Hoo-Yah! 

MeganJane McArdleGalt is far too easy a target for you, Jess, but it’s nice to see you take the time to bust a (metaphorical) cap in her ass every now and then. Good shot…

I suspect the only way people will change their behavior is a sudden desire to move up the social ladder.

Yes, that’s the problem with poor people: they don’t want to move up the social/economic ladder!

Note the other point made by the reader:

The moment someone I know suddenly gets ambitious, or makes partner, or needs investors, they start losing weight.

No one who “makes partner” or “needs investors” is poor to begin with. He’s basing his experience off of what rich people do when they become successful.

One notes the lack of empathy involved: it is beyond their comprehension that many poor might (correctly) realize that they’re trapped. Nor does it dawn on him that being thin is not a path out of poverty.

We all take our cues from television/movie industry and the message is clear: you must be sexually appealing, no matter what you do.

Right, there’s a recipe for success, happiness, wealth and health for all.  Clearly this person is one whose ideas we should take under consideration.

In my world, it makes no sense to buy the bag of Dole lettuce or the package of celery because I’m only one person, and every time I buy pre-packaged fruits or vegetables, the food rots before I can eat it.  Talk about a waste of money.  It’s more productive for me to buy crap in a box.  At least it won’t rot.

I can buy single apples and orange and such, but grapes, cherries, any kind of berry, and most vegetables (save onions, squash, cukes, and peppers) are sold in prepackaged units that are assumed to be going home to a family.

I need market-style fruits and veggies so that I can buy enough for one without seeing three-quarters of the package turn brown and gooey, but the market-style stuff is usually much more expensive.

Yes, I’ve put on weight living alone, even though I really only eat one meal a day (living alone makes it seem pointless to cook), and I only eat granola bars or something similar if I’m hungry the rest of the day.

Is McArdle and her reader’s problem one of lack of understanding or is it a basic heartlessness to begin with? I would say the lack of understanding stems from that heartlessness, because having a heart would mean trying to see the world from the prespective of someone who is poor.

We all take our cues from television/movie industry and the message is clear: you must be sexually appealing, no matter what you do.

Actually, the message is more akin to Fernando’s in the old SNL skit: “It’s better to look good than to feel good, my darlings.” McArdle’s tacit approval aside (and ignoring laughable implication that she’d fit in with the “beautiful people” of L.A.), this is not really a good message.

In any case, the film and TV industry—as with most media industries—depends just as much on connections and nepotism as on good looks or talent. Strange that McArdle, who knows a lot about connections and nepotism from personal experience, wouldn’t write about the role that plays in, just for example, a dim-witted young hack ideologue getting a columnist position with a high-end publication.

well, there you go!  the solution to poverty is that all those poor people need to start eating sushi!  why doesn’t someone tell them!

revrick, I also have wondered about the clueless/heartless question - probably a mixture, and different for all this ilk.  mcfartle seems mainly clueless; I get the impression that she thinks everyone is just like her, with her privileged upbringing, and they just didn’t know enough* (unlike awesome her!) to eat sushi and make partner.

*or willfully made bad choices, because of their inherent unworthiness, due to, gosh, I don’t know, something…

Is McArdle and her reader’s problem one of lack of understanding or is it a basic heartlessness to begin with?

I don’t know about the reader, but McArdle’s problem is a grotesque sense of entitlement. Heartlessness is one of the many unattractive symptoms of that disease.

Just gotta love it when people who have never been poor come up with all the reasons why the poor are different, based on their moral failings.

I’m sure they even had a poor friend once ...

I respectfully ask that both of them stop being fucking morons. 

If they do that, they’ll have lost their entire reason for living. How can you be so cruel, Jesse?

This is what happens when you have a society that pretends to be meritocratic but actually has LESS social mobility than average for industrialized countries. You wind up with a whole bunch of spoiled asshole brats like McMegan who were, to adapt Ann Richards’s bon mot about GHW Bush, born on second base and thought they hit a double.

We all take our cues from television/movie industry
The poor have TVs?!?!!!11! Outrage!

ack ... server ate my comment? But my comment was loaded with empty calories!

Having worked at a major food company, however, it is a true statement that the heavy-buyer demographics for the less healthy foods (Cheetos, etc.) are overwhelming lower socioeconomic class.  Whether the reason for that is what McArdle says is a different story - but statistically speaking, it is true.  That’s a fact; what it means and why it is that way is a different story.

Speedbudget - I’m totally with you.  I once had someone over to my apartment when I lived alone and worked on a campaign, and she remarked that my fridge was full of nothing but beverage.  Fruit juice, milk, soda, beer, whatever.  I didn’t even bother having food, because I knew it would go to waste.  It was cheaper to just buy small quantities of prepared or packaged food and eat it as I needed it. Buying tomatoes was as good as just shredding three dollars outright.

“A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit ‘tasty’.”

-George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

Amanda wrote:

the reason people become faux-libertarian faux-economist bloggers is because being six feet tall and female makes you otherwise unemployable in socially useful pursuits.

A strange example, given that being taller is seen as more attractive, for women as well as men; most models have to be taller than average as well as nearly bone-thin.

A package of microwaveable brand-name hot dogs is $2.50, a package of boneless, skinless chicken breasts requiring seasoning and cooking is $2.39.

  In effect, the hot dogs are the less expensive alternative; if the choice is based on cost and labor considerations alone, the hot dogs are the logical choice.  The chicken breasts become the superior choice only if someone is considering nutrition as well.  You pointed that out yourself.

My question is: what would you do about it?  The part you posted from Megan McArdle is actually on target: people change their eating habits when there is a goal to which they have committed themselves which is more desireable than the ease derived from consuming junk foods.

We all want to be tall and thin and attractive; for some people, that’s a goal effortlessly achieved, while others have to put real work into it.  Sometimes the effort is not seen as worth it, though that decision is usually not a conscious one.  Financial rewards tend to follow attractiveness, so it’s unsirprising that the things you decry also follow poverty.

I have the same problem with food going to waste; to shop for fresh veggies for one I have to drive to a special market 30 minutes away with terrible parking and little to no public transport access.  Am I going to do that two or three times a week?  No, I am not.

Oops!  I just noticed: this was Jesse’s article, not Amanda’s.

Financial rewards tend to follow attractiveness, so it’s unsirprising that the things you decry also follow poverty.

But the converse is not true, attractiveness does not necessarily lead to financial rewards.  Ask any disgruntled ex-Suicide Girl.  Nor is ‘everyone should work on being more attractive’ a sound poverty-fighting policy, among other reasons more people being pretty will dilute the rewards for being pretty before it completely changes the standards.  Right now attractive is tall, thin and fit.  If everyone is tall, thin and fit then the standard will be tall, thin, and fit + X.  Being extra attractive might give you the edge in a highly competitive professional environment (especially one blatantly based on looks, like entertainment), but for normal people in normal people jobs, it’s not supposed to be that important, and for very good reasons.

In my mind, there is a real oddity about the way libertarians talk about poor people. I percieve it as a kind of vampirism. It is as if removing as much money as possible from the poor is not enough for libertarians… they’re licking their lips, wanting to siphon even the simple pleasure of eating junk food from the poor. It is as if the libertarians’ desire for, and simultaneous hatred of, the poor, leads them to imagine themselves as predators. A strange kind of psychic vampirism.

We all want to be tall and thin and attractive; for some people, that’s a goal effortlessly achieved, while others have to put real work into it.

Do tell me, dear Dana, how I’m such a slacker for being short.  Jeez, toss away my Ph.D., for I am 5’2” and spent only 2 minutes on my hair this morning.  Considering I have M&Ms;in my office drawer, you may as well tattoo untermensch on my forehead.

None of this addresses the well documented fact that most poor people also have less accesws to healthy food.  Most live in areas where there are no nearby grocery stores , because the big chains will not build in poor neighborhoods.  This applies in both urban and rural areas and here in Montana people in some areas must drive 100 miles to buy groceries.  All that is available to them are convenience stores and, if they are lucky, small mom and pop groceries.  Both options are much more expensive, have little selection, and focus on high calorie, low nutrition food.

The reality is that it is expensive, often prohibitively so, to eat healthy.  Many in America are forced to skip meals because they cannot buy food.  Food banks cannot keep food on the shelves and are near the breaking point.  Wages fro American workers, adjusted for inflation, have been flat for 30 years (thanks, St. Ronny) and those for low income workers (in the bottom quintile) have actually declined.  At the same time. costs have continued to rise.  And these asshats want to make this about a failure of will?  That the poor are morally deficient?  They are quite plainly moral monsters who deserve to be shunned by all decent people.

Dana, you might actually like the solution: stop subsidizing all the components of unhealthy foods.  The basis of almost every unhealthy thing up there is corn; the first two ingredients in Cheetos are corn meal and corn oil.  The basis of the unhealthy American diet is government policy.  If anyone would have the courage to push Iowa’s primary to March, we’d be a dramatically healthier nation within a decade.

n California, being fat will hurt any career, whether you’re a doctor, lawyer or accountant.

And yet, if you are Johan Goldberg you get a column at the LA Times.  If you are Grover Norquist, you get your own god damn cottage industry of tax bitching.  And don’t make me go down the list of fat-ass state Congressmen and Senators.

Somehow Dennis Hastert got to be the longest serving majority leader in House history, while weighing a metric ton.

Given that I know plenty of poor skinny people and rich fat ones, I can’t help but feel as though Megan is really just spending 3000 words to build up a bigoted stereotype.  But then, this isn’t really a surprise, coming from some shallow socialite from California (zing!  I can do it too!)

Healthy eating is the pleasure denied here.  Except for the microwaveable dinners, the ability to buy food which requires the purchase of yet other foods in order to constitute actual meals is the luxury - not to mention preparation time, the shorter viability for fresh foods, even the fact that they require types of storage that a box of crackers doesn’t.  You have to spend extra money just to make the food you actually bought worth buying.

This all assumes a lot of home cooking.  And, to be honest, I think that’s the real flaw in logic.  Because poor people tend to be not only short on money, but short on time.  They work longer hours to make up the difference in pay.  They can’t afford cleaning services or child care.  Many of them are single parents.  They have fewer vacation and sick days.

It doesn’t matter if Top Ramen costs less than Cambell’s Soup when you have to eat all your meals out of the drive through window at McDonalds.  And, in this case, it’s not a matter of price as it is of speed.  Poor people don’t have the luxury of time, which means no opportunity to hit the gym or spend hours twice a month at the grocery store finding the best low fat salad dressing to go with your short shelf life vegetables.

That’s the real joke here.  Because while McArdle probably has a personal trainer at her gym, and a home office where she can catch up on work, and a maid, and an accountant, and a Peapod delivery frequent shopper card, she’s penning an article that amounts to “If you don’t have any bread, you should eat some cake”.

While some parts of your rebuttal of McArdle make sense Jesse, sadly, your examples just reinforce her point that in some cases, we are wilfully fat.  The one that stands out is the chicken breast/hot dog example.  I fully expected there to be a huge price differential in favor of the hot dogs.  Pound for Pound, nope.  Serving for serving, yes.  That pack of hot dogs probably contains 10, the chx breasts 4. One would hope that most people can see it’s a matter of how many slices the pie is cut into when one asks how many it will serve, and that the answer is relative.

The argument would be bolstered by citing the advertising and convenience factor.  Many folks will eat a hot dog “raw” (They’re almost always fully cooked, so c’mon, admit it.)  or microwavable in a minute with no dirty dishes. Your additional cost factor doesn’t fly here, as most of us would require hot dog buns.  The other factor is cooking know how - sadly, most Americans no longer cook, and dining time - most Americans dno longer have sit down dinners.

The fact is chx breasts are easy to cook, require little spice, and can also be served on a bun, albeit, they are not really microwaveable. 

Add to that that most kids have been advertising conditioned to “want” hot dogs” ad harried parents have given in, there is an argument, that convenience wins.  And yeah, working three jobs translates to convenience and peace at home means a lot, but there are many Americans not in the three job category who still choose the convenient, fatttening crap.  Americans, in general, are lazy when it comes to food.

I do feel for the folks in the food desert areas like Kyso.  There are programs working to change that.  Try to hook up with one of them, whether it’s a co-op, a neighborhood garden, or starting a farmers market in your area. For that matter, have you ever tried talking to the produce manager at the store that sells large quantities? They want to move that stuff before it spoils, too.  Failing that, couldn’t you get a neighbor to split the packages?  Yes, it takes some extra effort, and if you won’t put out the extra effort…..

I just seems impossible that even someone as clueless as McArdle could really believe the crap she writes. That’s why I don’t even try to engage her argument, and instead look at what the psychological basis might be. It would be different if she had some kind of real expertise in economics or sociology, rather than merely being a well-practiced bullshit artist.

DrDick - I have talked about that issue at length before.  But even where the healthy food is available alongside unhealthy food, it’s still not priced in a way that makes the healthy food an option.  And then you get the Whole Foods issue, where healthy food is sold at a status-conscious premium for precisely this reason.

Megan McAddlebrain is truly the Jonah Goldberg of Libertarianism: There seems to be no limit to the subjects about which she is utterly clueless, and every ignorant screed is accompanied by the stench of monstrous entitlement with a towering and completely unearned air of moral superiority.

While some parts of your rebuttal of McArdle make sense Jesse, sadly, your examples just reinforce her point that in some cases, we are wilfully fat.  The one that stands out is the chicken breast/hot dog example.  I fully expected there to be a huge price differential in favor of the hot dogs.  Pound for Pound, nope.  Serving for serving, yes.  That pack of hot dogs probably contains 10, the chx breasts 4. One would hope that most people can see it’s a matter of how many slices the pie is cut into when one asks how many it will serve, and that the answer is relative.

Notice that I said “name brand”.  The generic packages are even cheaper, for one.  The other issue comes down to the fact that, as I said, hot dogs can be stretched out for weeks and used whenever - chicken breasts stay a few days unless frozen, and then require defrosting. 

Convenience is a huge issue, but it doesn’t mean we’re “willfully” fat unless you think an additional half hour spent using quickly spoiled food after working a stressful, low-paying job (or jobs) is somehow “willful”.  It seems like you’re embracing McArdle’s point, which I don’t think you intended to do.

Kyso wrote:

Being extra attractive might give you the edge in a highly competitive professional environment (especially one blatantly based on looks, like entertainment), but for normal people in normal people jobs, it’s not supposed to be that important, and for very good reasons.

Except that we all know that to get hired for job X, you have to be approved by supervisor or hiring manager or whomever Y, and people really do tend to favor better-looking people.  Looks may have absolutely nothing to do with performing a particular job, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t taken into consideration, at least sunconsciously.

In some ways, it’s counterproductive.  I knew one lady whose (unstated) policy was to hire fat, ugly women to work in the office.  Her reasoning, as far as I could glean it, was simple: they had fewer other employment prospects, and thus they stayed longer.  That reduced turnover and training expenses, and gave the office a more stable, more experienced workforce.  One other effect was it kept they guys like me away from wasting time in the office flirting with the women.  It all made perfect sense.  But it seems that office managers who think that way are in the minority; there are countless studies showing that taller, thinner, better looking people make more money, as a whole.

Mr Taylor wrote:

Dana, you might actually like the solution: stop subsidizing all the components of unhealthy foods.  The basis of almost every unhealthy thing up there is corn; the first two ingredients in Cheetos are corn meal and corn oil.

I’d prefer a much broader answer: stop subsidizing, period.  But we both know that’ll never happen.

Well i’m a poor college student (on scholarship) and i eat very healthy for $120 - $130 a month and most people are shocked by that number, but its really a way of thinking about things that I imagine many poor people never learned. I don’t mean that in an insulting way, I mean that if they were in poverty their whole lives perhaps they never learned things like budgeting or how to take advantage of sales, or about sites like allrecipes.com that practically plan the meals for you. If no one else used it or talked about it, how would they even know that that stuff exists? Or maybe spending $120/mo is still too much but considering the junk food i see i don’t know that you can spend too much less on it because junk food is not filling, its just carbs, so you need more of it to not be hungry.

And i could cut down the budget a bit, but i like eating fancy stuff like Chicken Marsala or really spicey food which necessitates buying random spices that i only use once. If i stuck to the same 40 meals or whatever i’d be able to cut it down further.

You also have to have at least a little capital because this is only possible if you buy stuff at places like Sam’s Club which charge a rather large initial fee to join (and then you end up saving tons later). I can see how this can get difficult or impossible. And that is, of course, assuming that you have 2 hours 3 times a week to cook and clean up.

Why does Megan hate free markets? Why does she want to destroy the processed food industry? Is Megan a socialist? Why do these people hate the American Farmer, God, and Apple Fruit pies by Hostess?

Well i’m a poor college student (on scholarship) and i eat very healthy for $120 - $130 a month and most people are shocked by that number, but its really a way of thinking about things that I imagine many poor people never learned.

So, you’re a college student.  Meaning you have plenty of time to shop, prepare meals, etc., totally unlike the average working class shmuck with two retail jobs.  But yes, i’m sure poor people are just stupid and require your wisdom.

This is just another version of Calvinism, using “society” in place of “God”. 

“I have known the right people/been lucky/taken advantage of others, therefore I DESERVE what comes my way, even with no effort (thinness/money/social approval).  YOU, however, have none of those things, therefore you are morally/socially lazy and undeserving.  It’s your own fault.”

People who believe that have no empathy, which I consider necessary to be a real human being.

Reading the rest of the comment, I see I was perhaps a tad harsh, as mnemeth does touch on convenience.  But no, I do not think that poor people have a poorer understanding of budgeting or coupons than the middle class.

Well i’m a poor college student (on scholarship) and i eat very healthy for $120 - $130 a month and most people are shocked by that number, but its really a way of thinking about things that I imagine many poor people never learned.

We’re glad you’re here mnemeth, with your extra-special specialness, to show those dumb and completely un-special poor people how its done. Whatever would they do without your education and wisdom to light the way?

We all want to be tall and thin and attractive; for some people, that’s a goal effortlessly achieved, while others have to put real work into it.

And those of us who are never going to be tall, thin or attractive?  Should we just off ourselves now? 

Fuck that shit.  I’ve wanted, I’ve tried, I’ve worked, and it just made me miserable.  Getting the hell out of SoCal and not wasting my time on shallow people?  That helped immensely, even if I’m still damaged from my time among the image-obsessed.

Yesterday’s Chicago Tribune had an interesting story about some social services organization run by the state that was teaching poor people how to cook.  Many of them really didn’t realize that the type of cooking that they knew was heavy on butter, salt, fat and wasn’t good for them or their children.  Many of them really didn’t realize that it was a good idea to serve vegetables for their children, buy lower-fat versions of milk once the kids were past 2 years old, and that fruit was a better dessert choice than sweet desserts.  From the quotes, it was evident that some of them really didn’t “know any better.”  If that’s the case—then, no judgment, I’m glad such education occurs on my taxpaying dime.

Correction, I think it was the Sun-Times.

What a cesspool SoCal is.  I’d like for McArdle and her buddy to provide a step-by-step guide to becoming unpoor.  Real, concrete steps.

My question is: what would you do about it?  The part you posted from Megan McArdle is actually on target: people change their eating habits when there is a goal to which they have committed themselves which is more desireable than the ease derived from consuming junk foods.

No, it isn’t on target, Dana, because this isn’t about eating to be healthier (McArdle’s starting point in re: the health insurance debate) but eating to look good—not exactly the same thing, as anyone who’s seen models subsisting on saltines and Fiji water cigarettes will tell you. But you keep believing what you see on magazine covers and da telebision is an actual depiction of good health.

I’m curious, by the way: how do you propose that an adult get taller by “putting real work into it”? The Procrustean bed, perhaps?

I’d prefer a much broader answer: stop subsidizing, period.  But we both know that’ll never happen.

Shorter Dana: since perfection is the only thing I’ll accept, and since perfection is unachievable, keep that corporate welfare flowing!

I’m sure McArdle, Rotarian socialist that she is, would approve of this idiotically transparent dodge.

Dana, man, people do not necessarily consume junk food because they find it more desirable than eating healthy food.  Did you not read the post and the comments that followed?

Theres a belief about poverty, evinced most commonly in the why you has cell phones? argument, that anything involved in poverty which has utility or, god forbid, pleasure attached to it is ultimately an indication that the person is not really poor.  Even worse, the presence of anything even remotely pleasurable (and pleasure is being defined as loosely as humanly possible as things which are not soul-rendingly terrible”) is evidence that poverty is itself a choice, the most comfortable thing for people without the drive or ambition to do more than work three jobs and wait for the bus at 5:40 in the morning.

I don’t think this is complete, and fails to emphasize the root basis of this kind of thinking. It’s not so much that poor people are having the wrong kind of pleasure, that they’re not really poor, or that they choose to be poor; it’s that they should not have any pleasure at all, and should be expending 100% of every single moment of their lives on “becoming not poor”.

Their real argument—despicable as it is—is that poor people don’t deserve to have pleasure. And the reason they believe this is because the only way they can tolerate their empty—but affluent—lives is to view wealth as a moral good and poverty as a moral failure.

