Who can't afford food? An egg costs like 30 cents, rice is like 20 cents a pound. Make some fried rice. Make a sandwich. The cost of great food is like $40 a month per person, with the bonus that they wouldn't be morbidly obese. Now explain why its unreasonable to expect people to eat high quality cheap food. (and no "poor people are too stupid" paternalistic arguments)
$1.30 per day food budget? Not accurate in the affluent world.
1400-1800 calories for an average height adult male is a reasonable floor (and that's a non-obesity scale). The $1.30 per day budget might get you around 1/3 of that calorie requirement, without solely existing on something like rice.
You can get by on closer to ~$90-$120 per month, per adult, and actually bring in enough calories to not starve over time. That's a surviving floor. You can temporarily go a bit lower to scrape by ($50-$90), however that's not livable longer term, you'll suffer increasingly.
If you modestly augment with various free food assistance options (not talking about SNAP), you could stretch the lower ~$50-$90 category up to something more like the $120 category consistently.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You're right: I didn't ask for advice, and I consider yours to be a chauvinistic and arrogant gesture based on totally not reading or understanding my previous post. Please leave me alone.
Sorry you feel that way. You said you were desperate so I thought I'd offer some simple advice. Despite your aggression, I hope you overcome your fears and figure out how to cook for yourself and not rely on exorbitant prices from restaurants
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.
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?
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.
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.
No, you are using a tiny subset of a group to make broad assertions about the entire group. That is not logically valid.
I accept there are sick people. But not all people are sick. Most poor people do in fact make themselves inexpensive food at home. That you and others want to claim it is impossible for them to do so is bizarre.
You must be incredibly out of touch if you think $40 a month is a reasonable budget for “great food.” 2 weeks worth of ham and cheese sandwiches alone would eat up the majority of that figure.
Not to mention the fruits and vegetables required for a balanced diet. Prices for produce in my area have gone through the roof. What about the family of four, the single parent, one of the many recently let go? The cost of basic goods and services has inflated as well, meaning less money for food. Sure, maybe there are people spending way too much eating out, but food scarcity is a real problem for many. And just saying you should be able to afford it and throwing around made up $ figures doesn't solve a thing.
Ham and cheese are both notoriously expensive though, and not especially healthy. One day of filet mignon would eat up the whole budget, but thats not an argument against what I said.
As for out of touch, I grew up eating government peanut butter and free school lunches. Lots of years that is all I ate. Food assistance is great and we should do more, but jeff bezos hording wealth isn't causing people to starve as gp suggests, food is incredibly cheap. The idea people are starving is rediculous.
I’m a bit confused then… what exactly do you propose the average American should put in their sandwiches—your suggestion—at a $40/mo budget? Eggs and lentils?
I live on only a bit more than that myself. I batch cook all of my meals for the week on Sunday mornings. It's simple food, all made from raw ingredients. I don't eat any sandwiches, though, since bread is usually highly processed and not cheap.
Nothing is objectively “bad” about that, but it is an insane stretch to call that “great food.” That is subsistence eating.
Moreover—can you put beans, rice, eggs, and mixed veggies in a sandwich? Because a sandwich was one of OP’s “$40/mo” suggestions. A food budget where a simple ham and cheese sandwich is an unimaginable luxury is ridiculous to propose as a reasonable target.
Why isn't it great food? People line up to get rice, veggies, and beans, onion, and chicken in a tortilla at Chipotle, but if you combine those ingredients at home you are 'subsistence eating'?
Well you seem to be skipping over the fresh cilantro, herbs and spices, marinating time, and expert preparation found in a Chipotle. Do you understand what it takes to build and maintain a respectable and functional spice rack?
Not to mention the spoilage that goes on. The rice and beans can keep long-term, but you'll need to do logistics on chicken, tortillas etc to keep fresh ones in the pipeline without wasting any, which you can't afford either.
Look, I've had food boxes before. The food box is an amazing wondrous bit of charity where you can get a ton of free food just for asking. There's cereal, I've gotten big hunks of frozen meat, dry beans and rice, I've gotten bits of candy and such, lots of staples, powdered milk, canned chickpeas and spinach and you-name-it.
However the food boxes only go so far. They won't cook the meals for you. They won't give you the utensils, pots and pans. You don't get any fats, oils, herbs, spices, or seasonings. they won't tell you which ingredients combine in a flavorful way. You don't get any recipes that use these ingredients and don't call for something you don't have.
