college, and it lasted me those four years, through grad school, and the first couple of years on active duty. There's no need to live high on the hog.
Eric Hines
I still make bread a lot. You're right -- flour is cheap, about as cheap as dried beans if you buy the least expensive stuff. Five pounds of flour, a pound of sugar, and some yeast is all you really need (although if you put a bit of fat in the dough it'll last longer and taste a bit better). It's luxurious to eat fresh bread, though: a luxury the poor can afford, if only they know how to make it.
I love fresh homemade bread slathered with butter, but it is fattening, and is not the butter. Carbs are basically like eating sugar.
I lived on the street for a while as a kid, only recall being hungry a few times. Guess the worst was rural living in Vermont, no money, no food, so we found a farmer who had harvested the potatoes and turnips and he let us glean the field - I did get sick of turnips! Beat being hungry though.
For the cost of a decent dinner for two a couple could eat well for a week, buying carefully and cooking. We live in a semi rural area and work at home so we cook almost every meal at home.
In the end, IMO, the reluctance to cook comes down to either laziness, or ignorance.
Of course, all the whining from the left is merely BTDT (Because Trump Did It.) That is the only metric- it is all as Lenin said- "there are only two things in politics- Who, and Whom". Anything the conservatives do is bad, anything the left does is good. I remember some leftist lawyer making a big deal out of Reagan's administration counting catsup as a vegetable for school meals. I had two thoughts- one was "Buddy, you don't have enough to worry about", and the other was, why is the Federal Government concerned with school lunches in the first place?
They say arguing with someone on the internet is like wrestling a pig- you get muddy and the pig likes it- same principal applies to reasoning with a leftist.
That's probably true. I was talking to a left-leaning friend about the 'food box' SNAP proposal yesterday, and he was deeply amused by how similar it was to the single payer dispute -- only with the supporters and opponents reversed, since it's a Trump proposal.
They used to run the 'food stamp' challenge in the local free weekly paper, and the whining by the (white(bread) middle class liberal) participants was always funny.
Cookies! Crab legs! it was mind boggling.
I have to laugh at Congressmen who think eating out of cans or using Hamburger Helper with fresh meat is skimping. Forget studying any history, didn't they ever have grandparents? Maybe they're too young now to have had grandparents who went through the Depression, but my grandparents would have stared dumbfounded at anyone who ate meat every day and thought he was economizing, let alone frozen dinners or packaged food.
In college, and frankly for years after college, my friends and I piled up in communal housing that I suppose gently reared people have no idea exists. We walked, took buses, or rode bicycles to work until we could afford cars. Well, at least we weren't trapped in our parents' homes by the paralyzing fear of leaving luxury behind!
And yet we hear these days about people too poor to avoid getting fat. The dangers people can dream up after a century or two of opulence. For a million years before that, it never would have occurred to anyone that true poverty wouldn't make you skinny.
When we lived in China, we bought an electric burner and a single skillet, a couple of plates and a big spoon for stirring the cooking food. Cooked most of our meals in that single skillet, 'one-skillet wonders' that involved whatever we could get locally that we liked. Ate a lot of rice, of course. But in terms of setting up a kitchen you could cook in with almost nothing and almost no money, there you go.
I found an article written by one of those Congress members on a Food Stamp budget.
Join Members of Congress, Take the #SNAPChallenge.
This is the work on Congressperson Barbara Lee (D-CA) who represents California's 13th District- which includes Berserkeley.
This morning, I went shopping for the week on the SNAP budget. Getting your budget down to $4.50 a day is complicated.
Next, I find canned tuna, canned peas, and a box to make tuna noodle casserole. You can buy the noodles separately, but the boxes are cheap. But, most of them require butter and milk, two things I don’t have a budget for. I read the back of every box and find one that only needs water and is also in my price range. A casserole like that will last several days and is fairly balanced. ...
I made sure to add an apple (the smallest one in the bunch, they’re calculated by the pound), a small onion, and a can of lima beans. I try hard to get some more fresh fruit and vegetables, but they’re out of my price range. Canned vegetables have too much sodium, but they’re cheap.
She can't afford milk? I can purchase a gallon of milk for under $3.00, which is 43 cents a day- quite affordable on the $4.50 a day SNAP allotment. Wouldn't you know, crackers and canned food, just as I predicted. Couldn't catch a Congressperson demeaning herself by cooking a pot of beans.
I can purchase a gallon of milk for under $3.00, which is 43 cents a day- quite affordable on the $4.50 a day SNAP allotment.
Without knowing the details of Lee's shopping "effort" or of the SNAP payment pace, there is the matter of cash flow, which takes careful, disciplined monitoring. At $4.50 per day from SNAP, a single gallon of milk (per the Leftists, it can't be filled milk), eats up most of the daily allotment; the milk isn't available at 43 cents, and buying pints or quarts just jacks up the cost.
The long pole in this example is that cash flow, not the daily allotment or the particular gallon of milk.
Another part of the cash flow is that $1.50 Snickers Bar that is no substitute for tuna, or milk. And since it's my tax dollars that's paying for the SNAP card, you bet I get to say (through Trump's proposal in his current budget proposal), "No junk food with your food stamp. Only healthy food."
Eric Hines
E Hines
At $4.50 per day from SNAP, a single gallon of milk (per the Leftists, it can't be filled milk), eats up most of the daily allotment; the milk isn't available at 43 cents, and buying pints or quarts just jacks up the cost.
If SNAP recipients were confined to $4.50 per day expenditures, this would be the case. However, the limit is not daily, but monthly. SNAP recipients receive a monthly allotment, not a daily allotment. SNAP: Frequently Asked Questions
In 2015, the average SNAP client received a monthly benefit of $126.39, and the average household received $256.11 monthly.
Monthly, not daily.
I have been in grocery lines with those who use the Lone Star Card- used in Texas for SNAP purchases. They certainly do not confine themselves to $4.50 purchases. The amounts of their purchases are congruent with purchases of once or twice per week.
So, it is entirely appropriate to consider the purchase of a gallon of milk on the SNAP program. That Congresscritters like Barbara Lee do not consider such purchases when evaluating the adequacy of SNAP funding, is more a comment on their competence as food budgeters AND their competencw as Congresscritters than on the allegedly inadequate funding that SNAP provides.
There's some rumors online about the Cabal, Mark of the Beast, Deep State wanting to indoctrinate genetically altered foods with artificial vaccinations and what not.
Reminds me of the American deep past that has been covered up, where the State performed enforced sterilizations as part of the American fascist eugenics program.
If people don't know how to cook and are reliant on the US gov sugar daddy, it would be quite feasible to begin alpha dry runs.
Dalrymple's observations in Britain: "Meals here were solitary, poor, nasty, British, and short."
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