Their real argument—despicable as it is—is that poor people don’t deserve to have pleasure. And the reason they believe this is because the only way they can tolerate their empty—but affluent—lives is to view wealth as a moral good and poverty as a moral failure.

Exactly. Which is why they look like a bunch of vampires to me.

I’ve wanted, I’ve tried, I’ve worked, and it just made me miserable.  Getting the hell out of SoCal and not wasting my time on shallow people?  That helped immensely, even if I’m still damaged from my time among the image-obsessed.

Same here. One of my main gripes about living in L.A. was that you were always (and I mean always) being sold something, and the various “billboards” included the human body. These days I can only take a maximum of 2 weeks at a time in that town.

I didn’t even bother having food, because I knew it would go to waste.  It was cheaper to just buy small quantities of prepared or packaged food and eat it as I needed it. Buying tomatoes was as good as just shredding three dollars outright.

I’m in the same single-guy boat as speedbudget, and pretty much take your approach (along with dining out). It’s more expensive (especially if you’re going for high quality and nutritious stuff), but there’s a lot less waste.

Except that we all know that to get hired for job X, you have to be approved by supervisor or hiring manager or whomever Y, and people really do tend to favor better-looking people.  Looks may have absolutely nothing to do with performing a particular job, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t taken into consideration, at least sunconsciously.

Sure, but I’ve been served by enough fat, ugly and old people to know that being extra-special attractive isn’t a job requirement most of the time, and that if I wanted a mid-level office job I’d spend more money on buying a proper interview outfit and getting my hair done than I would on a gym membership.  McArdle’s dumbass reader is taking the “pretty people have it easier” trope way, way too far.  It also ignores that the more your employment hinges on your looks, the more fucked you’ll be when that stops working for you. If I get hired because the guy who interviewed me prefers buxom blondes, I can’t be fired later because he’s replaced by a guy who prefers skinny black girls, and if I find that that happened, I can always try to sue their asses off.  Plus, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so I’m not sure what practical advice I’d give to a person who wanted to be more attractive for employment purposes.

Amd yes, mnemeth, one can eat healthy on the cheap—I’ve done it myself. The problem being discussed here is that those pervasive societal values Dana raves about (the ones McArdle’s L.A. fan discusses) are also turned by the very same media industry toward selling people (mostly minorities) on the idea that you can eat at “cheap” brand-name greasepits like McDonalds all the time and still look and be healthy.

If that isn’t bad enough, many public schools have been urged to sell out their cafeteria rights to those same corporate interests—so much for education on healthy eating.

And physioprof says what I was trying to get at! 

It doesn’t matter if Top Ramen costs less than Cambell’s Soup when you have to eat all your meals out of the drive through window at McDonalds.  And, in this case, it’s not a matter of price as it is of speed.  Poor people don’t have the luxury of time, which means no opportunity to hit the gym or spend hours twice a month at the grocery store finding the best low fat salad dressing to go with your short shelf life vegetables.

You’re missing something here zif,  not all that long ago, poor people could/did eat BETTER, especially the rural poor during the Depression, Dust Bowl area excepted, because poor people knew how to cook.

Jesse does get it, with the subsidized corn comment.  I’ve read a good book that explains a lot of this, “The End of Food” by Paul (?) Roberts.  Most programs and economics demand that food be “value added” with the concept of value being an arbitrary one (pretty packaging, portioning, additives etc. being seen as “value”). 

The problem is that Americans, in general, are willfully ignorant about cooking.  I have spoken with numerous producers who tell tales about throwing food on compost piles (yes, I’ve now set up links with food pantries) because no one will buy neckbones, or in one case, fresh hams.  ANd this is well raised meat.  The food pantries only give the neckbones to the soup kitchens, because the “old ladies” there, are the only ones who know what to do with them.

There is so much more here than cost, as some people have pointed out and some people have completely ignored.

Access to healthy food is a huge problem in cities, even for people who aren’t really poor.  When I was in college, I lived right in the middle of a city for 5 years.  The closest grocery store was 2 miles away, and the bus routes didn’t come anywhere near my apartment or that store.  2 miles isn’t so bad when walking to the store, but produce is freaking heavy so the walk back is almost impossible.  Some people get carts with wheels, but you can only fit so much food into that.  I had a car, but there was no parking at the grocery store and I couldn’t risk moving it anyway because I wouldn’t be able to find a parking spot where I could leave my car for days or weeks at a time.  Most of the parking around my building had a 2-hour limit during the day, but classes were to far away for me to come back and play musical cars between classes.  My only option was to drive to a farther grocery store every other Sunday, when I knew parking would be available when I got back.  This is when I did all my shopping at other stores too.  I would usually buy two types of fruit: strawberries or bananas to eat right away, and apples or oranges that would last into the second week.  I never even bothered with meat.  So, I was a rich, young student with a car and plenty of free time, and it was still difficult for me.  For anyone without a car, my plan would not be an option.

Anyone who says that it’s easy to make chicken breast is being naive.  It might seem convenient enough to you, but a lot of poor people simply do not have that extra time.  They often don’t have the energy either, after spending 12 hours waiting tables or scrubbing toilets.  It’s only cheaper if you think that their time and labor is worthless.

Cheese is subsidized, too, so the only parts of Cheetos not subsidized are a bit of salt and the bag they come in.

DrDick - I have talked about that issue at length before.  But even where the healthy food is available alongside unhealthy food, it’s still not priced in a way that makes the healthy food an option.  And then you get the Whole Foods issue, where healthy food is sold at a status-conscious premium for precisely this reason.
Comment #28: Jesse Taylor on 08/27 at 10:17 AM

stop right there, Jesse.  You had it when you talked about how state subsidies make bad food artificially cheaper, but now you’ve blown it with this comment.  It does indeed take more COGS to get healthy food to market.  Part of it is those subsidies, part of it is that as long as people buy more of that, the Sysco’s and the Walmarts will have an edge in economies of scale.  Raising heirlooms is more labor intensive than manually harvested uniform, nutritionally and taste lacking tomatoes.  There’s more loss to spoilage with heirlooms because they haven’t been treated and they aren’t bred to last as long.  Meat that is dry-aged loses 20% of it’s weight versus wet aged. It isn’t necessarily a status price, it’s a real price versus the artificially discounted externalized costs of the cheap, subsidized, value added ultra processed crap.

I keep seeing ads for Nutrasystem where they deliver prepackaged “healthy” food.  That seems like a great idea for single people, especially ones like myself who cna’t cook.  Anyone tried Nutrasystem?

Hungry Man dinners and Healthy Choice dinners are the same price, and one promises twice the calories of the other.

Not to mention the proud boast of the Hungry Man dinners, “Over 1 lb. of Food.”

Mom did not work outside the home a generation ago, so she had the time to cook meals. Two generations ago, people ate canned vegetables whose nutrition had been boiled out. The practical solution for most people is to buy frozen vegetables—they retain most of their nutrients, will not spoil unless the electricity goes out, and only take a few minutes to heat. Urban stores sell thermal bags for a few dollars that should prevent your veggies from thawing while you ride home on the bus.

The other option if you are poor is to be a poor Asian or poor Hispanic, because both have access to cheap fresh vegetables in their neighborhood. Stir frying is a fast way to prepare vegetable-laden dishes.

Dana, man, people do not necessarily consume junk food because they find it more desirable than eating healthy food.  Did you not read the post and the comments that followed?
Comment #44: SarahMC on 08/27 at 11:02 AM

Actually Sarah, much of that junk food is addictive MSG and HFCS for two (and prettier because of all the dyes) so the addict does find it more desirable.  Not to mention the fat and carb highs (yes there have been actual scientific studies done on brain effects of food additives).  THink Doritos versus say, baked in the oven tortilla chips, Cheetos versus homepopped popcorn - and yeah, you don’t need a microwave to cook the Cheetos, but if you have one, it is inconvenient because it takes all of what?  3 1/2 minutes?

Actually, I haven’t blown it.  The subsidization of the cheap goods is what’s created the hyper efficiency of their production.  Even those engineered tomatoes you talk about are incredibly expensive most of the year in most of the country.  And if you think Whole Foods doesn’t have a status markup on many items, I’ve got the entire history of capitalism to show you.

Access to healthy food is a huge problem in cities, even for people who aren’t really poor.

One of the great things about living in NYC was that there was access to healthy food at reasonable (for NYC) prices—between Fairway and the various greenmarkets and the public transit to get there, I could usually stock up for the week with quality non-perishables and then supplement with short trips to a market near work or home. But that situation is very unusual in most American cities.

That said, there are a lot of poor neighbourhoods in NYC where the options are still slim—after a hard day’s work, it’s often just easier to go to the local market with the crappy selection or, more depressingly, the over-priced bodega or corner deli or McDonalds. It would be even more depressing in a rural or exurban area without the wider shopping options and transport afforded by NYC.

Anyone who says that it’s easy to make chicken breast is being naive.  It might seem convenient enough to you, but a lot of poor people simply do not have that extra time.

That applies to people who aren’t poor, too. I can cook, and I’ve been told I’m a good cook. I know all about cooking in bulk and freezing for the week. However, I don’t want to spend my spare time doing it, since it’s not an activity I enjoy. And at least I have the luxury of that choice—I’d imagine that most poor people who do enjoy cooking good nutritious food just don’t have the time or energy to do anything they might enjoy.

I keep seeing ads for Nutrasystem where they deliver prepackaged “healthy” food.  That seems like a great idea for single people, especially ones like myself who cna’t cook.  Anyone tried Nutrasystem?

My parents have used it. It’s more of a diet product, so a lot of it isn’t particularly tasty. Also, it’s relatively expensive. You’d probably be better off going to the prepared foods section of a good supermarket and doing take-out.

Anyone who says that it’s easy to make chicken breast is being naive.  It might seem convenient enough to you, but a lot of poor people simply do not have that extra time.  They often don’t have the energy either, after spending 12 hours waiting tables or scrubbing toilets.  It’s only cheaper if you think that their time and labor is worthless.
Comment #54: catgirl on 08/27 at 11:51 AM

Sorry catgirl, butI think you may be the one dissing poor people for being dumb.  I happen to think they have the smarts to make choices when the choices are clear - that hot dog will not give you good energy, neither will the HFCS drinks.  The chx breasts will.  But so much of the knowledge has been buried under years of advertising and lobbying by the food industry (Conagra, Cargil, ADM and Monsanto) that most people do not get that knowledge.  We need to teach real food knowledge, not nutritionism in elementary schools.

>I’d prefer a much broader answer: stop subsidizing, period.  But we both know that’ll never happen.

hey so could you clarify whether or not you are tacitly admitting that there is an institutional problem and it isn’t just a question of “POORS LOVE BE FAT”

Actually, I haven’t blown it.  The subsidization of the cheap goods is what’s created the hyper efficiency of their production.  Even those engineered tomatoes you talk about are incredibly expensive most of the year in most of the country.  And if you think Whole Foods doesn’t have a status markup on many items, I’ve got the entire history of capitalism to show you.
Comment #61: Jesse Taylor on 08/27 at 12:17 PM

WhyTF would a poor person (or anyone) think that tomatoes should be available year round?  One eats tomatoes in July -September in the midwest, and canned or sauces the rest.  That’s just more willfully stupid in some cases, and innocently ignorant (as in not knowing) about farming and food seasonality for the rest.  You have no idea the number of supposedly educated, middle class folks who bitch about “where are the veggies?” when the LOCAL farmers markets open in May around here.  And then when we find a farmer who has something that actually grows in April or MAY (like greens or such) they bitch about I meant tomAAAAytoes) or peppers, not thaaat.

I’m not talking about the ultra processed stuff WF sells.  I’m talking about the fresh foods and not only Whole Foods, but even farmers market produce - the COGS are higher and unsubsidezed if they’re doing it right..

Seriously, Dana, use your brain for once in your life. When was the last time you stepped into a fast food restaurant or an auto-body shop or even a big-box retailer that was staffed exclusively by bikini models and weightlifters?

Don’t use those examples—Dana is talking about “good” white-collar jobs that involve cubicles. Of course, a visit to the corporate campuses of Google, Microsoft or Yahoo would disabuse him of his notions. And forget being tall, thin, or good-looking, during the dot-com a lot of well-paid coders didn’t even bathe or shave on a regular basis—meritocracy of a smelly sort.

The only industries where the superficial appearance of health and vitality tends to matter are those that are in the business of selling image (e.g. media industries) and those where the employees are obsessed with being big swinging dicks around the office (corporate law, finance, car sales, etc.). And even there, there are plenty of “non-beautiful people” doing the behind-the-scenes and grunt work.

Physical appearance can certainly be an advantage in getting hired or in business—no-one’s denying that, especially in the media-saturated HR Culture. But Dana, with his narrow focus on superficial appearances (bet he believes that those Fox News babes write their own material) gives it far too much weight when it comes to achieving success in one’s career.

Not to mention the proud boast of the Hungry Man dinners, “Over 1 lb. of Food.”

It’s been a long time since I even looked in that section of supermarket freezers, but wow, if that doesn’t illustrate another problem with the way most Americans eat: over-sized portions. We’re addicted to a “bigger is better” philosophy that has no real bearing on (and often works in opposition to) healthy eating.

The problem is that Americans, in general, are willfully ignorant about cooking.

All of the knowledge and cookbooks in the world help people who don’t have time to cook.  Half an hour might seem convenient to you, but that’s not the case for many poor people.  Stop acting like we’re just too lazy/ignorant to cook and realize that you are asking people to do even more work and spend even more time working.  It’s great for you if cooking often works for you.  It’s not a reasonable option for many people.

Sorry catgirl, butI think you may be the one dissing poor people for being dumb.

Honey, I never said that poor people are dumb.  I said that they are busier than you are.  It’s not that they can’t cook; it’s that they don’t have the time.  You’re as bad as McArdle, saying that poor people just need to work even harder than they already do.  They are smart enough to realize that chicken breast is healthier, but they are smart enough to realize that if they cook it, that means they will spend less time doing something else, such as sleeping.  This has nothing to do with intelligence.

<blockquote>That applies to people who aren’t poor, too. I can cook, and I’ve been told I’m a good cook. I know all about cooking in bulk and freezing for the week. However, I don’t want to spend my spare time doing it, since it’s not an activity I enjoy. And at least I have the luxury of that choice—I’d imagine that most poor people who do enjoy cooking good nutritious food just don’t have the time or energy to do anything they might enjoy.
Comment #62: Gracchus on 08/27 at 12:17 PM <blockquote>

Finally, someone whose willing to own it. Thank you, Gracchus.  And yeah, we’ve all been there, probably for a day, a week, a year.  But at some point, it becomes the same as doing laundry, or cleaning, or ... You do it because it’s required for life or health or self respect.  The difference is, we have an alternative that allows us to fake it with cooking, even though we’re seeing that the consequences are devastating.

phylosopher,

Why did you ignore Gracchus’s point that even when poor people want to cook, they often don’t have the time or energy to do it?  These people are busy, not just lazy.

Again, catgirl, read my posts.  This isn’t something confined to the poor. The problem stretches to the middle class, too.  That problem is that we see cooking as something to be outsourced.  Plain and simple, it isn’t, not to do it right.  ANd since the consequence to not doing it right can very well be your life, it’s worth working on changing that.

I mean, consider your argument, first, let’s look at the levels of income here and the various excuses: 
First, the really poor, on welfare, etc.  But wait, food stamps and senior are now accepted at many farmers markets, and the market movement is growing in many areas.  ANd sorry, but by definition, if one is unemployed one has more time.

Second, we have the working poor.  Yes, in some cases those working poor have long hours and multiple jobs.  But in other cases, they are underemployed, working one thirty hour per week job, or it;‘s a low-paying job that one does leave at the end of the day.  Yes, time can be made to cook, at least on MANY nights.

THird, we have the middle class “too busy too’s.”  Yes, soccer moms, but increasingly soccer dads.  Everyone gets sooo overscheduled, that a sit down meal doesn’t happen because all activities are crammed into increasingly longer school days.  Dinner is more often served in the car than at a table and must be non-messy as well as fast and portable.  At this level though, it is a choice that is being made.  But we shorten the truth of that choice to: “I’m too busy to cook ,” instead of “I choose to do other things than cook.”  Again, make your choice, but then fucking OWN IT.

A cup of Cheese-Its has 312 calories, a cup of lettuce has seven calories.  A rational person with little money, even if they absolutely love the leafy crap out of lettuce, is going to go for the higher-calorie food, even if it’s worse for them.

In my world, it’s a cup of trail mix and not a cup of Cheese-Its, but the equation still holds good.  I have few complaints about my life, though I’m not well-off; I live in the country and there are definite benefits to that* (as there are definite drawbacks).  Still and all, here’s a short-list of things I do without:

heat (except for water)
air conditioning
my own car

Fun as it might be for me to imagine what my life might be like if it were liveable on lettuce and sushi (thought experiments are always nifty) I can’t ignore the fact that my mode of life is a mode of life unlike the one germane to those who can have their body temperature regulated from the outside, not the inside, and who never have to walk.

(Incidentally, I love the leafy crap out of lettuce.)

*For example, not only can I get fresh food, I can get it from actual farmers’ markets, the difficulty being, as Amanda has pointed out, one of caloric intake.  Fresh fruits and veggies (I live in Western Washington and have access to those for most of the year) are phenomenally low in calories.  That’s exactly the problem.  People like McArdle live lives that are lead-pipe cinches from a physical point of view, which is why they can develop in themselves the fleshlessness which advertises that “I literally need never lift a finger” and make it pay.

Finally, someone whose willing to own it. Thank you, Gracchus.  And yeah, we’ve all been there, probably for a day, a week, a year.  But at some point, it becomes the same as doing laundry, or cleaning, or ... You do it because it’s required for life or health or self respect.

I have no problem owning it—it’s not shameful, and I somehow still manage to be alive, healthy, and maintain my self-respect. It’s just one of the things I’m able to “outsource to quality vendors” (to use corporate-speak), even though I know how to do it. The working poor usually don’t have that option, whether or not they enjoy it.

I think there’s a lot of things going into it:

- the George Orwell point that when you’re miserable, “tasty” food—the food we’ve evolved to crave precisely *because* when you’re starving, high-calorie, high-salt food is actually good for you—is a small pleasure in your misery, and it’s a lot easier to deprive yourself of such small pleasures when you have the pleasures that power and money can bring

- many uneducated people genuinely do not know how to cook healthy food

- many uneducated and perfectly well educated people who are working two jobs just to survive may *know* how to cook healthy food, but have no damn time to do it

- people in inner cities may have the time to cook healthy food but not the time or transportation to get out to a real supermarket where they could buy said food affordably

- exercise is also a component, and most people do not have physically strenuous jobs, even if they are poor—ringing up other people’s groceries doesn’t burn a lot of calories, and even a shelf stocker probably isn’t lifting *enough* weight, frequently enough, to burn many cal—so contrary to the public perception that “fat is lazy”, fat is most likely “so hard-working you have no time to exercise”

- even techniques of burning calories while doing something you have to do anyway, such as biking to work instead of driving or riding the bus, are only available to those who have enough free time to do it—if you work two jobs you probably can’t afford to have an hour long commute instead of a half hour one, and that would be if there were safe places to bicycle *and* somewhere to lock your bike at the end *and* you could afford your bike—every abled person can afford the equipment to walk, but walking is about 12 times slower than taking a car, so a five minute commute becomes an hour, and if your commute was fifteen minutes by car, walking to work becomes impossible to fit into an average person’s workday

- the government subsidies of corn make unhealthy food, processed snacks and things with high HFCS, cheaper than fruit and vegetables—you could garden for fruit and vegetables, if you have a yard, which people in cities usually don’t, and time, which poor people usually don’t

- the pressure on women, specifically, to be the food police for their families and the food preparers means that most techniques that improve the health of a family’s diet put more work specifically on mom, who already has less free time than anyone else

- meanwhile, men are pressured not to care about their health—it’s manly to eat a big grilled steak and french fries, but you’re a girly-man if you eat arugula - so the people who are taught to care about health don’t have the time, and the people who have time have been taught that if they care about their family’s health their balls will fall off—also, “helping” their wives cook for the family would also be unmanly—they should drink another beer and watch some more sports on TV while wifey cooks some Hamburger Helper because she hasn’t got time after her workday for cooking from scratch, otherwise they are not real men

I mean, it’s like a perfect storm of things that make you gain weight. But no, it’s all because these fatty fat fats don’t *want* to be rich.

Mnemeth,
Doesn’t this

<i>”You also have to have at least a little capital because this is only possible if you buy stuff at places like Sam’s Club which charge a rather large initial fee to join (and then you end up saving tons later). I can see how this can get difficult or impossible”<i>

Pretty much destroy the rest of you point?
And it aint just Sam’s Club fees, its travel costs, storage costs, etc etc

Because I don’t buy it, catgirl.  I don’t see poor food choices as symptomatic only of the poor.  It is endemic in our society.  I see no reason to think that poor folks would be any different than the rest of society if their economic status changed.

I remember a conservative friend of mine berating the nanny (of his kids) for buying a pretty dress while she was poor. Meghan would say the nanny was wise, as a good looking nanny gets better jobs.

They both show an abysmal lack of empathy, but also are complete clueless of life “on the poor side”.