Now you boil some water, throw in some beans and rice plain, and cook until soft. Go ahead, throw in some string beans for vitamins, and some kind of protein. Spoil yourself! Then try to choke that down in the absence of salt, butter, or anything that might impart flavor. How long until you're going to just kill yourself?
Well there you go, add chicken and tortillas to the mix and your budget doubles just for dinner. People generally enjoy eating more than just the bare-bones, most minimal staples.
Dodging the question… provide me one example of a nutritious set of sandwich ingredients that can be procured at a cost of 43¢ per serving (assuming you spend a generous third of your $1.30 a day budget on just a sandwich). Bread alone would cost that much.
Great, now I need to own a car and afford gas to drive 40mi to the nearest library. (More importantly, now I need to have a kitchen to cook in.)
You realize that there are people who are homeless and who live in areas that don't have any support systems for homelessness (e.g. homeless shelters), right?
I feel like you're unclear on what poverty, homelessness, and hunger are.
You have proposed that a homeless person obtain a phone, find a library that'll mail books, obtain a mailbox, have a book mailed to them, presumably pay for return postage, all so they can obtain recipes to cook on a stove they don't have with utensils they likely lack with ingredients they can't afford.
Homeless people aren't in that situation because they needed someone to write down "how to make rice in a pot", nor are they likely to have discretionary income for your proposals.
>I feel like you're unclear on what poverty, homelessness, and hunger are.
And I feel like you do not understand that the average American is not homeless.
If you are homeless you are not going to be a person who is spending >$40/mo for food and needing a cook book to make cheap food interesting to eat. You will just buy cheap food until you bootstrap yourself back to a house and a stable job.
Scroll up to where this comments thread says "You realize that there are people who are homeless", then talked about a box under a bridge, then not having a mailbox. Who did you think we were discussing?
Our knowledge of what is healthy is spotty at best, but plenty of countries that eat a lot of ham and cheese (France, Spain, Italy) are fairly OK health-wise, so it certainly seems to indicate that there is nothing seriously wrong about either.
Congratulations, you alone in the world have had this one genius thought that nobody else has ever thought of or considered, and definitely isn’t the first thing anyone who has spent zero time learning about any of the actual problems and just wants the most shallow possible dismissal of other peoples’ problems reaches for.
The entire problem is solved, everyone, crisis over.
For some reason the doomers always forget that there hasn’t been a case of involuntary death from malnutrition in decades in America.
The argument seems to revolve around the fact that there will always be people who are way worse off than most others. It’s not particularly more surprising than the fact that there will also always be people who are way better off than most others.
> Deaths attributed to malnutrition more than doubled, from about 650 in 2018 to roughly 1,400 in 2022, according to preliminary death certificate data from the California Department of Public Health. The same trend occurred nationwide, with malnutrition deaths more than doubling, from about 9,300 deaths in 2018 to roughly 20,500 in 2022, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
> Malnutrition is particularly common among older people, especially those who are ill, low-income, homebound, or without reliable access to healthy food or medical services. It can result from not eating enough but also from poor eating habits that lead to nutritional deficiencies. The majority of deaths in California from malnutrition last year occurred in residents 85 and older.
These are people too elderly and feeble to take care of themselves, and often people who have medical conditions that prevent them from being able to absorb nutrition from food in addition to that. This has literally nothing to do with it being impossible to afford food.
Also in the same period there were around 300,000 deaths due to obesity with around 30,000 in california.
Right, but you are intentionally ignoring the context, intentionally misinterpreting the claim, and being pedantic. It's so lazy and dishonest to do a super literal close reading of what someone says and then debunk that. Your teachers failed you.
It's completely obvious that OP meant that otherwise healthy people aren't starving to death. That used to be common, millions of otherwise healthy people died in famines in Ireland and Ukraine and China not so long ago. People that were healthy couldn't find a way to get their hands on enough calories and they wasted away and died, and their children wasted away and died, gradually over months. That literally doesn't happen in the US and hasn't for a long long time, and if you are claiming it does you live in a land of make believe.
I suppose it's a matter of definition for the word "involuntary" at this point. What I mean is that everyone who is willing and able will have enough food stamps to get enough nutrition for the month - no matter your living situation.
Like the parent said, you seem to be disputing my original claim out of spite and in bad faith.