Said nanny was sending money to her family, so not all of her meager salary was being spent on instant gratification such as a pretty dress or fatty food. She just felt she needed SOME of her income, no matter how small, to be spent in making her life more worth living. So a poor woman spent $80 instead of $ 19 at a Walmart drab dress. Can’t she chose to use 61 dollars to feel good about herself ? How much closer to “not poor” does $61 gets you ?

Poor people are PEOPLE. They are not machines that can be programmed to accumulate wealth in detriment to everything else in their lives. If they laugh, eat, sing, drink, it doesn’t mean they are chosing to be poor. It just means they need to have a life worth living. Like all of us humans.

Because I don’t buy it, catgirl.  I don’t see poor food choices as symptomatic only of the poor.  It is endemic in our society.  I see no reason to think that poor folks would be any different than the rest of society if their economic status changed.

phylosopher, you sound like someone who has a problem with honesty. Yes, this is American society, where we’re all overworked and have little time for the simple things in life, like cooking.

Of course poor cooking habits aren’t confined to the poor, but the stress of being poor is going to worsen the situation. Even if you’re unemployed. That is what catgirl was getting at, I don’t see how you got that she was ‘blaming the poor’ out of what she said. What she said was straightforward and honest.

That problem is that we see cooking as something to be outsourced.  Plain and simple, it isn’t, not to do it right.

If you outsource an activity, by definition you’re not doing it—period, end-stop. Judgements of right or wrong don’t come into it, except to judge the “vendor.”

Hey Gracchus, I think you hit on a point here (among your many other good ones).  “It isn’t shameful.”  (to outsource your cooking). 

I HATE cleaning.  TO quote a like-minded friend, in order to pay a houseclenaer, we would be wiling to “dig ditches, by hand, in 100 degree heat.”  However, due to finances, even though I’m working, part time ditch digging jobs aren’t available.  So, I have a choice.  I can either choose not to clean and feel ashamed should someone stop by (and I’m not talking not dusting here, I’m talking a clean sink and toilet and taking out the garbage once every few days). Or, I can MAKE time to clean.

I think this is part of the problem, between advertising and subsidies, we’ve taken the shame/guilt out of unhealthy eating. (Alara’s perfect storm)  And we’re going about it the wrong way by trying to link the shame to fatness.

where we’re all overworked and have little time for the simple things in life, like cooking.

Fucking nonsense, atheist.  If anything, in a down economy what we end up with is time, as we have hours cut, get laid off, have one partner at home, etc.  Look at the rise in cable and DTV subscriptions.  We make choices and the one we’re rejecting en masse is to cook our own food.

I think this is part of the problem, between advertising and subsidies, we’ve taken the shame/guilt out of unhealthy eating.

The problem with that idea is, there’s no real good that comes out of shaming someone who doesn’t have the options that you or I do. That’s a Republican/Libertarian thing, also known as Blaming the Victim.

Two generations ago, people ate canned vegetables whose nutrition had been boiled out. The practical solution for most people is to buy frozen vegetables—they retain most of their nutrients, will not spoil unless the electricity goes out, and only take a few minutes to heat. Urban stores sell thermal bags for a few dollars that should prevent your veggies from thawing while you ride home on the bus.

Of course, you also need a freezer at home that will actually keep the veggies frozen. None of the low-rent apartments I’ve lived in have actually had a freezer that worked properly (they were the fridges that have the little plastic-and-metal ice-box INSIDE the fridge).  Incidentally, none of the ovens in these apartments were ventilated, either, and would invariably set off the fire alarms and fill the room with smoke if you used them for more than 10-15 minutes.  The landlords really didn’t care, and they certainly weren’t going to replace perfectly good 19-year-old appliances.  Fully-operational appliances are a perk of middle-class living.

Anyway, freezerless living is a drag, because not only can you not use frozen veggies, you can’t freeze leftover portions for later consumption, either.  As a student, I got used to eating 8 servings in a row of the same healthy soup or stew (as a grad student, fortunately, I had time to sit around and cook) made with fresh veggies bought from local markets (which, again, I had leisure to do, thanks to my student lifestyle).  However, it would be practically impossible for a person working multiple minimum-wage jobs to cook this way.

THird, we have the middle class “too busy too’s.” Yes, soccer moms, but increasingly soccer dads.  Everyone gets sooo overscheduled, that a sit down meal doesn’t happen because all activities are crammed into increasingly longer school days.  Dinner is more often served in the car than at a table and must be non-messy as well as fast and portable.

Oh hey, this may end up being two posts in a row, but I noticed this after I posted, and I wanted to address it separately.

During the school year I get up at 7:30 (it’s going to shift back) in order to get my kids to school. I have four of them, two in day care, two in separate middle schools because one’s in a gifted program. I have a husband who needs to be taken to the train station because he can’t drive and I have to get to work myself.

So by 8 o’clock we all get in the car. Husband and daughter dropped off by 8:10, older son dropped off by 8:30 because these are all very short distances but they’re in a city, with city traffic, so something that objectively should take me five minutes takes twenty. Then back to drop off the little ones, that’s 8:45, then down to work. 9:15. I work my 8 hour day and get out the door at 5:30 or so. Daughter and son have gotten home from school on their own, but little ones need to be picked up from day care, so with traffic that’s 6:10. Then my husband gets home on the 6:30 train so I go pick him up. Now it is 6:40 and dinner has not been started.

Going to cook a healthy meal! A stir fry! So I defrost the meat (having had half an hour to get myself and two babies and possibly the older son ready for school in the morning, taking the meat out ahead of time was not an option.) That takes 10 minutes in my microwave on low power. Meanwhile I’m chopping up the vegetables that I bought from the farmer’s market. That takes 10-20 minutes; gotta work around my tiny kitchen and the babies that want drink, and snack, and a cartoon, and to tell me something very important about aliens. I’m chopping up the meat, too, once it’s defrosted. Now it is 7:00, at best.

Put in the rice. it will take 20 minutes to cook. Start cooking the meat. Stir fry is supposed to be quick, but the microwave never fully defrosts the meat and I am cooking for 6-7 people depending on if our housemate is home, so it will easily take that whole 20 minutes. Also, the vegetables. Gotta steam them or throw them in to fry as well.

So now it’s 7:30 and dinner is ready. I’ve been working on it for an hour. If I wanted to go to the gym, I’m out of luck—the day care closes at 8 and I can’t get there before then, because the gym with a day care is in the suburbs half an hour away. If I want to go shopping, I hope I just need to get to the Target or the grocery store, because there’s one of them five minutes from me, but everything else is half an hour away and after I eat, it will be 8 and everything closes at 9, so any errands I have to run will need to get done within half an hour. I already missed the opportunity to pick up the dry cleaning, it closed at 7. Couldn’t buy my daughter shoes, the nearby shoe store closes at 8 and we weren’t done eating our dinner until then. Did I have chores to do at home? I can’t start any of them until 8. One load of laundry takes two hours, so if I’m gonna get laundry done it’s going to be at best two loads tonight. Plus, starting at 9 babies need to be put to bed, so there’s bath and bedtime story and mom, you forgot another hug and kiss! and I need a drink, now I need a snack, I’m really hungry! and when all that’s done it might be 10.

Where am I overscheduling? Tell me, did you see soccer practice or gymnastics or anything like that in there? I saw “take everyone to school or work, go to work, come home from work, pick everyone who needs a ride up from school or work, start dinner.” I’m failing to see where any of that can be cut except “start dinner”.

We all want to be tall and thin and attractive; for some people, that’s a goal effortlessly achieved, while others have to put real work into it.

So, can someone enlighten me on what kind of ‘work’ I need to become taller?

Seriously, I’d like to take Ms. Mcardle, take her car, her fancy clothes, her maid and her personal trainer away, drop her (and her kids if she has them) in some run-down, working-class neigbourhood, give her a 60 hour a week, uncreative, repetitive job that makes her want to eat a gun on a daily basis and a monthly pittance with which to buy her food, rent, heat, clothing and childcare see how long before she starts eating food that’s baaaaaaaaaaaaaad for her and how long before she stops give a fuck about how she looks.

Phylosopher, you’ve pretty much devolved into incessant whining about how everyone but you is dumb and lazy.  There’s really no answer to that, because they only answer you’ll accept is everyone’s a fat pig who’s worse than you at life. 

For most of history, the reason that people didn’t eat unhealthy foods wasn’t shame.  It was because they couldn’t afford unhealthy foods, and they certainly couldn’t afford unhealthy foods in enough bulk to be persistently unhealthy.  In the past few decades, the production and distribution of unhealthy foods has gotten so efficient and so cheap that it’s turned the way we eat on our heads. 

Your invocation of cable is perhaps the most indicative thing you’ve said.  When you have little money, cable is actually an efficient choice for entertainment - dozens or even hundreds of options for a couple of dollars a day.  The problem that you’re refusing to face is that we have systems, subsidized by the government, which promote certain choices.  You can make alternative choices, but at a significant cost to yourself.  By making shame and guilt (but oddly, non-fatness related shame and guilt) the motivating factors, you’re seeking to impart a motivation to food choices that, absent religion and/or significant forces of cultural identity, has been largely absent from food choices for most of human history.

If you want to start a religion that doesn’t believe in the consumption of corn, go ahead.  Otherwise, you’re going to have to deal with reality.

Alara, leave the kids in random places for a few hours.  It builds character.

I need to take issue with the argument that in the olden days, poor people ate ‘healthy food.’

Poor people ate unenriched, unfortified foods, and suffered terrible nutritional deficiencies as a result: rickets, scurvy, anemia. Poor access to affordable food meant caloric intake below what is needed to sustain basic levels of health for adults, and growth and cognitive impairments for children, and contributed to infant mortality.

Poor people have always eaten badly.  It is only lately, with access to cheap but nutritionally dense foods, that they are not suffering as much as some people think they should.

Fat and poor trumps starving and poor, even if conservatives and libertarians think the poor deserve to suffer, or if faux-liberals like phylosopher think the poor are just lacking in self-respect.

Fucking nonsense, atheist.  If anything, in a down economy what we end up with is time, as we have hours cut, get laid off, have one partner at home, etc.  Look at the rise in cable and DTV subscriptions.  We make choices and the one we’re rejecting en masse is to cook our own food.

But why should that bother you, phylosopher? After all, when people make choices you don’t approve of, that only makes it easier for you to judge them as losers who have no self control. And that’s the point you’re trying to make, right? That Americans are all a bunch of lazy backsliders who don’t understand the importance of cooking the right way, and cleaning the right way, correct? You get to feel morally superior, while keeping yourself from noticing how life really is for most people. Win/win, right?

Back to those chicken breasts and the hot dogs for a moment. The hot dogs need a few minutes to cook, but even more important, you can do something else during the cooking time. Most of the cooking time for something like chicken breasts is time that you have to be paying attention to the food. (Other real foods are a bit less that way, but still attention-consuming compared to the crap stuff.) So-called leisure time—the time during which you decompress, sleep, and get ready for the next day of work—is worth $10-20 an hour according to economists that follow such things. So for every six minutes you spend at the prep and cooking (oh, and the eating too, because most quality foods are harder to just wolf down) add a buck to the price.

And remember, it’s not just time, it’s energy. On the days that the kids aren’t in daycare, we usually eat at least one meal out/prepared junk/freezer food because 12 hours of being “on” for young offspring simply doesn’t leave the energy and concentration for cooking right. And we have it easy.

I should add that by ‘nutritionally dense’ I mean dense in calories, minerals and vitamins.

The money angle can really not be underestimated here. Just as an example: I live in the Northeast, and I usually go to the supermarket about once a week. What do I buy there? Vegetables (usually lettuce, tomatoes, onions, cucumbers, sometimes the odd avocado), fruits (mostly apples, pears, blueberries and sometimes cherries), meat (usually chicken, as well as sliced meat for sandwiches), milk, eggs, cereal, bread, cheese. Basic, basic things. And yet, it’s not that rare for me to walk away having spent about $100 on my food. Now, I’m in a position of privilege where I can afford to do that if I need to; I have a car, time after work, I don’t have a family to care for, and I can cook for myself when I come home. But when you start adding up other commitments (like Alara was doing a few posts above), it becomes pretty clear how the intersection of the time and cost space makes it very prohibitive for many people to eat healthy food. The sad thing is that we incentivize unhealthy eating through many direct and indirect measures, and then people like McArdle have the temerity to blame people for being subjected to that system.

The problem with that idea is, there’s no real good that comes out of shaming someone who doesn’t have the options that you or I do. That’s a Republican/Libertarian thing, also known as Blaming the Victim.
Comment #82: Gracchus on 08/27 at 01:19 PM

Gracchus, I have every bit of sympathy for those in food deserts, and those who are working poor at multiple jobs.  That’s why I work to build and participate in those programs that alleviate such things, like the WIC program that was in the Sun Times (there has been one around called EFNEP since the 1970’s in my state.)

What I’m pointing out is that the idea of being able to cook and cook well is no longer a matter of pride, but that the opposite, the inability to do so is now something to almost aspire to.  It is symptomatic of our times and our culture.  My neighbor, on buying a lawn tractor proudly claimed” that’s the last time I’ll walk across this yard!”  The man is a poster child for obesity and major health problems at well over 300# and a smoker.  He will probably get his wish as in the next few years he may well become incapable of walking said yard

We also willfully incapacitate our kids.  There was a time when tying one’s own shoes was a right of passage.  But now I hear the same type of bs from kids - I don’t HAVE to tie my own shoes, I’ve got velcro. 

The same with carrying stuff, walking places, lifting and COOKING.  It is willful incapacitation through laziness.  And we’re setting ourselves up for tragedy when the energy to run the technology, or the technology itself fails- like the health problems we’re experiencing with fast food.

We also willfully incapacitate our kids.  There was a time when tying one’s own shoes was a right of passage.  But now I hear the same type of bs from kids - I don’t HAVE to tie my own shoes, I’ve got velcro.

Is it 1987?

leave the kids in random places

Damn right. “It takes a village,” so let the village participate in raising your child.

So now it’s 7:30 and dinner is ready.

Yep, I can’t see getting dinner on the table in less than an hour. If you were supremely organized, under ideal conditions, you could maybe shave fifteen minutes off that, at best.

they were the fridges that have the little plastic-and-metal ice-box INSIDE the fridge). 

That worked for Grandma, but she could rely on Grandpa to get it repaired or replaced if necessary.

V.: I didn’t mean to imply that poor people ate better in the past.  Sorry about that.

the WIC program that was in the Sun Times

WIC, whoopty-do. The only animal protein in the WIC program is eggs. The only other protein is dried beans—which requires long cooking to prepare.

@jefft452
no, the fact that you need about $120 sitting around just to enter a Sam’s Club is my point.

I’m simply speculating on how i eat healthy and cheap and i immediately come up with absolutely legitimate reasons why poor people can’t do what i do.

And $120/mo for food, if i had 3 kids? That quickly becomes not cheap.

And then, as people mention, theres the whole TIME factor. I have very little time as a college student (@ Gaveldown what college did you go to?? free time? whats that?) since i spend about 30 hours in class and 30 hours outside of class on homework alone, and then theres my job… assuming no huge ongoing coding projects, and then theres travel, food prep and cleaning, so no, I don’t have much extra time. But i can cut out sleep sometimes, i’m young and healthy, i don’t have any kids, and my job and hw is all thinking stuff so sometimes i like to actually DO something which could be cooking. And yeah i’d estimate about 10 hours for shopping, bagging and freezing, and cooking which if you work 60+ hours a week is not something you want to do when you get back.

I keep seeing ads for Nutrasystem where they deliver prepackaged “healthy” food.  That seems like a great idea for single people, especially ones like myself who cna’t cook.  Anyone tried Nutrasystem?

You still have to provide your own fruits, vegetables, milk, and bread, so it doesn’t keep you from shopping.  And you eat a *lot* of fruits and vegetables on it.

It did work great for my husband when he got his diabetes diagnosis to recalibrate his eating habits to keep his blood sugar more stable and to get him over the “what the hell can I eat” hurdle, but that only took a couple of months.  It definitely didn’t make preparing meals easier, though.

Jesse-

I agree completely with you about the relative pricing of healthy vs. healthy food, which was implicit in my statement that it is expensive to eat healthy.  I guess I should have been clearer there.  I was merely amplifying your statements by pointing out the logistical difficulties poor people face in even trying to eat healthy.

Alara, you yourself admitted that you didn’t take out the meat (yeah we all do that sometimes).  But do you do that everyday?  ANd where was hubby dear - he can’t get the kid some juice?  entertain them, give them a bath (if you think you must, every day).

I think you’re being quite disingenuous here.  Your daughter doesn’t need shoes daily.  You don’t forget to defrost, daily.   

You’re also not allowing for major differences in lifestyles/geography.  I pointed out suburban ones.  You are obviously talking about city life.  There are tradeoffs and differences with each.  Laundry for a city/aparmtment dweller with a shared or laundromat routine may well take two hours.  Laundry for anyone with a private machine takes minutes of actual attention. 

Perhaps you live in a high crime neighborhood, but anything that takes ten minutes to drive is pretty walkable, too.  Unless hubby has a disability…in which case, your situation isn’t typical, so stop trying to act like it is..

Shorter Phylosopher: “Your actual living situation means nothing to me, because theoretically you should be able to spontaneously generate steamed broccoli and lemon pepper chicken from your thoughts, like me.”

And ten minutes’ driving time at 25 MPH is about 4.2 miles.  Round trip, it’s 8.4 miles.  If you walk briskly (about four miles an hour), you’re walking for two hours.  But of course, if you’re walking for two hours a day, you wouldn’t have time to cook, so…

What I’m pointing out is that the idea of being able to cook and cook well is no longer a matter of pride, but that the opposite, the inability to do so is now something to almost aspire to.  It is symptomatic of our times and our culture.  My neighbor, on buying a lawn tractor proudly claimed” that’s the last time I’ll walk across this yard!”

Not only that, I hear there’s these new fangled contraptions called ‘cars’, which move people to and from their work. Personally I don’t trust these ‘cars’. Don’t people understand it would be so much more healthy to walk to work and then walk home? I’m afraid we will soon lose our ability to walk ten miles in a day, as I do every day! Why are people so lazy?

Laundry for anyone with a private machine takes minutes of actual attention. 

Here is my pet peeve: The washer does not make a sound when it stops, so unless I sit and stare at it, I never get to take the clothes out as soon as they are done. Why not? Driers do.

anything that takes ten minutes to drive is pretty walkable, too

Really? I drive around my neighborhood at an average speed of 20 mph. Thus, in ten minutes, I cover 3.3 miles. Round trip that would be 6.7 miles, meaning over two hours of quite brisk walking.  That’s not what I would consider “walkable.”

What I’m pointing out is that the idea of being able to cook and cook well is no longer a matter of pride, but that the opposite, the inability to do so is now something to almost aspire to.

I certainly don’t see that, even in the popular culture—they’ve had cooking shows of a sort on prime-time network television, the lowest common denominator of media. There are 24-7 cable channels devoted to the subject, and whole sections of bookstores and magazine racks concerned with food and cooking.

And honestly, I see nothing wrong with someone who doesn’t enjoy an activity outsourcing it if he can. If there are unhealthy consequences to that choice, that’s (mostly) his problem to deal with.

McArdle and her Hollywood correspondent and Dana aren’t slagging people with choices and options like your neighbour, though. They’re insisting that poor people eat crappy food because of character flaws and laziness, and I’m afraid you’re stereotyping Americans in general in the same way. You’re not wrong about the consequences, but you’re blaming the victim (albeit a lesser victim like your neighbour) in the same way McArdle does.

In a way, you remind me of James Howard Kunstler, who starts out making reasonable points about sustainability and the limitations of natural resources but always ends up doing things like romanticising post-apocalyptic manorialism, rhapsodising over the hair-shirt peasant life, and veering off into “get off my lawn” crankiness about kids today.

Gee Jesse, I think I was the one that bitched about HFCS and subsidies and externalized costs- nice of you to ignore that.  Also nice of you not to notice that I’m not claiming a better than thou because I do all this, all the time.  There are days when I forget to defrost, or pick up the ingredient, or I just don’t wanna cook and gee kids, how about a bowl of popcorn in front of a movie I have to watch for a class?  But somewhere along the line, if I do that too often, yeah I feel a bit guilty as a person and as a parent.  Part of it is having some knowledge, and having good food experiences and some cooking skills.

What I’m trying to get is that while McArdle associates food choices with poor folks do this and that’s what makes them poor, I’ve been trying to show that this isn’t a poor folks thing, it is rather endemic to our society. 

People want ease and easier.  We might find that evolutionarily it served a purpose (the less you did, the less calories you needed, the fewer dangerous hunts you had to go on).  Religion at one point served (and still serves for the McArdles) to make sloth (leisure) a sin to feel guilt over.  The religion part is bullshit, IMO.  But I do think we need that guilt/desire to be better whether that’s healthier or whatever in order to persevere in those endeavors.  I don’t think there is anything wrong with having that guilt on a personal or communal basis.  Realizing a personal responsibility, if you like. 

I’d also like to point out that I speak from a should implies can POV.  So those who really can’t, can’t.  But in the examples I see, it is choice, not inability.

I think you’re being quite disingenuous here.  Your daughter doesn’t need shoes daily.  You don’t forget to defrost, daily.

If there are 4 children in the household, there will always, ALWAYS be something, be it an extra item that needs doing/fixing/discussing, or some incident that prevents you from getting regular stuff done.

Also, small children do not walk 4 miles/hour, except when you need them to sit still.  If you need to take children anywhere with you, a better figure is approx. 0.5 miles/hour.  Of course, you could use a stroller, but that would incapacitate them.

It’s another relatively non-controversial sociological phenomenon is that people who can afford to eat non-shitty food at every meal almost never eat shitty food.
People who have more money still overwhelmingly eat unhealthy, i think phylosopher is right about that

Every day about one quarter of the U.S. population eats fast food.
40 percent of American meals are eaten outside the home
So no, its not just the people who can’t afford to eat better. It is everyone.

http://www.vivavegie.org/101book/text/nolink/social/supersizeme.htm (same facts are substantiated on other websites)

Oh yeah and then theres this which i found surprising
More individuals with high incomes (65 percent) eat away from home compared to low-income individuals (45 percent). - http://www.ars.usda.gov/IS/pr/1996/eatout1196.htm

dunno why the text warped, sorry.

oh, phylosopher. You are claiming better than thou.  According to your repeated (and really self-righteously ugly) comments, people who claim they can’t, at least on this thread, really CAN.

They just don’t want to. They don’t have the morality that you do, feeling all guilty as a parent and a person if they give their kids popcorn or something.

If they are not immoral, then according to you, they are lazy. Or lack cooking skill.

I’m not saying that you don’t, in fact, know a subset of immoral, lazy, lawn-mower-riding suburbanites.

It’s just that that isn’t the majority experience.

And you claiming that your experience is or should be the experience of others, reeks of a certain privilege that is not shared by most.

You need to own it.

It’s also important to note that when you have children, the idea of a “meal” becomes less flexible. If my husband and I are dog-tired at the end of the day (and believe me, I’ve got it cushy working from home and shit), we can just make a big salad and then sit down on the couch with a couple of forks and go through the salad bowl. You can’t do that with kids, you’ve got to make sure that there’s protein and starches and vegetables not to mention Suzie hates mushrooms and Tyler won’t eat any food that’s touching the other food on his plate.

Maybe y’all should just eat your children. Then you can do the salad bowl on the couch thing more often.

@Dan, Grand whatever…
I suppose website context would have been called for. It was talking about fast food. (did you even glance at the link before calling me a moron? of course not, then you’d have to get off your pedestal) The point was just that rich people eat fast food the same as poor people, so while phylosopher may be wrong about the motivations and needs of the poor, he may be right that rich people are just doing it because they’re lazy. Or maybe they’re eating fast good because the reason they’re rich is that they work more than 40 hours at their posh jobs. In my experience, its about 50 50.

Oh yeah and then theres this which i found surprising
More individuals with high incomes (65 percent) eat away from home compared to low-income individuals (45 percent).

They’re not eating at Mickey Ds, though.  Haute cuisine may contain a lot of butter, but it’s all real food and generally in reasonable portions.  Eating out doesn’t always mean eating unhealthfully.

@mnemeth:

I read your USDA link.  Apparently, you didn’t.

It’s a typical ‘science as press release’ link, reporting a few summarized facts from a gigantic study.  However, from what I could glean, the operational definition of ‘eating out’ at a fast food restaurant for this study is AT LEAST ONE FOOD OR BEVERAGE.

That could include a cup of joe from Dunkin’Donuts in the Am (oh no! Fast food!) as well as a supersized Big Mac meal.

There is no way, without reading the entire study, to prove or disprove much of anything from that link.

Not to mention that third link says nothing about the study only being fast food, or that rich people were eating fast food too.  It just said the most common items were burgers, fries, etc.  There are a ton more poor people than rich people.  Just because the most common foods eaten were fast food, and the rich people eat out more than poor people, doesn’t mean they’re eating fast food.

I need to take issue with the argument that in the olden days, poor people ate ‘healthy food.’

Poor people ate unenriched, unfortified foods, and suffered terrible nutritional deficiencies as a result: rickets, scurvy, anemia. Poor access to affordable food meant caloric intake below what is needed to sustain basic levels of health for adults, and growth and cognitive impairments for children, and contributed to infant mortality.

Correct!

In 19th century England, one of the leading causes of infant death amongst the masses of urban poor, who worked horrendous hours under horrendous conditions, lived in slum housing and had access to a limited variety of poor-quality foods , was Marasmus. That’s starvation to me and you. Not enough protein in the diet to sustain life. The infant mortality rate amongst farm labourers was much lower, similiar to middle-people, due to both environmental and dietary factors.

The biggest single predictor in health outcomes in the UK and the USA is still social class. Plus de change, etc.

^That should read ‘middle-class people’ not ‘middle-people’. Argh.

Or maybe they’re eating fast good because the reason they’re rich is that they work more than 40 hours at their posh jobs.

Also, to anyone who has any knowledge of the lives of the poor (and hell, I’m wealthy as fuck but I still found time to thumb through “Nickel and Dimed”) this is a really repellent, obnoxious statement, as well as being utterly false.

I work full time at a law firm and go to school at night.  Easily 70 hours a week.  And I know for a fact that my house cleaner works a hell of a lot harder than I do.

V88: Unenriched, unfortified?  Foods needed to be enriched only when processing stepped in to deconstruct food.  Vitamin A & D added to milk?  Body manufactures with sufficient sunlight.  Slum kids and working at age 8 kids needed it.  It is in milk and meat from animals raised outside CAFO’s.  White bread?  as we know, lacking fiber.  Way back when, it was a sign of wealth to eat white bread.  But the old bakers saying “the whiter the bread, the sooner you’re dead” still holds.  Thanks, the peasants and I will eat our bread very brown indeed. 

Again, there needs to be a distinction made between urban poor and rural poor.  Rural and suburban poor who live the farm(ish) lifestyle actually eat better and healthier then urban and suburban rich.

I suppose website context would have been called for. It was talking about fast food.

Actually, the stat you cite from the link doesn’t specify fast food.

Elsewhere, they divide dining out into fast food (32%), sit-down restaurants (27%), and grocery and convenience stores (24%). I’d expect that a breakdown for high income people would skew more heavily to pricier sit-down restaurants and up-scale grocery stores like Whole Foods.

The may be right that rich people are just doing it because they’re lazy. Or maybe they’re eating fast good because the reason they’re rich is that they work more than 40 hours at their posh jobs. In my experience, its about 50 50.

Or maybe they don’t enjoy cooking (shocking, I know). That isn’t the same thing as being lazy or uneducated about food. That’s not to say that some people aren’t lazy, but 50-50 is another stat you might want to think twice about defending.

You make a good point about those who work long hours to make the big bucks, but the older workers in those positions usually demand quality order-in or upscale in-house cafeterias if the company isn’t self-interested enough to see the benefits itself. Younger workers can be bought off with Domino’s and Jolt.

Comment #17: Dana  on  08/27  at  09:47 AM
A strange example, given that being taller is seen as more attractive

Dana misses the sarcasm completely.

We all want to be tall and thin

No we don’t. I (and many others) find thinness, or excessive thinness, disgusting. This doesn’t mean that being morbidly obese is overweight, but if I can see your ribcage, I really don’t want to see any other part of you. Your stereotypes are your own hangups, not inherent in our species.

Comment #26: phylosopher  on  08/27  at  10:11 AM
Many folks will eat a hot dog “raw”. . . or microwavable in a minute with no dirty dishes. Your additional cost factor doesn’t fly here, as most of us would require hot dog buns.

Wrong. Hot dogs can be eaten alone are more palatable than chicken breasts eaten alone, and acoutroments for hot dogs (the buns, or even just plain bread) are cheaper than those for chicken (bread + chicken makes for a dry, unappealing sandwich; something more is needed).

The fact is chx breasts are easy to cook

They take longer to cook than hot dogs; you just said hot dogs were pre-cooked. You are inconsistent.

Neighborhood gardens and co-ops are phenomenon seen mostly on the west coast. I’ve been in states where no one I met had even heard of them.

Thanks, the peasants and I will eat our bread very brown indeed.

You wouldn’t be from Yorkshire, would you?

Brown bread can be a lovely thing, but it’s not some sign of moral purity or superiority, any more than liking the taste of white bread makes one Marie Antoinette. And you’re certainly not going to convince America’s actual peasants and proles to make the switch on that basis. Education that respects their circumstances works better than shaming with this sort of thing.

The page i linked to said this:
“These figures are averages,” Borrud said. “The percent of calories obtained from food eaten away from home ranges from a single diet soda or cup of coffee to three full meals.” In fact, the most popular foods eaten away from home were beverages—sodas, coffee and milk. Other popular foods are lettuce salads, sandwiches—especially burgers with or without cheese—and french fries.

and this:
Borrud said Americans selected foods that are, on average, slightly higher in fat and cholesterol and slightly lower in other nutrients than foods eaten at home.

So the study was about how eating out is bad and how rich people eat out too! It doesn’t make me a liar, even if the study included coffee. I posted the website and said exactly what the website said. If you think the website is making a huge deal out of people buying a cup of joe, keep in mind that according to Dunkin Donut’s website one small cup of coffee with just cream is already at 20% of your daily value of saturated fat. And from working at a fast food restaurant myself, most people order medium with cream and sugar. Fast food isn’t just burgers and fries, its anything you consume that is fast and (with the added social context) unhealthy. Carrot sticks are fast, but not really considered ‘fast food’ in this societal context, so the study seems to have recorded everything from coffee to full scale applebees take out meals.

I’m gunna have to go out on a limb here and say that even if all you bought was a dunkin donuts frapachino it probably easily gave you over 400 calories or the person thought it constituted a meal. And thats fast food too.

You also seem to be implying that when rich people eat out, they eat good stuff so it doesn’t really matter that they don’t eat at home and i’m stuck trying to find a restaurant that doesn’t load their food with extra fat and High Fructose Corn Syrup to make it taste better. So whether they go to McDonalds or they go to Applebees during their worklunch and their boss pays for it, they’re really eating the same crap.

Their real argument—despicable as it is—is that poor people don’t deserve to have pleasure. And the reason they believe this is because the only way they can tolerate their empty—but affluent—lives is to view wealth as a moral good and poverty as a moral failure.

To which this is the answer.

So whether they go to McDonalds or they go to Applebees during their worklunch and their boss pays for it, they’re really eating the same crap.

You’re still way, way too low on the income scale.  Think www.seldelaterre.com

McCardle is a charlatan.

You also seem to be implying that when rich people eat out, they eat good stuff so it doesn’t really matter that they don’t eat at home

I’m not implying, i’m STATING it.  Rich people eating out and poor people eating out are NOTHING alike, and since the study didn’t break down by income category who ate what it is USELESS for your point that rich people eat crap too.

You also seem to be implying that when rich people eat out, they eat good stuff so it doesn’t really matter that they don’t eat at home and i’m stuck trying to find a restaurant that doesn’t load their food with extra fat and High Fructose Corn Syrup to make it taste better.

Wealthy people have more ways to opt out of that situation if they’re aware of it. If the senior associates at the corporate law firm are going out to lunch on the boss’s dime, it won’t be to Applebees. That’s not to say that the choices will be particularly healthy, but there’s a difference in ingredient quality and even prep between Tad’s Steakhouse (10 steaks for $5) and Smith & Wollensky.

And yeah, wealthy people who aren’t aware of what they eat will often eat junk food, too. If they like it and their plumbing can handle it, that’s their (un-informed) choice. Shaming them isn’t going to help them, either.

But why should that bother you, phylosopher? After all, when people make choices you don’t approve of, that only makes it easier for you to judge them as losers who have no self control. And that’s the point you’re trying to make, right? That Americans are all a bunch of lazy backsliders who don’t understand the importance of cooking the right way, and cleaning the right way, correct? You get to feel morally superior, while keeping yourself from noticing how life really is for most people. Win/win, right?
Comment #89: atheist on 08/27 at 02:05 PM

Wrong again, atheist.  I think there are people who live in food deserts who deserve some help and attention in changing that situation.  I also acknowledge that there are working poor who work multiple jobs to make ends meet and are very short on time.

But unless you are totally an idiot, you also have to acknowledge that there are those who have been “downsized, furloughed, temporarily laid off, etc.”  Let’s call them those who have involuntarily traded money for time.  Those who have cooking skills are definitely better off than those who don’t in that situation.

So this idea that every poor person CAN’T possibly cook is extremist bs.

I actually was going to point out that driving is about 12 times faster than walking, so unless a drive is 5 minutes, it is not walkable unless you have a great deal of free time.

My daughter has walked home from school. It’s two miles. Takes her an hour and a half. Her school is right near the train station. My husband, who is much taller than my daughter and experienced with walking, could probably make that trip in forty-five minutes, walking. But… our car does it in five to ten minutes depending on the traffic lights, and all of us are *already* short on free time. So we can’t really work “walking long distances” into the time budget. Now, my husband would like to be able to bike to the train station, but they don’t have bike lockers, so he’s got nowhere he could safely stash his bike once he gets there. He’s talking about getting a folding bike so he could take it with him, and that would improve his ability to get around in DC once he gets there, too, so he could more reliably make the early train home. But… think about this. A guy who works in a corporate office and makes a six figure salary wants to *carry* a *bicycle*, folded, on a train. He has to do this because he’s legally blind and not permitted to drive. How many other people, given the option to drive, *could* take the train and the folding bike instead, but won’t because *it’s really goddamn inconvenient for everybody*? I mean, we don’t even know how much it’ll cost, and how is he going to bring it on a train that’s crowded, and isn’t that heavy to carry and will it throw out his back… and my husband’s thirty-five and his only disability is in his eyeballs. Older people and people with walking disabilities and women like me who are healthy but tiny and have no upper body strength to speak of couldn’t, realistically, carry a bicycle. Even a folding one.

Bike lockers at the train stations could solve this problem. But we don’t have any.

When I was young and single, I walked a mile nearly every day, for fun, because it helped me think. I don’t have *time* to do that. The burden on anyone with kids, other dependents such as elderly parents who require care, or a job that takes more than 40 hours a week is such that there’s just no time to work exercise into the workday. And the less exercise you get, the more tired you are when you do exercise, so the slower you can go, so the more you want to put that work off on a device because you don’t have time and it hurts. I drive to the drugstore on the corner nowadays. I’m ashamed of that; I can walk that distance and back easily within half an hour. But I don’t *have* half an hour to leave my kids at home and dinner unmade and go get something at the drug store, so I drive it, get there in two minutes, buy my stuff and get back in two more. And, I admit, I have gotten so out of shape that the walk up the hill would exhaust me.

Everything about the design of our society is set up to maximize being overweight and out of shape. We have little public transportation, pressure from work to work more and longer hours, workplaces that have moved out into the suburbs so even if *we* don’t live in the suburbs we still have to drive in them, but the hub and spoke design of the roads and the public transportation aren’t designed to handle that, unhealthy food being marketed to us because it’s convenient and tasty, bad options for food shopping in cities, inability to get anywhere in suburbs without a car…

Any one person who can overcome all that and still manage to exercise frequently and eat properly is doing well, and good for them, but do *not* blame the majority of people for being unable to overcome *all* the societal hurdles in their way. The exceptionally lucky and the exceptionally talented should never be treated as the average we should all be expected to hit. We need systemic solutions, not “everyone should just learn to cook!”

Let’s call them those who have involuntarily traded money for time.

Those people will learn on their own eventually.  But I suppose free cooking classes for the laid off would be a good idea.  Hell, i’d throw some money towards making that happen.

Gracchus, Gracchus, how do you think the “taste” for white bread started? It was a class thing, then a class envy thing, then a capitalist thing.

Really, education alone isn’t going to win any food wars, not when we have the likes of major marketing and child psychologists advising the McD’s and BK’s.  The flip side of shaming is taking pride in a skill.  I think that is a good thing and something we can agree on to encourage.  Which is why I think that the WIC cooking program is wonderful.  It alleviates a legitimate reason people don’t cook.  But just a sort of carte blanche excuse for eating a whopper a night does no one any favors.

I am cracking up at the implication that Applebees is where rich people eat.

SarahMC, especially if you house that implication as voiced by Cletus or Brandene from the Simpsons.

Wrong, Hector B.  WIC also gives coupons for cheese, dairy and tuna.  It has recently been expanded to fresh fruits and veggies.  SHoudl it also include good quality animal protein, absolutely. 

Time to cook dried beans - yes, but that isn’t labor intensive attention needing cooking.  If you’re home anyway, enjoying that cost efficient cable that Jesse touted,  a football game or a movie will give you that time.  It’s also the trap (and now I’m rehashing posts from a previous thread) that all dinners need to be cooked fresh the evening they are served - Alara used an example of this.

It really takes a mental switch to think to cooking for tomorrow, today, if you see cooking as an arduous chore to be avoided until absolutely necessary.    In other words, if I go to McD’s tonight or order a pizza or whatever, then I can put on beans for tomorrow night’s supper when I get home.  The same with lots of soups and stews.  Come home tomorrow and reheat, just like a .... Hungry Man dinner.

Gavel down:

Free cooking classes for the laid off?  How about free FOOD for the laid off?

Phylosopher: ‘excuse’ for eating a whopper? There you go again, equating food and morality.

And I’m so glad you feel able to arbitrate what are and are not the ‘legitimate’ reasons for not cooking.

We all know your choices are the best, right?

If healthy eating means your kind of self-righteous, moralistic foodism, I’ll happily ingest a Big Mac every night.

Gracchus, Gracchus, how do you think the “taste” for white bread started?

Not only do I know how the aspirational taste for white bread started among the Third Estate, I know when: in the 17th and 18th centuries. If you have a time machine, feel free to go back and change the taste for “cake”—otherwise, accept that it morphed into Wonder Bread generations ago, and hasn’t had aristocratic connotations for a very long time before that. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Really, education alone isn’t going to win any food wars, not when we have the likes of major marketing and child psychologists advising the McD’s and BK’s.

I agree it’s a battle, but it’s one between the phony-baloney “education” you describe and reality-based education. But shaming? Well…

The flip side of shaming is taking pride in a skill.

Fine, then focus on the benefits of learning a skill, without all the self-righteous, McArdle-style (and Kunstler-style) judgments about character and morality.

Well gee, Jesse, if you want to get that anal about it, it’s actually 4.16 miles.  And most really urban areas also have buses, other commuters in same ...
I find it highly amusing, at this point, that Alara gives a very “particular to her situation” and because it agrees with your argument you embrace her as a representative everywoman.  On the other hand, my examples get dismissed and I get name called. Biased much?

Where are the other feminists asking the same question I did, which remains unanswered - where is the chauffered home, non-driving hubby in all this?  Why is the woman, Alara, solely the one responsible for cooking, childcare and laundry?

The “older” kids are old enough to have “got themselves home?”  Excuse me, but they couldn’t defrost the meat in the microwave like Alara did?  Chopped up some veggies while she went to pick up hubby? Sorted some laundry? 

Sorry, but this is like the sob story of an exec who refuses to delegate any responsibility or opportunity, then complains that s/he has to stay late while everyone else goes home.

I feel about the concept of educating people how to cook in order to combat unhealthy living the way I felt about HSA’s and high-deductible insurance. It’s a good idea, it’s one tiny piece of a solution that would need to be much larger, and it’s problematic only because it can be sold by people who really can’t comprehend the challenges that others face as “the” solution. It’s kind of like stitching up a gash in the arm of a person with cancer. Great, now their arm won’t fester and become infected, but you really haven’t helped the cancer any.

So yeah. I’m all for teaching people how to cook. Especially if the emphasis is on quick healthy food, not on boutique living like a significant number of the cookbooks I inherited from my mom are trying to sell me on. Hey, if I knew what spices to add to my hamburger meat that if I pour it over noodles it’ll taste like Hamburger Helper, except yummier, I could totally go for that. But it can’t be the only solution, it can’t be the preferred solution, and it can’t be presented as the “solution that everyone who is a decent, intelligent person needs, and anyone who needs more is probably dumb or lazy.” Which is exactly where we end up when we argue that poor people *could* cook more, or that middle class people *could* cook more, they just don’t wanna. (or when we argue that vegan living is so *easy*, you just have to learn how to cook right and it’s just so *easy* anyone could do it and anyone who thinks that no, in fact, it’s kind of hard is dumb or lazy. or when we argue that buying organic is so *easy*. yadda yadda. We on the left are not immune to this bullshit either. Anything we find simple to do is easy and if you can’t do it you must be dumb or lazy.)

Frosted Yummi-Os are part of this balanced, nutritious breakfast that has to also include eggs, milk, bacon, orange juice, toast and fruit… and teaching people to cook is part of this balanced, nutritious approach to better health for Americans that involves *so* many other parts it’s almost trivial in and of itself. I mean, yeah, do it. There’s certainly people it can help. But until we have public transportation everywhere, and supermarkets for poor people in inner cities that don’t act like all their customers are automatically thieves and actually carry decent produce, and bike lockers at all the train stations and bike lanes on all the city streets and suburban roads, and the return of grocery delivery services, and a living wage on one job, and the end of corn subsidies, and subsidies for fruits and vegetables and beans instead, and convenience foods that manage to actually not be utterly horrible for us sold at fast food chains, and so on and so forth… don’t expect miracles from just that piece.

Again, there needs to be a distinction made between urban poor and rural poor.  Rural and suburban poor who live the farm(ish) lifestyle actually eat better and healthier then urban and suburban rich.

Once again you display a basic and profound ignorance of the real world.  My mother grew up rural poor (hillbilly) in the Missouri Ozarks.  She and her siblings suffered from chronic malnutrition throughout their childhoods.  She used to talk about how often all they had to eat was “thin gravy” (melted lard) and biscuits.  Take a look at some photographs of Southern sharecroppers from the first half of the 20th century.  They all suffer from profound dietary deficiencies and malnutrition.  Most of what they grew had to be sold or, in the case of sharecroppers, given to the landlord (normally 60% or more of the harvest).  Life for the poor, including the rural poor, has never been anything resembling bucolic or healthy.

And honestly, I see nothing wrong with someone who doesn’t enjoy an activity outsourcing it if he can. If there are unhealthy consequences to that choice, that’s (mostly) his problem to deal with.

Gracchus, if someone is outsourcing to healthy choices i.e. good restaurants, a personal chef, yeah!  Yeah, I don’t care who cooks your food.  But if we’re talking fast food and Cheetos or other long term health care need causing sources -then yes, those of us who will pay for it whether in a public health option or the current system - have both a responsibility to see that everyone has good food available and the means to turn it into meals, as well as the right to question self-destructive choices.

Hey V, if you’ve got the time to post on a blog, at home or at work, you aren’t exactly breathlessly chained to a machine, ya know?

Considering I’ve said little (one example) about my daily cooking and eating habits, not sure where you’re getting this (bad reading skills?)

Mnemeth,

” no, the fact that you need about $120 sitting around just to enter a Sam’s Club is my point.”

Sorry, misunderstood you
Thought your point was that poor people never learned things like budgeting or how to take advantage of sales

Probably because you said this
”but its really a way of thinking about things that I imagine many poor people never learned. I don’t mean that in an insulting way, I mean that if they were in poverty their whole lives perhaps they never learned things like budgeting or how to take advantage of sales…. If no one else used it or talked about it, how would they even know that that stuff exists?”

Gracchus here’s the pop version of the cooking habit studies I mentioned:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/magazine/02cooking-t.html?_r=2

with the passing of Julia Child, there have been lots of articles/shows, etc discussing exactly this phenomenon.

Np, phylosopher, once again you misunderstand.

I was expressing my utter revulsion with your privileged POV, not making a personal claim of poverty.

And thanks for making the cell-phone argument, yet again.  Or is it the expensive athletic shoe argument?

Whatevs. Clearly, those poor people just don’t know how to manage their money/time/choices as well as you.

Thought your point was that poor people never learned things like budgeting or how to take advantage of sales

Probably because you said this
”but its really a way of thinking about things that I imagine many poor people never learned. I don’t mean that in an insulting way, I mean that if they were in poverty their whole lives perhaps they never learned things like budgeting or how to take advantage of sales…. If no one else used it or talked about it, how would they even know that that stuff exists?”

IME, this notion that poor people on average don’t know how to budget or know how to take advantage of coupons and sales is 100% complete bullshit.  If anything, poor/working/lower-middle class people tend to be pros at that mainly because that’s the only way they can subsist on the limited incomes they earn from working their 2+ jobs. 

On the other hand, the ones who tend to not know how to budget or know how to take advantage of coupons and sales IME tend to be overwhelmingly from upper/upper-middle class backgrounds because they’re so used to getting what they wanted as kids that they had a hard time differentiating “needs” from “wants”. 

Spent hours having to explain to such classmates and co-workers those differences because their lack of knowledge in this area was causing them to dig themselves deep financial holes to the tune of several tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars…..

Late to the party but eh, what’s with ragging on the chicken?  When I lived alone and on the cheap I did a lot of “bachelor chicken” - buy family package of chicken on sale, repackage in small portions; pull one portion of chicken from freezer, season with whatever’s to hand, wrap in aluminum foil and shove in toaster oven (still frozen) for about 45 minutes; when cooked through, eat with fingers from foil package then chuck the bones and recycle the foil.

This obviously won’t work for *everybody* any more than “walk more” or “eat more green veg” or “grow your own” or whatever the universal solution of the week is.  There aren’t really any universal solutions and I think we all know this on a deep level - the trick is figuring out which of the available solutions are applicable to a given person’s situation.  And that does take thinkin’ time which is often in short supply.

Gracchus, if someone is outsourcing to healthy choices i.e. good restaurants, a personal chef, yeah!  Yeah, I don’t care who cooks your food.

I can outsource to healthy choices (not always, but I try) because I can afford it—not everyone can, and there’s no shame in that, either.

And I’m sorry, but not only do you care who cooks other people’s food (trained organic chef, yay! Burger King, boo!) but you and others made some value judgments about the laziness and lack of self-pride and self-sufficiency in those who, for a wide variety reasons, choose not to cook their own food. That’s something that I and others here have perceived in your comments, and something you might want to consider “owning” or disclaiming.

But if we’re talking fast food and Cheetos or other long term health care need causing sources -then yes, those of us who will pay for it whether in a public health option or the current system - have both a responsibility to see that everyone has good food available and the means to turn it into meals, as well as the right to question self-destructive choices

That’s fine, but again, it’s an educational mission, not one for shaming or moral scolding of individuals. Michael Pollan is starting to get this, although the passive-aggressive Oprah-smug tone and cultural crusade mission is still off-putting.

Once again you display a basic and profound ignorance of the real world.  My mother grew up rural poor (hillbilly) in the Missouri Ozarks.  She and her siblings suffered from chronic malnutrition throughout their childhoods.  She used to talk about how often all they had to eat was “thin gravy” (melted lard) and biscuits.  Take a look at some photographs of Southern sharecroppers from the first half of the 20th century.  They all suffer from profound dietary deficiencies and malnutrition.  Most of what they grew had to be sold or, in the case of sharecroppers, given to the landlord (normally 60% or more of the harvest).  Life for the poor, including the rural poor, has never been anything resembling bucolic or healthy.
Comment #147: DrDick on 08/27 at 05:11 PM

Well Medicus Phallus, look who is being ignorant as well as nasty here - note the tense of the verb “live” in my post. 

Certainly those conditions existed, yet many rural folks, particularly in the 20th century and today, while not monetarily what we would call wealthy, do eat better.  For one, they have the room to grow a garden, may have family around who know how to preserve, and, in some instances, a supportive community. 

Back when, many suffered some nutritional deprivation, but not all, and even the “most” depended on the quality of the soils.  But generally, hunting/fishing supplied a better quality meat than Mr. Armour did.  Fruits, berries and nuts were wild harvested, as were mushrooms. 

Yes, there were families who did not have a capable male hunter, or a female preserver or a non-slave driving landlord.  I’m sorry this was the case for your mother. 

As for your “look at the photos” as proof, many of those photos were post-community destruction.  Take a specific example like the Appalachian poor of the Smoky Mountains.  It wasn’t until the railroads and national park evictions destroyed thriving communities that we saw real hardship.  Before that, folks were monetarily poor, but they ate adequately, and nutritionally better than today.

One of my relatives moved to a rural area, ten acres just outside the exurbs in the early sixties.  Though both parents worked outside the home, manual unskilled labor, and they weren’t ever wealthy, or really $ comfortable, damn they ate well.

Thanks, the peasants and I will eat our bread very brown indeed.

Yeah and you’ll also start burning people at the stake for witchcraft because ergot poisoning causes hallucinations.

I work in what recent studies show to be the poorest section of a large eastern US city.

And I can tell you this: that even if all of my students and their parents stopped eating fast food, it wouldn’t make them not poor.

There is a level of urban poverty and marginal living for which substituting beans for dollar-menu burgers makes no appreciable difference.

Eating ‘healthy’ wouldn’t even make my still-growing students healthier: if they stopped eating processed foods (and foods containing the mythically evil high-fructose corn syrup) they would be less well-nourished, as they would lack ready access to the vitamins and minerals cheaply available in the (again, mythically evil) processed bread and grain products.

People who preach ‘healthy eating’ as if it’s some magical solution to poverty and poor health may as well, in the neighborhood where I work, be shouting: Be hungrier! Have less money!

How about free FOOD for the laid off?

Something I have always supported vehemently.  Has V not actually read my posts?

I forgot about the cow juice. Yes, milk contains animal protein. As for the magic mercury-laden tuna, only nursing mothers can get it, for the first year of their kid’s life.

ACG, please read my posts in context.  I was referring to the person doing the cooking being unable to do so earlier and uninterrupted because she had to go chauffeur hubby from a train station home.  According to her argument, it is difficult to cook healthy in part because she lives in a city and commute times, etc. Most cities and ‘burbs tend to link bus and train.

Their real argument—despicable as it is—is that poor people don’t deserve to have pleasure
THIS

Which is a very unrealistic way of seeing people. If you can’t have laughter and pleasure in your life, is life really worth living ? More to the point, can ANYONE live with a fixed goal, all consuming, no distractions, no breaks, no rest ? Should the poor stop sleeping too ? Is at least 4-5 hours they can use to “cook healthy meals” and “learn a skill” that they are wasting!!!

Getting out of poverty is an achievable goal, but it can’t and won’t be pursued 24 hours a day, 7 days a week by humans. It is just not feasible to think anyone can dedicate his entire being to a goal, any goal, no matter how worthy it is.

If you really thought about the poor as PEOPLE you would realize that they need some rest now and then, from the daily fight for subsistence. They need to recharge their batteries.  Like all of us. So yeah, they will eat comfort food and they will buy a cellphone or nice sneakers.  That doesn’t make them unworthy of help. It makes them human.

Dan, I wouldn’t bother with someone who is claiming to be in class 30 hours a week at college. WTF college enrolls a student for the equivalent of 10 courses?  I’m calling bullshit on his/her entire participation in this thread at this point.

THank you killerbot - you support my contention.  Urban poor have it the shittiest food choice wise.  Thank you Upton Sinclair.  The rural poor (once the enclosure laws were scrapped) have always had at least the opportunity and space for better nutrition.

generally, hunting/fishing supplied a better quality meat than Mr. Armour did.

Relatively few people took out hunting licenses in the first half of the 20th century, especially when the bag limit was lowered to 1. Unless you’re poaching, you’re not going to feed a family for long with 100 lb of meat.

http://www.michigan.gov/dnr/0,1607,7-153-10363_10856_10905-28543—,00.html

Well Medicus Phallus, look who is being ignorant as well as nasty here - note the tense of the verb “live” in my post.

First I am a Ph.D., not an MD.  You seem very good at jumping to erroneous conclusions.  I can take you to plenty of rural communities where people still suffer from poor nutrition, even though they have gardens.  Today, as in the past, most truly poor rural people live on marginal land (the rich or at least prosperous folks own most of the good land) and nobody today makes a living off farming a small parcel.  As to the photos, those represent the ongoing reality of life for the rural poor in America up until the establishment of the modern welfare state.  Read descriptions of the rural poor from the 18th and 19th centuries (as I in fact have) and that is what they often describe.  Pellagra was endemic in the South until late in the 20th century.  As to eating game, again you simply do not know what you are talking about.  My mother’s family always hunted and fished as well.  Quit this foolish romanticization of poverty.  It is quite obvious that you really do not know anyone who is poor.

@Gaveldown:  Sorry, my bad—I did take that out of context, and I apologize.

IME, this notion that poor people on average don’t know how to budget or know how to take advantage of coupons and sales is 100% complete bullshit.  If anything, poor/working/lower-middle class people tend to be pros at that mainly because that’s the only way they can subsist on the limited incomes they earn from working their 2+ jobs.

Yes exholt, I think it is often that the poor and even middle class are often so good at making the forefront economic choice that the problem is created.  If you look at two items, one organic/natural/real food, and one not, let’s say meat item, on the surface, it will look like the low end store pack of ground beef patties is a real bargain.

But then there’s the analysis, because the meat isn’t dry aged, it shrinks by 1/4 or 1/2.  It will have less satisfying flavor but more fat.  This usually causes one to eat more, or add a shitload of HFCS kethcup or other condiment just to get some flavor in it - and those aren’t cheap. 

On the other hand, the quality meat from a local processor is often slightly (10%) higher in price (and yeah, the rural poor have an advantage here, because the abbattoir is usually on the “bad side of town and doesn’t exist at all in the cities or ‘burbs.)  It shrinks little, has tons of lfavor, no fillers like that low end store meat might, etc.

So, you can get perhaps 1# of high end meat to feed 4 @ even $3.50/# or spend $4 on 2#‘s of the cheap stuff.  it seems like you’re getting more, but….

Why do you all think it’s OK to exclude beverages when talking about food eaten away from home?  Many of the obesity inducing calories come from soft drinks and latte coffees. 

Look at the options if you get thirsty on the road or when out:

Water at what $1.50-$2 a bottle, say what???? Sorry, I always have a problem buying water.  Not to mention environmentally unfriendly.

Try to find juice (tiny and cost prohibitive at best) or an unsweetened tea, most fast food chains don’t have it.  Some, like Taco Bell, don’t even have coffee.

I’m only at comment #54, so forgive me if I’m repeating something, but some poor people don’t have stoves.

Just recently a fire due to a faulty knob on my gas stove took out my range.  I already couldn’t use the oven portion of it, and now I can’t boil water.  This has taken even convenient cheap foods like ramen out of the picture, and I’m now completely dependent on my slow cooker and electric wok to do all my cooking.  (Bless hubby’s family for both!)  We’ve had to switch to eating mostly canned foods and meals based off of dried beans, we’re very fortunate that I’m at home to manage most of the cooking, as it takes much longer now to prepare simple meals.  Our fridge is also highly unreliable, as the freezer very quickly ices over, making it impossible to shut the fridge door and necessitating a bi-weekly defrost.  So much for fresh produce.

Now the fact that we’re renting someplace that’s supposed to have a stove is one up on people who rent by-the-week hotel rooms that have no stoves.  What they do, I have no idea.  I imagine electric kettles and hot plates, but I also imagine a lot of eating of cheap fast food.

Whether or not one knows how to cook is a moot point if there’s no way to do it.

I think V.‘s post at 5:59 addresses the “seems like you’re getting more” point.  Sure, that’s great and all, but if you can’t afford as much food and you end up going hungry, it just plain sucks ass.  So, cheap meat may not be as good for you (or even as good a bargain overall) but if you want to not be hungry, it may still be a better choice in straitened circumstances.

Well Dan HEBF, are you another reading challenged person?  25% sure as shit = everyone, when the discussion is talking about groups of people.  AS in, all groups, not just the poor. Or, regardless of socioeconomic class, people are eating fast food more often.

On the other hand, the quality meat from a local processor is often slightly (10%) higher in price (and yeah, the rural poor have an advantage here, because the abbattoir is usually on the “bad side of town and doesn’t exist at all in the cities or ‘burbs.) It shrinks little, has tons of lfavor, no fillers like that low end store meat might, etc.

I have to quote Barney Frank here and ask on what planet do you spend most of your time?  I have spent most of my life in smaller towns and rural areas and that has never been the case anywhere I have been.  Most meat processing plants in the US are in larger cities like Oklahoma City or Omaha.  There are very few slaughter houses anywhere near where most of the animals are raised and when there are, buying locally is substantially (more like 20-30%) more than buying the cheap and fatty stuff at Wal-Mart (which is where a lot of rural America really buys their food).  You obviously know nothing about how the modern agricultural economy actually works.

Look at the options if you get thirsty on the road or when out:

How about option 3—fill your $6 steel bottle with water or juice and take it with you when you head out. I don’t know where you live, but in my wicked and wasteful city I can’t turn around without seeing someone toting their own water bottle.

Nah, much more satisfying to scold people.

phylosopher: having spent my whole life in the West and Southwest, few of our large cities have both train and bus access (though SoCal is trying to change this).  An even bigger problem is that bus access after 9pm and before 5am is nonexistent in some areas and inconvenient at best in others.  In my big metro area, a 10 mile bus ride will likely take you 2 hours (if they are running on time).  Doesn’t leave much time for cooking when you’ve worked 9 hours and spent 4 hours on the bus.

Why aren’t those lazy poor people cooking on the fucking bus?  If they were really serious about their health, they would drag the Hibachi with them!

Quit this foolish romanticization of poverty.  It is quite obvious that you really do not know anyone who is poor.

He’s not romanticising poverty, but he does seem to be romanticising a return to pre-industrialism:

Kunstler’s name is mostly associated with nonfiction works like The Long Emergency, a bleak prediction of what will happen when oil production no longer meets demand, and the antisuburbia polemic The Geography of Nowhere. In this novel, his 10th, he visits a future posited on his signature idea: when the oil wells start to run dry, the world economy will collapse and society as we know it will cease. Robert Earle has lost his job (he was a software executive) and family in the chaos following the breakdown. Elected mayor of Union Grove, N.Y., in the wake of a town crisis, Earle must rebuild civil society out of squabbling factions, including a cultish community of newcomers, an established group of Congregationalists and a plantation kept by the wealthy Stephen Bullock. Re-establishing basic infrastructure is a big enough challenge, but major tension comes from a crew of neighboring rednecks led by warlord Wayne Karp.

One thing you can count on, both the “employees” of the good Squire Bullock and the serfs of naughty warlord Wayne Karp know how to cook! And they use organic ingredients, too. Chalk up one point in favour of post-collapse feudalism and manorialism.

Look, I loathe exurbia and recognise our limited oil resources almost as much as Kunstler does. However, to paraphrase Dean Wormer and Thomas Hobbes, “nasty, brutish and short(-lived) is no way to go through life, son.”

we’re renting someplace that’s supposed to have a stove

Eek. Contact your local tenants’ rights group. Every state recognizes the implied warranty of habitability—basically here, if they rented you a place with a stove, they must supply you a stove in good repair. Check your lease to see if they’ve excluded the stove somehow.

Thank you Alara for clarifying.  I didn’t want to pry, but you are definitely in a tough but atypical situation.

You know, when I commuted, our train station didn’t have bike racks either. Today in Chicago, we not only have a bike rack downtown, but we have an entire bike facility with showers!! 

There are other grants to get at least bike racks.  But no one will even try if they think there’s no interest.  You have to let them know.  Start by lettignyour local bike store.club know. 

http://media.www.theonlinerocket.com/media/storage/paper601/news/2009/04/24/News/Art-Students.Make.Recycled.Bike.Racks-3724647.shtml

AND yes, it is a systemic problem.  But we have to start somewhere in supporting emergent systems.

I actually think many of phylosopher’s points about ‘quality’ food:

yummy!dryaged ground beef vs regular beef and ‘expensive’ ketchup

are part and parcel of the Whole Paycheck classist foodism, wherein ‘quality’ is a construct manufactured to lend status.

Phylosopher has bought it, hook line and organic, locally-grown, very expensive sinker.

Last I checked, ketchup isn’t all that expensive. But I think phylospher’s point is either that it’s a marker of low status, and thus bad, or that it’s an expensive luxury which those lazy poor people shouldn’t use. Because if you give up ketchup you can afford dry-aged beef. Or something.

Or maybe there wasn’t a point.

Maybe it was all about asserting class status. Ya think?

If healthy eating means your kind of self-righteous, moralistic foodism, I’ll happily ingest a Big Mac every night.
Comment #143: V.  on 08/27 at 04:42 PM

Please do, you’ll be off the planet sooner. Just do me a favor and go for the massive coronary, not the chronic disease that makes you linger, OK?

Oh, since this is a feminist blog, I should mention women don’t have much real power in Kunstler’s lovely World Made By Hand—even in the “liberal” towns. Funny how that always happens in these back-to-the-earth movements—“go make babies and cook, babe. We’ll handle the big decisions.” Our own Dana may be the furthest thing from a hippie, but he’d probably have fit right in on those communes.

Hey Gracchus, you mistake the opinion blog versus the practical app.  I personally won’t be shaming someone into good choices. But society as a whole can.  Unless you’d like to challenge that it wasn’t education alone, it was that PLUS public approbation that reduced the smoking rate?

Maybe it was all about asserting class status. Ya think?

DING!

There is a pervasive elitism in his screeds that simply sets my teeth on edge.

Back to locally grown meat.  I live in Montana, which produces a lot of beef and some lamb as well.  You really have to hunt to find locally raised meat anywhere in town (including our local Whole Foods wannabe) and it is generally 20-30% higher than regular grocery store meat.  As an example, we have several shepherds in the area and one used to sell his lamb at the local farmers market, but quit this year.  I have looked everywhere, including the local small scale slaughter operations, and cannot find any local lamb.  Everything in the stores is from New Zealand.

Please do, you’ll be off the planet sooner. Just do me a favor and go for the massive coronary, not the chronic disease that makes you linger, OK?

‘“If they would rather die,’” said Scrooge, ‘they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.’”

V.‘s response is self-destructive, but your response isn’t much better. Really, enough of this hyperbole.

We’ve known for a while that McCurdle models herself on Marie Antoinette, but it’s something new to hear her buddy say “let them stop eating cake.”

To be a total elitist foodie douche for a second (forgive me!) have you tried www.eatwild.org DrDick? 

I also really don’t think societal shaming has much of an impact, even on smoking.  Rather it became easier to not smoke than to smoke.  The balance shifted, and people changed their behavior.  I think the “eww smokers” stuff actually got peoples backs up and made it harder.  But, that’s just my opinion - I can’t back it up.

I personally won’t be shaming someone into good choices. But society as a whole can.  Unless you’d like to challenge that it wasn’t education alone, it was that PLUS public approbation that reduced the smoking rate?

The education came first. People learned about the health risk and accepted them as reality-based fact—despite the presence of the original denialist campaign. The public approbation grew organically (heh), but individuals generally quit because of personal health scares or to feel healthier or, often, at the prodding of their families, not because strangers or warning labels tsk-tsk at them or make them feel like smoking is a character flaw.

Hector, Hector, First, you’re using an example form only 1 state, and one animal.  100 pounds of meat goes a long way.  As is six months at least for a family of four. 
Now supplement that with fish, rabbit, pheasant, quail, raccoon and squirrel and you’ve got a prety good larder fill for a midwesterner.
On top of that, if you has any land AT all, you were probably raising some chickens for eggs and meat, a hog and perhaps a goat or cow for milk. 

Note that in Michigan, by the time of the Depression, deer were plentiful.  And using hunting license records is pretty silly.  Yep, city folk going out ot the country might buy a license, but if you think the average hungry man feeding a family was going to spend the money - hahahahaha.  There were a lot of law enforcement looking the other way at subsistence hunters, too.  And I have the family sotries to prove it.

Phylosopher, since death rates for cardiac disease continue to drop in the US, ( down 22% in the last decade, according to the CDC,) and I’m a premenopausal non-smoking woman, the odds of my dropping dead from a heart attack any time soon are poor.

Gavel Down is also correct: there’s a convenience issue that emerges from the disincentives. But again, like the warning labels, anti-smoking by-laws are grounded in health concerns about second-hand smoke, not in moral crusades and shaming.

What kind of warning label on a Big Mac do you think would be more effective? “Warning: eating this product will give you the trots” or “Warning: shouldn’t you have cooked your own meal instead of buying this, you lazy git”?

The education came first. People learned about the health risk and accepted them as reality-based fact—despite the presence of the original denialist campaign. The public approbation grew organically (heh), but individuals generally quit because of personal health scares or to feel healthier or, often, at the prodding of their families, not because strangers or warning labels tsk-tsk at them or make them feel like smoking is a character flaw.
Comment #189: Gracchus on 08/27 at 07:01 PM

Timeline doesn’t follow.  We’ve known smoking was dangerous since the early sixties.  The rate remained fairly constant until the mid nineties, at which point, non-smokers became very vocal in droves.  Yes, this was a recursive process; the science of secondary smoke backed up the non-smokers complaints.  Suddenly, Tv/movie smoking became “uncool”  and starting smoking as seen and called “stupid” were definite factors in lowering the juvenile start rate.

Jamie Oliver’s arriving in the US to do a combination of two shows he made in Britain—one looking at what goes into school meals, the other looking, to put it bluntly, at the combination of malnutrition, obesity and limited time/cooking skills. I think it’ll be interesting to watch.

@ Gracchus: My point could have been better expressed.

My point was that there are worse things, to my mind, than a junk food diet.  The un-mindful (to put it charitably) elitism in phylospher’s post’s—which masquerade as pleas to the poor to think of their health and eat as he/she/zie does—strikes me as just as bad for the human condition.

And let’s not get started on the revisionist history of rural poverty.

Or, I’m sorry, reviewing the latest post, rural plenty. In the Depression. When people ate well.

Perhaps that Depression thing was a misnomer?  Plentition?

Gee, nice to see you don’t count the Amish as people, Academus Phallus.  But speaking of jumping to conclusions, show me where I said anything about deriving one’s entire income/ livelihood from farming.  The one personal example I gave specifically said they both had outside jobs. 

And again, I’m primarily a midwesterner.  Most soils are decent.  Yep, the rich or the corporations farm most of the good land for row crops.  However, the area for a garden is small enough to build soil.  In many cases of malnutrition in marginal areas, much of the poor nutrition comes from the empty calories of the subsidized food - cola in a baby bottle anyone? One program I worked for actually tracked calories of the poor - calorie count was fine or over abundant, even protein consumption was OK, it was always in the fruits and veg that they lacked.

Dear Dr. Dick:

How absolutely appropriate your moniker is.  I happen to work in agribusiness in addition to being an academic.  My area of specialization is local food networks. 

First, not all slaughterhouses are USDA.  In the midwest, we do have state inspected plants.  Much more likely to be local, doing business of under $500,000 per year.  As a matter of fact a small poultry operation just opened in the neighboring state.  In addition, there are also custom exempt abbattoirs. 
Second, one of the newest tools in the locavore network building kit is the mobile abbattoir. Eliminates trucking the animals and as such is much more humane, and keeps the local food much more local.
Third, there is also a large contingent of ethnic and religious and poor folk who go to the farm and slaughter their own hog or lamb.  Not done with cattle generally.
     
SO yeah, I live in the very real world.  What planet is it you are on?

That’s fine, but again, it’s an educational mission, not one for shaming or moral scolding of individuals. Michael Pollan is starting to get this, although the passive-aggressive Oprah-smug tone and cultural crusade mission is still off-putting.
Comment #155: Gracchus on 08/27 at 05:47 PM

Gracchus, we’ve been down this route before and it’s getting a little boring.  You claim it’s an educational mission, right?  Then why is it that every time a thread on food starts and someone says oh, I’d like to do x but excuse/reason,  and another poster says hey, you could try y to do x, the response is a litany of “how do you expect poor people to,” “but here’s my atypical situation,” or “we need a whole world makeover and everything needs to be perfect before I’ll change.”  And even when an educational example that is not at all smug, is obviously working to some extent, etc, receives a putdown like WIC did?

show me where I said anything about deriving one’s entire income/ livelihood from farming.

Most of your postings on rural poverty imply poor people are farming, which most do not or only do in a minor way.  Mostly they work at least one full-time, low wage job (often seasonal).  Combined with the time needed to commute to the job, it leaves little time or energy for extensive gardening or “soil building” (providing that they even have access to the knowledge necessary to do that).  Most of the country is not the Midwest, which has some of the best soils in the world, so your experience does not translate very far.  Even in the Midwest, there are extensive areas of marginal lands in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.  I will concede that some rural poor do eat marginally better than urban poor, but it is nowhere near as good as you indicate and there is a lot of significant malnutrition, especially in the South and the West.

ANd sorry, but by definition, if one is unemployed one has more time.

I cannot BELIEVE no one has called this out yet. What planet do you live on?

You want to know what the whole family had “more time” for when my husband was unemployed and I was caring for a tiny baby and a small child?

We had “more time” to drive around trying to find interview clothes for him that didn’t cost more than we could spend.

“More time” to pore over our grocery list figuring out what we could cut out and not starve or go crazy.

“More time” to try and convince the 5-year-old to eat just a few bites of this watery, uninspiring soup we made out of random vegetable leftovers.

“More time” to drive to churches all over town and beg them for some money to keep our electricity on. “More time” to wheedle utility providers and our landlord not to cut us off or kick us out.

You are fucking living in a different reality from the rest of us if you think that being unemployed means “more time” to shop for lovely produce and good bargains on tasty healthful food and lovingly cook it up. Dear God.

Oh, Phylosopher, you are so CUTE!!!!

“Note that in Michigan, by the time of the Depression, deer were plentiful.  And using hunting license records is pretty silly.  Yep, city folk going out ot the country might buy a license, but if you think the average hungry man feeding a family was going to spend the money - hahahahaha.  There were a lot of law enforcement looking the other way at subsistence hunters, too.  And I have the family sotries to prove it.”

Really?  Because in my family I have cousins who did prison time for repeated poaching offenses merely for trying to feed their families, from the Depression onward.  Also, other wild game like quail, etc… all have seasons and if you get caught hunting them out of season, you’ll get nailed for poaching them, too, and taking eggs counts as poaching (no pun intended). 

Also, on getting fresh meat from slaughterhouses in cities?  Really?  Perhaps they do that in Chicago, and I say perhaps.  I’ll check with some of my Chicagoan friends, but I have never lived near a slaughterhouse (at least not in the last 20 years) that would sell meat direct to the consumer.  They’ve all got contracts with distributors now.  My husband’s grandparents haven’t been able to get their once annual side of beef from the slaughterhouse in years.  I spent six years in Ellensburg, WA, smelling the gods damned slaughterhouse and stockyards all fucking summer, and most of our beef came from someplace else.  The only places you can get local meat are small butcher shops and farmer’s markets, if you’re lucky enough to live near some place that has those. 

As for public transit.  You do realize that not every city has light rail?  I hear Chicago’s is pretty awesome, but I mean Seattle’s opened less than a month ago and it is exceptionally limited.  My commute doesn’t even put me within a mile of it.  The light rail here was set up to benefit tourists rather than commuters.  So, instead it’s a 45 minute to one hour bus ride to work, then from work, if traffic’s good.  Some cities, even bigger ones also have shit transit.  One example I can think of right now is St. Louis, which is slashing their transit budget and cutting routes to already dreadfully underserved areas, like East St. Louis.

Seriously, though, I’d like to thank you for a good laugh.  It’s always fun when someone who just doesn’t get it tries to tell the rest of us how we’re doin’ it rong.

In my mind, there is a real oddity about the way libertarians talk about poor people. I percieve it as a kind of vampirism. It is as if removing as much money as possible from the poor is not enough for libertarians… they’re licking their lips, wanting to siphon even the simple pleasure of eating junk food from the poor. It is as if the libertarians’ desire for, and simultaneous hatred of, the poor, leads them to imagine themselves as predators. A strange kind of psychic vampirism.

It’s caused by psychological poverty—the inability to generate one’s own sense of pleasure in life, and the consequent NEED (not just desire) to find an external source of narcissistic resources (the elements we all need in order to feel good about ourselves). 

Anti-feminists do this too.  There is nothing tangible for them to gain in opposing feminism, but they feel driven to do so anyway, as if it were a matter of life or death for them (which, on a psychological level they feel it is).  It’s linked to their feeling that unless women are in a position of extreme social vulnerability, they will be unable to feed off individual women for their narcissistic resources. 

And to be unable to feed in this way?  It feels like death.

Oh and I agree with whoever pointed out that history is not a sweet rosy wonderland where the poor ate simple, tasty, healthy food.

Not only did they consume mostly starches that keep well and cost little (bread and potatoes and more bread and potatoes; my mother told me about sandwiches of bread spread with cooking fat and sprinkled with sugar) but that food took a LOT more time and energy to prepare and clean up after.

It was possible (when it was, and we have to remember that for a lot of families it wasn’t) because women formed even more of an unpaid underclass than they do now. They spent their lives growing, preparing, cooking, baking, preserving and cleaning up, from girlhood to old age, and in order that they be available to do this work, they were denied the chance to have any sort of life beyond domestic drudgery.

Anyone who whines “why can’t people just COOK like they used to” is actually whining why can’t women just get back in the kitchen where they used to be?

By definition Dick, you live in a less populated state, where extrapolating to the conditions east of the Mississippi doesn’t work.

So let’s look at a few things.  First, did you call your local shepherd and ask why s/he quite the farmer’s market?  It could be something as simple as his truck broke down and no money to fix it and you can still buy out on the farm. Did your abbattoir go out of business?  If you value the local lamb, you find out the answers and see if there’s something you can do to alleviate the problem.

nice to see you don’t count the Amish as people

The Amish, Hutterites, and Mennonites are not poor, but in fact some of the most prosperous farmers in their areas (we have several Hutterite colonies here in Montana).  They are also a very small and exceptional minority whose success is based on their communal ideology and sharing of resources built up over generations.

I happen to work in agribusiness in addition to being an academic.

Agri-fucking-business????  What are you, a shill for ADM or Whole Foods?

Also, on getting fresh meat from slaughterhouses in cities?  Really?

No, that’s bullshit. I feed my dog raw bones and meat, and it’s fucking impossible to get stuff for my DOG from any but the tiniest, hardest-to-find, winking-at-the-rules type places.

Similarly, you cannot get produce that’s about to go bad anywhere near as easily as phylosopher fondly believes. You do realize, phylosopher, that nowadays most grovery stores actually padlock their dumpsters so no one can salvage the food they throw away?

phylosopher’s advice has the charming sound of something she read out of a how-to-survive-book from the 1970s. I have one of those, and it’s an entertaining read, but it’s not advice for the real world.

Phylosopher is trying to distort Amish life to fit a revisionist world-view. 

Perhaps she/he/zie romantically thinks that the Amish still make their living from subsistence farming—but in this study of Midwestern (Ohio) Amish, less than one quarter of the Amish make a living from agriculture.

http://geography.uwo.ca/research/great_lakes_geographer/GLG_volume7/LoweryNoble.pdf

Two thirds of the Amish businesses in Lancaster County, PA provide full-time, regular employment for their owners and employees.

Have an (Amish-written)link for that:

http://www.amishnews.com/amisharticles/plowstoprofits.htm

Here’s an expanded book version:

http://www.amazon.com/Amish-Enterprise-Profits-Anabaptist-Studies/dp/0801878055/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215692743&sr=8-1

Here are some health links about the Amish, which are limited to self-reports and surveys:

http://heb.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/17/2/197

http://www.womenshealthcoe.psu.edu/publications/Womens_Health_Issues_April2007_Amish.pdf

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3919/is_200610/ai_n17194971/?tag=content;col1

If anyone is considering the Amish as less than human, it is the poster who stereotypes the community.

Kristin:  I was gonna say…  Plus, not every city has slaughterhouses.  Hell, not every REGION has slaughterhouses.  The big slaughterhouse in Ellensburg closed about seven years ago (right after I moved, assholes).  Slaughtering is one of those services that’s being centralized. 

Now, if you can find smaller shops (Cle Elum has an AWESOME butcher shop that dresses wild game), you can get nice cuts, but again, it’s going to be more expensive than the crap at Safeway or QFC.  And sometimes $5 is the difference between getting to work and not getting to work.

OK, I was trying not to be mean, but the insistence that you can just waltz down to the local “abattoir” and buy meat made me laugh until I couldn’t breathe. 

How very 1890s.

my mother told me about sandwiches of bread spread with cooking fat and sprinkled with sugar

My dad would joke about eating jam sandwiches—two pieces of bread jammed together.

He and his brother were orphans who lived with their grandmother. Their urban backyard was crammed with vegetable plants, which his grandmother would can, as well as make pickles and sauerkraut to help them get through the winter.

I remember the halcyon days of ketchup sandwiches… Ah, youth… 

Or butter sandwiches (actually, margerine, because real butter was too expensive).

ACG, he’s supposed to walk to the shepherd’s!  For his health! 

By definition Dick, you live in a less populated state, where extrapolating to the conditions east of the Mississippi doesn’t work.

I spent the first 35 years in Oklahoma and lived 12 years in Chicago before moving to Montana, so I have a bit broader experience than you do.  I have also researched living conditions in much of the rural South in the past.  Montana also has a huge proportion of rural poor (we have the fifth lowest household income and the highest percentage of people working two or more jobs).  I live in the second largest city in the state with a whopping 60,000 people.

I know exactly why the shepherd quit, he decided it was more hassle than it was worth.  There has not been a major slaughter house in the area for decades, if ever (Montana beef and lamb was shipped east to Chicago earlier and to places like Omaha or Kansas City today to slaughter).  There are several small local slaughterhouses, but none carry lamb.  The only way I can get local lamb is to buy a whole lamb, and pay to have it slaughtered and butchered.  I cannot afford that and do not have the storage for it either.

Which brings up another problem with your scenario.  While gardening can seasonally supply fresh vegetables (provided you have seed and that bugs, drought, floods, animals, or disease don’t kill your plants), you then have the problem of preserving these over the winter.  Either canning or freezing involves significant capital expenditure and labor (I know because I have done this).  It also requires a fairly substantial garden to feed a family of four (about average for the US and rather small for the poor), as I know from personal experience.  That also requires substantial labor, which is a lot to ask of someone working two jobs.

Again you are spinning unrealistic fantasies here whose realities are substantially more complicated than you pretend.

Gracchus, no, I’m not touting pre-industrialization.  And FYI, I’m not alone in claiming that we need a reintegration of rural and urban - urban chickens anyone?  You know, that’s one thing that poor immigrants and rich yuppies have in common these days. You’re as likely to find poultry in both their backyards.  However do they all find time to do it?

If anything, I like the technology that enables lots of people to cook and work - so stuff it, kristin.  Refrigeration, crockpots, breadmakers, microwaves and the like mean that the amount of attention time is much less, and even an “amatuer” cook, not the stereotypical woman who knows her way around a kitchen is required.  It certainly isn’t women need ot be back in teh kitchen, but somebody sure as heck does, whether that is sharing of the reduced time, or the male cooking, or whatever. 

IF you note my earlier post Kristin, I was the one asking Alara, before she mentioned her husband’s blindness why he couldn’t do some of the work.

And GGR, I was replying to Alara, who already mentioned her husband taking the train.  While many cities are without rail, usually they have bus service, not the other way round.  As for Chicago’s rail, it is pretty good but getting very old.  Ask those relatives about “slow zones.” 

To answer your meat question, the last slaughter house in the city is Chiapettis, and they do lamb and veal. Last I heard, they were negotiating new digs with the city.  Many farmer’s markets do have a meat farmer.  And yes, if they want a side of beef, there are quite a few small processors in Indiana,  a bit of a drive once a year, who can provide.

Again, go to localharvest.org, or the Indiana BOAH and ask for a list of state inspected slaughterhouses.

OK, I was trying not to be mean, but the insistence that you can just waltz down to the local “abattoir” and buy meat made me laugh until I couldn’t breathe.

How very 1890s.

Truly.  I have lived most of my life around rural areas and have bought from small local slaughter houses and I have never heard anyone working in ag use the word “abattoir”.  I honestly doubt that most of the folks I know even know the word.

That’s great for Indiana. 

I’m in Washington state, I’ve lived in Michigan, Ohio, and Idaho.  Amanda’s in Texas.  Many other posters are scattered all over the globe, let alone all over this country. 

We keep explaining to you why your “simple solutions” aren’t that simple for us, and you keep “extrapolating” your position to ours, then scolding Dr. Dick for extrapolating his position. 

Plus, it sounds like Alara’s not in Chicago, so your experiences are not going to necessarily translate to hers. 

Seriously…  Give it up.

And yes, if they want a side of beef

Do you honestly know any poor people????  There is no way they could afford a side of beef, let alone afford to have it butchered into usable portions.  Nor would they have access to any way of storing that much meat.  Meat sellers at farmers markets (and we have several here selling beef, pork, or bison from whom I sometimes buy) charge substantially more for the meat than do regular grocery stores (at least $1-$2 more per pound here), let alone what Wal-Mart charges.

Either canning or freezing involves significant capital expenditure and labor (I know because I have done this).  It also requires a fairly substantial garden to feed a family of four (about average for the US and rather small for the poor), as I know from personal experience.  That also requires substantial labor, which is a lot to ask of someone working two jobs.

Ohhhh, give it up, DrDick. We had a long go-round about this a couple months ago, and you’ll never ever EVER get phylosopher to admit that preserving food is anything but a whimsical happytime activity where the children help you adorably and the whole family just has a wonderful time. And of course, the resources to do the work, er, I mean play, and storage are of course never ever difficult to come by.

She lives in a different reality. What she reminds me of most is the landed gentry of centuries past who would amuse themselves by dressing up in special country frocks and playing shepherd or goose-girl for the day.

Re: Disappearance of “abattoirs.” The evocatively named “Jean’s Farm Kill,” of Eagle Point, OR, has apparently closed. I don’t know where you would take a meat animal in southern Oregon to be slaughtered any more.

You know, it’s getting a little old watching you all play CHinese telephone with my posts.  This started out as a rural versus urban poor opportunities to eat well/healthy.  My point was that the rural poor had a better opportunity in part becssue of the location of slaughterhouses in rural communities.  Now I read that I’ve said there are slaughterhouses in every city.  FUCKING READ MORE CAREFULLY PEOPLE

Similar trajectories Dick, I’ve lived up by Glacier, in Kansas, Chicago and NYC.  Currently doing the local foods work.  And if you’d all actually read, and used the brain, do you really think ADM would be paying someone to work on establishing local food networks?

“There are several small local slaughterhouses”  well,  there’s a step in the right direction.  OK, will this take some effort, yeah.  First, your lamb will generally be about 80 pound carcass weight, or 50-60 edible meat.  A side of lamb will be 25-30#.  It takes one cubic foot of freezer space to store 30 pounds of meat.  Even a refrigerator freezer is this large.  And you’d have to find someone else to take the other half.  But, the farmer may have others who’ve called him.  Usually, the farmer will take it to the abbattoir.  You will work with them to give processing instructions (email is a wonderful thing these days.)    The farmer may even deliver it to you for a fee,  or the abbattoir.  If not, you’ll have to pick up.  Generally, for lamb, your costs will be comparable of or the same as for New Zealand, (around here, it’s about $6/#) and well - you know the difference in taste.  C’mon, you want your local lamb, don’t you? 

You might also want to divide further, taking smaller quantities per person.

GGR, your post was a little confusing,  You mentioned Chicago and grandparents wanting a side f beef in the same paragraph. So that was the response

As for not using the word abbattoir - please, please, tell Joel Salatin he’s not really a farmer, or not in ag, and do it in person.  The black eye will only last a week or so, honest.

<em>preserving food is anything but a whimsical happytime activity where the children help you adorably and the whole family just has a wonderful time<em>

Also predicated on full-time, unpaid female and child labor in the house and taking care of the garden.  Having done it myself and having seen that my mother, who grew up doing it, had absolutely no desire to do it as an adult, I have no illusions that it is anything but work.  Today virtually all small family farms in the US require the paid wage labor of the wife to survive, and those are the relatively prosperous ones.  For the rural poor, they both have to work at least one job each.

Do you honestly know any poor people????  There is no way they could afford a side of beef, let alone afford to have it butchered into usable portions.  Nor would they have access to any way of storing that much meat.  Meat sellers at farmers markets (and we have several here selling beef, pork, or bison from whom I sometimes buy) charge substantially more for the meat than do regular grocery stores (at least $1-$2 more per pound here), let alone what Wal-Mart charges.
Comment #218: DrDick on 08/27 at 08:30 PM

Already been over this, Dick, it’s a false economy to buy the Walmart meat.

Did you know that the cost per pound of a side of beef is around @2.35 - 4.00 depending largely on the way you have it cut (consumer’s choice).  Most farmers will match you up with other customers, so we’re talking quarters here, not sides (on a smaller grassfed, that’ll be about 100# of meat.) And that can also be split further by enlisting family and friends.  There are even meat CSA’s starting up.  Can the really, really, really poor do this?  Probably not.  CAN someone who can manage to save $300-600 do this if they can then reduce their food bill by that in the next few months?

local harvest has 512 matches for meat in Oregon, Hector.  And some folks up in Puget Sound have established that mobile abbattoir

OK, will this take some effort, yeah.  ......  C’mon, you want your local lamb, don’t you?

Like all of your posts, this sounds really reasonable and eminently doable.  Unfortunately, it does not work exactly that way.  If you had read my posts carefully, you would realize that I have in fact investigated the possibilities here.  First I would have to buy a whole lamb and pay for the carcass weight at over $200.  I would also have to pay to have it butchered (the farmer would do the slaughter), but I never got far enough to price that because I do not have the storage space for a whole lamb and I do not know anybody who wants to split it with me.  Even with a side, I would not have freezer space for anything else.  I would prefer to buy local lamb (and this is the best lamb I have ever eaten), but it is frankly far too much work, time, and money to be practical.

I should also point out that most poor in Montana are rural.  Most also hunt (and we have abundant large game).  A friend works for the statewide foodbank network and tells me that they cannot keep the state foodbanks adequately supplied and that there is huge demand in areas that do not have a local foodbank (they have a mobile foodbank they take around to these small rural towns).  Their highest demand is in rural areas.

blockquote> Also predicated on full-time, unpaid female and child labor in the house and taking care of the garden.  Having done it myself and having seen that my mother, who grew up doing it, had absolutely no desire to do it as an adult, I have no illusions that it is anything but work.  Today virtually all small family farms in the US require the paid wage labor of the wife to survive, and those are the relatively prosperous ones.  For the rural poor, they both have to work at least one job each.
Comment #223: DrDick on 08/27 at 08:48 PM</blockquote>

Talk about preserving myths, pun fully intended, those are good ones.  There is absolutely no reason that the garden, the preserving can’t be shared work - and in some relationships, it is.  There’s also no reason that strenuous work can’t be made family fun, because it can.  AND is, for my family and quite a few I know.

IN your experience, perhaps it wasn’t, but kindly keep your wet blanket to yourself.

People who can debate ‘false economy’ vs ‘real economy’ by definition, do not live in a world where they are affected by poverty.

When I’ve been poor, there has only been ONE economy. That’s the economy that will keep a roof over our heads, clothes on our backs, and our bellies full.

When there is 20.00 left till the next paycheck and child-support is late, a case of ramen noodles and cheap dollar-store breakfast cereal always, always trump dry-aged beef.

Someone who has 300-600 dollars in extra cash—after they have paid off all their bills, paid off their credit-card debt, and put some money aside for emergencies like illness, job loss, car repair—

Those people are not poor.

And thus, not the topic of this discussion.

$2.35 to $4 per pound of beef?! Please. I consider myself to be living in fairly flush times, and we still don’t buy meat unless it’s on sale for less than $2 per pound.

Talk about preserving myths,

I was speaking about conditions at the time when such activities were routine.  In my personal experience, the work was indeed shared.  It was also very time consuming and, for the gardening, hard work.  I could do it because I was in graduate school and had a somewhat flexible schedule, though working to support myself and my family ate into that.  I have no illusions about the actual feasibility for a lot of poor people.  Again you present an overly idealized scenario.  In an ideal world these would be great ideas.  Unfortunately we do not live anywhere near ideal.

These are both from way up there, but there are two points I wanted to mention.

But if we’re talking fast food and Cheetos or other long term health care need causing sources -then yes, those of us who will pay for it whether in a public health option or the current system - have both a responsibility to see that everyone has good food available and the means to turn it into meals, as well as the right to question self-destructive choices.

Um, you really don’t get to “question self-destructive choices.”  Education and access are vitally important.  But when it comes down to the very personal decision of what someone puts in hir body, that is very much no one else’s business.  No, not even with fully universal health care.  No one has to meet some arbitrary standard of virtuous living to deserve treatment.  I’m impressed that you’ve managed to keep from shouting “ZOMG OBESITY CRISIS BOOGA BOOGA!” but you’re getting awfully close.

Second, I’m generally pretty tone-deaf when it comes to ableism.  But dismissing Alara’s experiences as so atypical as to have no place in the discussion because her husband is disabled?  That’s some incredibly ableist shit right there.

Phylosopher, this conversation reminds me of the Green “revolution,” in which the onus to Save The Planet is put on individuals rather than industry. 

“Change your light bulbs!”

“Bring reusable bags to the grocery store!”

“Don’t leave the lights on!”

It’s good to do those things.  But we individuals are all spinning our wheels trying to take responsibility for environmental degradation whilst lawmakers and the evil industries in their pockets point and laugh at our gullibility.

Instead of telling poor people the best way to jump through hoops, how about pressuring, um, agribusiness, to change their ways.  Get rid of the hoops.

I feel the need to reitirate what other posters have stated above: phylosopher has no idea how piss-poor U.S. public transit is. That he would make a sweeping generalization of its quality across all fifty states is a breathtaking example of the increased confidence granted by complete ignorance.

Leeley, you’re missing two things.  One, Alara’s first post did not mention her husband’s disability.  It came across as she was doing it all, EVEN though he was home with her.  ANd yeah, as a feminist I think that’s a VERY VALID question about that behavior.  Personally, I’m not into telling paraplegics to get up and walk, but I also think that the paraplegic needs to make ihis.her condition known and not use it tto say that we can’t ask anyone to stand up (Biden).  You now want to say that most couples have one spouse with a serious, legally classified disability, that it is typical?  From a purely statistical basis are you nuts?     

There’s a long road from being concerned with others food consumption - which includes issues of availability and education to denying people care.  I think Pollan had a great idea when he wanted soft drinks taken off the list of things food stamps will buy (reclassifying it as “not food.”)  Ditto for Cheetos, and other junk food.

Re: your argument Sarah, the response is that individual action is much more influential with these local issues than the conservation efforts.  If we don’t support the local farmers and especially the local processors, we will lose the local network.  Period.  Even good farmers who treat their animals well and feed wholesomely will not bother if they don’t get a fair price from individuals - which requires the existence of local abbattoirs.  Competing with the CAFOs just isn’t monetarily feasible.  And as the small processors become more viable, agribusiness takes note.  Walmart now offering organic is a proof of that.  If it wasn’t for the folks who showed that they would go out of their way for organic - do you think Walmart would have ever bothered? 

And doing one doesn’t preclude doing the other.  Dr. Dick might even talking to his local grocery store to stock, on a somewhat regular basis, local lamb. Or his favorite restaurant to serve it.

Hey, phylosopher, I’ve got a question for you-

Sure, my parents live out in the country and grow their own vegetables, as we’ve been doing for years. Mom even cans.

What happens in a year like this year, when the deer completely devoured their garden despite their best efforts at integrated pest management?

Oh, and I live in Harrisburg- east of the Mississippi.  I have to drive ten minutes to work because my neighborhood has no sidewalks and the road is not safe to bike.  Please pull your head out of your ass and recognize that almost no one lives in the apparent fairy-tale world that you do.

phylosopher—maybe because it’s none of your damn business.

I cook meals nearly every night. I’m a big advocate of local organic food. You’re a fucking fanatic and need to chill the fuck out.

We are here to have a discussion about the practicalities of trying to make healthy food choices in day-to-day living.

We are not here to have you pass judgement on us and determine what dispensations are allowed for our unique situations.

Tell me, does ACG stand for Asshole Constantly Griping?  Again, Alara’s first post presented her situation as typical and the feminist hackles got raised.  So I asked.  So fuck off. 

Really, NOOC? You really should have told me about that when I was stuck on a train for two hours yesterday (for a 40 minute trip).  ALara wrote about picking hubby up from the train, brilliant deduction on my part, she lives where there is train service.  Other parts of her post indicated that she is living in a city.  (Later confirmed, she lives near DC - and the east coast has some of the best commuter service nationwide.)

Yeah, transit sucks.  Yeah a lot of people are against funding it.  Yeah I support it when I can, mostly by badgering legislators. Yeah it needs to be improved and what are you doing about it?

phylosopher -

The problem here is not that your ideas are bad.  They would indeed greatly improve the lives of the poor.  The problem is that the poor simply do not have the resources (time, energy, money, knowledge) to do these things.  There is also your pervasive tone of moral superiority and condescension, that you know what is best for the poor and if they would only listen they could redeem themselves.  That is extremely off putting.  It also places the onus for their situation on the poor, rather than on a society which disenfranchises them.  What is fundamentally needed is a minimum wage which will actually support a family, affordable childcare, better education for all, convincing supermarkets and other large scale merchants to build in poor areas (this will only work in urban areas), and a dramatically improved social safety net which allows the poor to lead decent lives.

Generally, for lamb, your costs will be comparable of or the same as for New Zealand, (around here, it’s about $6/#)

New? Fucking? Zealand?

Okay all, this is as close as phylosopher can come to admitting he’s talking completely out of his ass. The idea that New Zealand’s agribusiness has a significant relationship to local meat costs generalizeable across the entire U.S.—this is beyond stupid. At this point, it’s just assholish trolling. No one could seriously consider this proposition.

Angry Geologist—not to mention earlier this week I had to go up and pull up all of the tomato plants I’d been growing in our plot at the community garden because the big box stores sold plugs of tomato plants that had Late Blight infestations (that would be the same blight that caused the Irish potato famine), so even though I grew my tomatoes from seedlings and had hopes for a little bit of canning, I found myself with a bunch of blackened withered vines just as my crop was getting going.

The Late Blight thing is huge: pretty much every tomato and potato plant (not to mention eggplants) in the northeast and mid-atlantic region is toast because everyone went to K-Mart, bought a Topsy-Turvey to grow tomatoes in (because, you know, fresh tomatoes, recession, etc), picked up some infected plugs, and the spores spread around to their community in breathtaking rapidity.

Really, NOOC? You really should have told me about that when I was stuck on a train for two hours yesterday (for a 40 minute trip).

Complete non-sequitor. Phylosopher either is an imbecile with no idea how to refute an argument or is just being a jackass attempting to employ logical fallacies to defend a pathetic proposition. The former is no sin but alas, it is unlikely.

Other parts of her post indicated that she is living in a city

Whoop-de-fucking-do. There are tens of thousands of cities with inadequate public transit services. Your generalization is STILL specious.

Yeah it needs to be improved and what are you doing about it

And, in classic asshole fashion, he ends with an ad hominem. Phylosopher, you have no idea what I do for a living or what politics I encourage. The only reason to throw such ideas out into the internet is to do what you do upthread: attempt to make an argument from authority, yet another fallacy. All the degrees in the world wouldn’t make your bullshit any less imbecilic, and if a five-year-old child reads a single city map and notes that the buses don’t go out very far it doesn’t invalidate the observation.

Comment #240: DrDick  on  08/27  at  10:07 PM
The problem here is not that your ideas are bad.

Actually, many of his ideas are bad, since they’re based on bullshit. The idea that everyone in the U.S. has access to food co-ops was complete bullshit, stated because his ignorance on the issue was so profound he took his lack of knowledge as justification for confidence. This is why Marie Antoinette comes up so much in this thread: her fallacy (perhaps anecdotal) is exactly the same; as Darwin said, “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”

Hey, phylosopher, I’ve got a question for you-

Sure, my parents live out in the country and grow their own vegetables, as we’ve been doing for years. Mom even cans.

What happens in a year like this year, when the deer completely devoured their garden despite their best efforts at integrated pest management?

Oh, and I live in Harrisburg- east of the Mississippi.  I have to drive ten minutes to work because my neighborhood has no sidewalks and the road is not safe to bike.  Please pull your head out of your ass and recognize that almost no one lives in the apparent fairy-tale world that you do.
Comment #237: The Angry Geologist on 08/27 at 10:00 PM

As for fairytales, you’ve been doing this for years, and you have never before had a crop failure so that you have to ask silly, rich phylosopher whose head is upass what to do?  There are no surpluses from last year or the year before?  You’re lying. 

And please,  tell those folks who lobbied and worked to get some of the better trails you have in Harrisburg that they should get their heads out ass, too.  Everything should be done for you, right?  If you’re an adult, you chose where to live.  If safe biking is important to you, then you either go where it exists, or work to get it changed.    Egads people, the lot of you are enough to make someone go libertarian.  Is there anything you all take individual responsibility for?  That you care enough about to seek to effect change?

And MPG, I’ve participated in a few of these discussion of “practicalities of making healthy food choices.”  Amanda tried it a while back with the gardening thread and the money saving one.  Almost every positive I’ve done x or you could try y from myself and other posters was met with someone whingeing about why that wouldn’t work for them., and how we were all big meanies to even suggest that they too might be capable of overcoming obstacles.

...Because you were suggesting that very young children could assist in canning.

When they cannot and the idea that they can is asinine.

Many of us DO buy meat from local farmers and eat locally grown veggies.  Some of us DO take part in co-ops.  We just acknowledge the role privilege plays in our ability to do so.

Godless Heathen touched on something that’s very often overlooked: “Whether or not one knows how to cook is a moot point if there’s no way to do it.” Besides requiring a working stove, fridge, and freezer, you also need a decent pan or two, a couple of sharp knives, utensils, maybe a cutting board, etc.  A Forschner chef’s knife “only” costs $20 or $25, but that’s out of reach of a lot of people.

The problem here is not that your ideas are bad.  They would indeed greatly improve the lives of the poor.  The problem is that the poor simply do not have the resources (time, energy, money, knowledge) to do these things.  There is also your pervasive tone of moral superiority and condescension, that you know what is best for the poor and if they would only listen they could redeem themselves.  That is extremely off putting.  It also places the onus for their situation on the poor, rather than on a society which disenfranchises them.  What is fundamentally needed is a minimum wage which will actually support a family, affordable childcare, better education for all, convincing supermarkets and other large scale merchants to build in poor areas (this will only work in urban areas), and a dramatically improved social safety net which allows the poor to lead decent lives.
Comment #240: DrDick on 08/27 at 10:07 PM

You know what’s interesting here, Dick, is that from some of the other threads, Pandagon doesn’t come off as a blog for the poor.  There are people on here talking about their houses, their travels, their new jobs, the affordability of cable.  So generally, I don’t assume I’m writing to an audience of “the poor.”  That sounds awfully as if we all consider them some homogenous monolithic group, which they’re not.  AS for the I know what is best for “them,“it should be noted that back when I was living in your mountainous state, it was in a slide-in camper on National Forest land (couldn’t afford the campground) and later a wall tent, in winter.  So I’ve been one of them, and still am not that far from being there..

I’m not disagreeing that we need the things you say, (heck I’m an advocate, like Milbratih, of a guaranteed yearly subsistence income that they one can spend as they wish, but I’m not sure that that would allow the poor to make healthier choices, if the infrastucture - small truck farms and local farmers and processors - aren’t there.  And not with the current barrage of advertising indoctrinating at an ever younger age to commercial food.  Saving the existing infrastructure can’t wait.   

You call it putting the onus on the poor, I see it as recognizing that even the poor have power and agency.  I’ve spent years working with programs that operate on the philosophy of “give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach him to fish and he can feed himself for a lifetime.”  Yes, we also have to make sure he has the time to fish, the knowledge to clean the fish, the pole and the clean stream. But we have to break into the cycle somewhere, and we have to acknowledge that the man has to choose to bait the hook and make the effort of casting.

So seriously Dr, since the large supermarket chains really have little unprocessed, local or healthy food in them, and they are reluctant to go into low-income neighborhoods, even if they were made to build there, how would you make sure that local foods and or healthy foods were available in them? 
What about any of these concepts?

CSA’s
Farm markets
locavore stores
cooking/preserving programs
children’s education

BTW, what is your doctorate in?

NOOC is it the alcohol that keeps you from reading the posts?  DrD referred to New Zealand lamb, you idiot.  In context my “same as New Zealand, meant similar to the priceof imported New Zealand lamb.

. . . and if you were not an imbecile, you’ll note that your “argument,” a term that I am most certainly misusing to refer to the doggerel that you regularly spew, was relying on the availability of LOCAL foodstuffs and the good doctor was pointing out their unavailibility in part by noting the imported meat.

And where the fuck did the “is it the alcohol” comment come from? How could it be concluded I even drink? Are you incompetent when it comes to insults as well?

No, don’t bother answering. No, just pull some more wisdom about the universality of public transit out of your ass. Go on. Own that topic.

OK, MPG, your example just proved my point.  If we supported our local nurseries, there would not be a market for the big box growers who import and buy from large monocrop farms.  This late blight infestation shows just how vulnerable globalization and non-local has made our food system. We got to this point by not supporting local because of the lure of big box. 

ACG, no need to steal, consider it a gift;-).  Ok, you read it different.  Alara didn’t explain WHY it was different for her, and I think it’s valid to ask, and then valid to point out that that’s not typical, when it clearly isn’t. 

Pretending?  are you denying the existence of people who are lazy or indifferent to health and environmental concerns, even their own?  And I’m the one that gets accused of fairytales?

I think the problem is that if we have two necessary conditions—both a cultural weight of knowledge of how to eat healthily and the physical capital present to take advantage of that knowledge—and both are missing, it’s ridiculous to blame the former with any seriousness.  It’s absurd to expect knowledge of how to take advantage of institutions that don’t exist for the vast majority of folks.

Yes, if one has no kids and is highly talented and has a college education and all this stuff, one can solve a lot of problems.  But that’s the damned point of birth control and being lucky and going to school.  If we’re discussing what ordinary folks with kids and middling to small educations are doing, we aren’t talking about cleverness.  We’re talking about systems which ordinary people can handle, even on days when they have nasty colds and the principal is calling about the kid and you gotta work late to keep the job that you qualify for.

If you create a system which doesn’t work for people who leave their coffee cups on top of their cars when they go to work, you create a system which doesn’t work for anyone.

phylosopher wants the poor to have agency—as long as that agency is in complete agreement with HER values.

What if the poor person spends her extra ‘free’ time working for other social goods?

I’m put in mind of a woman I worked with, who clawed her way up from living in her car with her kids to putting her oldest through college. She worked 2 jobs, from 6 in the morning to 7 at night. She had one child still at home, as well as an elderly grandparent for whom she did most of the caregiving.

She cared not one whit for your CSA’s, your locavore food, or canning.

Phylosopher says that she SHOULD.

Most of us would never be so arrogant.

same to you MPG.  My asinine idea has been succeeding in my kitchen, done out of the necessity of no money for daycare, and no support system for oh, about eight years now.  And this morning for breakfast I had a really asinine loaf of bread, baked by the kid who was brought up with the asinine idea that he could actually make his own food, and had some responsibiity to do so.  I put really asinine blueberry jam on it, made by all of us in one of those asinine canning sessions the kids assisted with by sorting and stemming the berries. If that’s what asinine tastes like, I’ll take a steady diet please.

As for fairytales, you’ve been doing this for years, and you have never before had a crop failure so that you have to ask silly, rich phylosopher whose head is upass what to do?  There are no surpluses from last year or the year before?  You’re lying.

Stuff kept after a year gets freezer burned, and honestly, I wouldn’t trust two year old canned spaghetti sauce.  I suppose if you freeze dried stuff maybe, but even freezing and canning presupposes equipment that a lot of people just don’t have, and freeze-drying is getting really deep in the weeds.  You’ve never actually done this before, have you?

And if you can’t tell, I was being facetious.  I just really can’t stand the tone you’re taking that completely ignores other peoples problems.  And since almost everyone on this blog can’t live like you, I think we can agree that you’re the weird one here.

And please, tell those folks who lobbied and worked to get some of the better trails you have in Harrisburg that they should get their heads out ass, too.  Everything should be done for you, right?  If you’re an adult, you chose where to live.  If safe biking is important to you, then you either go where it exists, or work to get it changed.  Egads people, the lot of you are enough to make someone go libertarian.  Is there anything you all take individual responsibility for?  That you care enough about to seek to effect change?

Um, first off, what trails?  There’s the Greenbelt that runs around downtown, and it does serve downtown fairly well.  The thing is, I live and work in a suburb, and there is one trail that’s privately owned by the apartment complex. 

Honestly, I’d love to move to a better city- but there’s this little thing called “money” that keeps me living where I am.  And I have to go to this thing called “a job” to get it (which I fortunately get “health insurance” through as well, but that’s tangental).  And that “job” is located ten miles away on a road that’s unsafe to bike, with public transit that would take 45 minutes if I caught the right bus.  And since this “job” takes 40 hours or more of my time a week, conveniently when public offices are open for comment and meetings, I can’t really go and complain- sure I can write letters to the editor of the paper of record and CATA and the planning commission, but that and $5 will get you an organic shade-grown cup of coffee at the end of the day, because they’re so strapped for funds that they can barely patch the roads and fill the diesel tanks.  Another one of those “money” problems.  So while I’m trying to change my situation so that I can actually get to a place that shares more of my values, I’m making the best with what I have, where I am.  And so is everyone else that you think is so beneath you.

Ideally, we’d all have public transit and safe, walkable/bikable neighborhoods.  But we don’t.  And you somehow treating this as a moral failing of people just trying to keep their heads above water is not cool at all.

phylosopher wants the poor to have agency—as long as that agency is in complete agreement with HER values.

What if the poor person spends her extra ‘free’ time working for other social goods?

I’m put in mind of a woman I worked with, who clawed her way up from living in her car with her kids to putting her oldest through college. She worked 2 jobs, from 6 in the morning to 7 at night. She had one child still at home, as well as an elderly grandparent for whom she did most of the caregiving.

She cared not one whit for your CSA’s, your locavore food, or canning.

Phylosopher says that she SHOULD.

Most of us would never be so arrogant.
Comment #254: V.  on 08/27 at 11:19 PM

That wasn’t the discussion at all and you know it.  The discussion was that the poor don’t have time to cook - period.  The poor and the rich can both exercise their agency, but neither get sto hide behind the “no time” excuse when they are exercising that agency for other endeavors.

Yeah, Sartrean radical freedom is a bitch.

You know, I think I’m the kind of person phylosopher is talking about when he talks about “typical.”  I have the time to cook if I made it a priority, I have a great kitchen with all the extras, a larger half who loves to play sous chef, access to farmer’s markets year round since I live in a breadbasket and the money to buy whatever food I want.

I cook about twice a week.  In a good week.  Because I don’t want to.  I’d rather support my local restaurants (mmm, hole in the wall Italian) with my money and spend my time doing whatever the fuck I want.

While phylosopher thinks he knows all and tells all, I know one thing he doesn’t—I am not typical.  Not by a long shot.  I am the exception and Alara is much closer to what I see when I, you know, look at the world.  But typical or atypical, we’re all trying to do our best in an increasingly cut-throat world.  The last thing we need is sanctimonious assholes telling us we’re doing it wrong.

Phylosopher, I have come to the conclusion that you are a concern troll, but without the concern part.

See, there you go with the negative waves again Angry G.  First of all, a little real knowledge can go a long way.  No, it doesn’t necessarily suddenly freezer burn after two years.  It may mean a bit of loss of texture/quality, but it will be safe to eat, indefinitely, according to the USDA.  Your spaghetti sauce would be only a year old, and well within USDA guidelines if you used last year’s to cover this year’s shortage.
And yeah, I didn’t know if you were facetious or just outright lying, but as noted, it stunk of fake.  Freezing takes little that even a least equipped kitchen has, and as for canning, Walmart stocks much of it and much of it can be multipurposed.  Freeze drying? uhm, I don’t know of anyone that freeze dries or suggests it as a way to home preserve as this generally takes some industrial equipment, I would think.  If you mean drying, or dehydrating, it is pretty easy and was discussed on another thread. 

Heard of stimulus funds and grants?  How do you think that greenbelt got there?  No, I don’t expect you to go out and pave a trail anymore than I would, but if it is important to you, you work for it, in whatever capacity you can or choose to.  I’ve watched the trail system go from non-existant where I’m at to now-we-need- to- connect- them.  And this is NOT a progressive area.  Nor is it particularly privileged.  But I always find it amazing what some folks taking the time to get involved can do.

In my experience, this blog has gone more like:

PERSON: I need to go to the grocery store, and my car is broken.
YOU: Walk there.
PERSON: I have a broken leg.
YOU: Oh, sorry, why didn’t you say so? Got anybody you can ask for a ride, or to get you some groceries if you give them the money and a list?
PERSON: BROKEN LEG, and I’d have to pick up the phone and talk to people and see if you’re really rich, you just call a cab, that’s it, you must be really rich and privileged and you don’t understand that I can’t do that because I’m poor, and it isn’t fair and you’re mean.
YOU: Those libertarians may have a point.

Many of us DO buy meat from local farmers and eat locally grown veggies.  Some of us DO take part in co-ops.  We just acknowledge the role privilege plays in our ability to do so.

Yes, exactly. I just got done these past couple weeks cramming two of the shelves in my freezer with summer fruits and vegetables I bought in bulk on sale. (That freezer, by the way, was bought on Craigslist for a mere $50). I love to bake bread. I have plans for blueberry jam in the next couple weeks since my husband and I will be making a romantic trip to Sequim, WA where there are oodles of berry farms. I enjoy canning and preserving.

But I can take an honest look at where I’m lucky enough to have the resources to DO all that. I have a car and grocery stores with good vegetable sales; I have a Costco membership so freezer bags are super cheap; I have a kitchen functional enough to prep fruits and vegetables in and good basic kitchen tools. I have a computer and high speed internet in my home so it was simple for me to stalk Craigslist for the freezer, and I have a car with sufficient cargo room and a schedule with enough free time to go pick it up. Neither of my kids is special-needs; I am not disabled at the moment; I have a partner who does at least some of the ordinary housework and childcare; I am not caring for elders.

And so on and so forth. I’ve been very, very close at some points in my life to not having a lot of those things, so I know exactly how easy it would be for someone’s life to be in a place where the things I do are unattainable.

Look, I realize we’ve all had those moments when we pull off something very clever, thrifty and DIY. The butcher looking to offload perfectly good scraps, the urban cherry tree dropping ripe fruit, finding out your new neighbor’s uncle raises free-range chickens, realizing that a friend who has an extra roast would love to trade for some of your jam. But what people like phylosopher are expecting is that people rely on these lucky-shot moments consistently, every day, to shape their shopping and eating habits and that’s just ... unreal. Unreal, condescending and really, when you get down to it, offensive, because the message that’s delivered cheerfully and repeatedly is “I know your life better than you do”.

I would love to see phylosopher dropped into the life of someone who lives in urban poverty and see how all her ideas work for her then.

Many of us DO buy meat from local farmers and eat locally grown veggies.  Some of us DO take part in co-ops.  We just acknowledge the role privilege plays in our ability to do so.
Comment #247: SarahMC on 08/27 at 10:37 PM

Right, which is why some of the newest co-ops include payment plans and a certain number of charity shares and sweat equity opportunities.  Because they recognize that only people of privilege can participate.  Some co-ops are formed to “gasp” save money.  And, again, for the underemployed poor that time can and does get spent working with the co-op. And why some community programs are working to ensure that low-income people have access to co-ops.  Because while some co-ops may in the beginning have privileged members, that is the way it was and always shall be, privileged membership only, co-op without end, amen?

And here comes adkay, carrying the strawman. What took you so long? Talk about setting up impossible hoops - you need a Forshner knife to cook?  Huh?  God, you must be starving because you know they make a special tool for opening Cheeto bags, and you just have to have one if you want to eat Cheetos.  Since Jesse posted about hot dogs versus chx breasts, I think we’re all within reason to assume that posts here aren’t addressing the homeless, but those with plumbing, a stove and a refrigerator.

”...the difficulty being, as Amanda has pointed out, one of caloric intake.”

Sorry about the misattribution.  Gee that was dumb.

Too late, Kristin, been there, done that.  And when you’re in it, it’s tough to get enough objective distance to see ways out.  And that was supposed to be one of the great benefits of the InterNet, that we could “meet” and learn from others who’d been there.  But instead, what I read on this blog is a lot of whingeing and reinforcement that it’s “luck,” I believe you said, reinforcing that idea of outer locus of control especially for the poor. That’s a really harmful attitude and pretty disrespectful.

ACG, at one point in another thread, even Kristen, (I think it was) realized how she was sounding because she posted a pre-emptive denial that she was “sitting in the dark because she wouldn’t get up and light a candle.”

It’s pretty hard NOT to read it that way when that’s what is written.

You’re a moron. Or a liar. Because I said that in clear reference to sharing the resources I have with others who don’t have them.

And actually, as you probably know perfectly well, the conversation goes like this:

PHYLOSOPHER: People can just walk to the store.

SOMEONE: I have a broken leg, man, I’m not walking to any store.

PHYL: Well then get your neighbor with a large comfortable car who has lots of free time and likes driving people to drive you!

SOMEONE: Not everyone has a neighbor with a comfortable car who likes giving rides.

PHYL: No problem, then you go to your friendly local church and make friends with someone who has a comfy car and likes giving rides! In Bumfuck, Iowa, most communities have a First Church Of Comfy Cars!

SOMEONE: Broken leg. And I don’t live anywhere near Bumfuck, Iowa. I don’t think there are any First Church of Comfy Cars around here. And I kind of need groceries tomorrow, not after I go to church and make friends.

PHYL: Why are you only interested in whining? Why won’t you lazy poor people take RESPONSIBILITY for your lives??????

Et cetera.

Really Kristen, where is that reference to sharing in your post?  And I’m the liar, hhmmm, last time we crossed swords, I believe you were the one whingeing about inadequate storage, and an illness that made you too cranky to deal with the kids being in the kitchen while you canned, and how it was always all up to the woman.  Glad to see you’re feeling better and your relationship is more equally balanced now.

SOMEONE: Broken leg. And I don’t live anywhere near Bumfuck, Iowa. I don’t think there are any First Church of Comfy Cars around here. And I kind of need groceries tomorrow, not after I go to church and make friends.

Phylosopher: Well, gee, you’re on the Internet, do you think it might be a good idea to try to find out what services are available to you wherever you live, instead of complaining on here to people who are too distant to offer you concrete help? I mean, I’d imagine you’d be more concerned about your food situation than complaining to strangers about it?

Someone: Well, that’s not what a rich/privileged person would have to do, they’d either have two cars or the money for a cab, why is life so unfair and why are you so mean?

I’m going to bed, but as the person who first used value added on this thread, I think, let me clarify that is in no way the way the term was intended.  “Value added” is a food science/bureacratic term for for processed food.

I still think that telling people they’re lazy and dumb is an unsuccessful strategy for getting them to do things you think they maybe ought to be doing.

Really Kristen, where is that reference to sharing in your post?

Gosh, it took me 30 whole seconds to find it:

http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/comments/gardens_for_victory_over_big_agra/

By the way, lest anyone think I’m cursing the darkness without lighting any candles, one of my favorite things to do is to mail out packages of easy-to-grow seeds to people I know and even strangers, gratis.

and I’m the liar, hhmmm, last time we crossed swords, I believe you were the one whingeing about inadequate storage, and an illness that made you too cranky to deal with the kids being in the kitchen while you canned, and how it was always all up to the woman.

OK, then you’re EITHER a blatant fucking liar OR, just completely lacking in reading comprehension skills. Or astonishingly fucking dense, which is the explanation I lean towards myself. On that same thread, I tried to explain to you over and over again that the problems I was describing were not mine, they were examples of problems that make growing and preserving hard for people with low incomes.

Except for the illness. Yes, my illness did make it necessary for me to give up gardening. I am completely unsurprised that you somehow turned a single, matter-of-fact mention of that illness into “whingeng”. Apparently, it’s “whingeing and whining” any time those uppity po’ people don’t shuck and jive in gratefulness that you’ve solved all their problems and taught them to take! responsibility! for! their! choices!

WhyTF would a poor person (or anyone) think that tomatoes should be available year round?  One eats tomatoes in July -September in the midwest, and canned or sauces the rest.

And if you live in Alaska you should chew on a pine tree and STFU.

mmm Pine sap.

What can I say, phylosopher, you’re officially more moral than all the rest of us put together due to your tireless, Martha Stewart-esque promotion of the healthy lifestyle. Now why don’t you go back to la-la fantasy land, and we’ll go back to dealing with the real world.

Who’s the provincial one now, Ento?  I suggest you actually either go there, or look up something on Alaska.  They do have quite the growing season, at least in Anchorage- ocean influence, duh

No Kristen, you’re the idiot with the sad writing skills, setting up imbecilic strawmen.  So to rehash, no Kristen, I didn’t suggest that the homeless try to can food.  But I think it’s pretty fair to assume that someone on a computer at 1 a.m. isn’t sleeping on a park bench purusing their laptap before nodding off. 

So yeah Kristien, it’s whingeing and whining whenever someone like you, Princess Victimhood,thinks it’s necessary to block any idea, even in the virtual world of a blog with a strawman. 

And it’s funny, how even I got sucked into being compassionate and understanding of Alara’s situation, since I also lived with a disabled person growing up.  Then I read her post where she’s found the time to write, what was it, 98,000 words of fanfic?  Hey, I love writers and it’s her choice of how to spend her time, but then don’t complain about how you have no time to do anything else because, gasp, you had to cook dinner. Or, if she’d chosen not to cook, how she was forced by society to feed her kids hot dogs because she didn’t have time to cook and now they have some chronic illness.  Go read about the ant and the grasshopper Kristen, that’s about your speed.  You too atheist. 
 
And atheist,  gee I wish you’d stop using that moniker, it gives the rest of the secularists a bad name. More moral, in thought perhaps, admittedly, not always in execution.  But certainly sitting behind the computer is a big time drain- so contrary to your silly accusation, I’ll go try to make access to healthy food a reality for more people, you just keep on virtually whingeing and whining and la-la-victimhood land. 

And Dr. D, I sincerely hope you find some good lamb.

Really, NOOC? You really should have told me about that when I was stuck on a train for two hours yesterday (for a 40 minute trip).  ALara wrote about picking hubby up from the train, brilliant deduction on my part, she lives where there is train service.  Other parts of her post indicated that she is living in a city.  (Later confirmed, she lives near DC - and the east coast has some of the best commuter service nationwide.)

I live in Baltimore. The public transit system in Baltimore, frankly, blows chunks. The *trains* are good, and we live within a five-ten minute drive or forty-five minute walk by an adult from the train station. But the buses are erratic; my son walks home from school because the buses line up in such a way that to travel a two mile distance, he takes one bus for a mile and then would have to wait half an hour for the next bus. This would be completely unacceptable as a way for him to *get* to school, and it takes him about an hour to make the walk, so he can’t walk in the morning either (he could, I suppose, if any of us could get up early enough in the morning, but frankly we’re sleep deprived enough.) My husband is actually only a tiny part of my shuttling people around, and he could get around more on his own if he *had* to; the point is that he’s not available to cook and it wouldn’t help anyway in terms of time. No one is *home* until 6:30 at best, so if we cook healthy food, which involves the preparation of fresh vegetables, we do not eat until 7:30.

Maybe im doin it rong, but I didn’t read Alara’s first post as presenting her situation as typical. I read it as saying, “You keep presenting this universal standard, this reason that everyone should be able to put fresh food on the table every night, but it’s just not realistic. Everyone has their own lives, everyone has their own situations, and here’s mine.”

Pretty much, yeah.

It’s funny to me that phylosopher keeps singling out things that I’ve said to try to derail my point, when my point is, I *do* what s/he thinks everyone ought to be able to do AND IT TAKES ALL THE TIME I COULD HAVE DEVOTED TO ANYTHING ELSE. Thus the problem is not “middle-class people and their overscheduled lives” but the two-job family and the forty-hour workday. If I choose to do anything with my evening besides cook—go to the gym with my kids, go shopping with my kids, go to the library with my kids, take my husband to evening college classes in the suburbs, take evening college classes myself anywhere—then I don’t have time to cook. When I cook, I don’t have time to do anything else. And I’m a privileged upper-middle-class person with a frickin’ CAR, who lives in a big city where public, at least, exists, and my family use public whenever it won’t cripple our ability to do something else worthwhile with our time. My disabled husband isn’t the point—the fact that I have kids is the point. If he could drive and he got home from work at the same time I do, it *still* would not change the fact that the time I get home is 6:30 and it takes an hour to cook a healthy dinner.

And it’s funny, how even I got sucked into being compassionate and understanding of Alara’s situation, since I also lived with a disabled person growing up.  Then I read her post where she’s found the time to write, what was it, 98,000 words of fanfic?  Hey, I love writers and it’s her choice of how to spend her time, but then don’t complain about how you have no time to do anything else because, gasp, you had to cook dinner.

I’m a privileged white collar worker. Look at the timestamp on my blog comments. I do this at work. If I had the option to cook for my family while I was at work, maybe I would have more time to spend with my family instead of cooking once I get home. I do my shopping on my lunch hour, I do my banking and my going to the library on my lunch hour, and I write at work. If I were working as a cashier at two separate jobs for 50 hours a week, I wouldn’t have time to write *and* I wouldn’t have time to cook. What gets killed isn’t my ability to write; it’s my ability to keep my house clean, my ability to do activities with my *kids* (so if they need something that they have to be involved in picking out, it had better be able to wait until the weekend), my ability to go to the gym (we have a gym with multiple locations and a fantastic pool for kids, but none of those multiple locations are within driving distance of my workplace on my lunch hour) unless I dump the kids on my husband and go by myself, and then *he* doesn’t get to go… everything that cannot be done while I’m at work is sacrificed so I can cook.

I do it. Because I’m a privileged white collar IT worker with a computer at my desk who can take downtime for fun and relaxation, and who can do the errands needed to keep the household running, while I’m at work. So I can afford to lose an hour and a half to cooking dinner and cleaning up after it, most days. When I’m too exhausted to do it, or when there’s an important project to get done at home, we order pizza or Chinese or eat convenience foods. And we have money, so we can afford to do that. My point was not “woe is me, my husband is legally blind” or “waah, I can’t cook for my kids, we have to go to McDonalds’ every night”—my point is that with a *vast* array of advantages I am able to do what you suggest everyone should do, and it costs me, a great deal. So how is it you expect people who lack my vast array of advantages to just do it? Should people who have been on their feet for 10 hours a day have to stay on their feet for another hour to cook? Should people who can’t get out and run errands at lunchtime forego ever going shopping so that they can cook dinner, and if so, what are they going to cook it with? Should people who have no car, who could get to McDonald’s in a ten minute walk or who could get to the supermarket in a forty-minute walk and then have to get the groceries home and then have to cook them, go to the supermarket after their 8 hour work day and hour-long bus ride back home, or pick up some quick food at McDonalds?

I can’t talk about the rural poor, only the urban poor. I have never been rural; I’ve been suburban and I’ve been urban, and I’ve been poor but with middle class privilege both ways. But I live among the urban working class, who are pretty damn poor. I see how my daughter’s friend’s mom, whose daughter is overweight and who feeds her kids mac anc cheese and hot dogs, has to walk half a mile to the laundromat, with two small kids, and then watch the kids at the laundromat for three or four hours while she does all the clothes, and then walk home. When would she have time to make a healthy dinner with lots of fresh vegetables for her kids? I can drive to the farmer’s market; there’s one year-round that’s a three minute drive on the highway. If you walk it, it’s longer in miles than it is on the highway, and you’re walking. Where does my daughter’s friend’s mom have time to walk an hour to get to the farmer’s market? How can she afford the higher price of the fresher, nicer produce there?

I’m not saying poor people can’t cook, by the way. Plenty of them do. And yes, educating people who don’t know how to cook would be a small positive step. But if people don’t have time to cook, all the learning about cooking won’t help. If they don’t have access to stores that sell fresh, nice produce, *what* can they cook? If they don’t have stoves or they don’t have refrigerators or they don’t have freezers, *how* can they cook, or with what? “Teach everyone to cook!” is an answer that comes out of privilege. It’s not *wrong*—teaching everyone to cook is a good idea. But it won’t solve the problem. And plenty of middle class families are in the middle class because both parents work long hours; they may have plenty of time to go shopping on their lunch hour, but it doesn’t get them home from work any sooner to start cooking.

“And it’s funny, how even I got sucked into being compassionate and understanding of Alara’s situation, since I also lived with a disabled person growing up.  Then I read her post where she’s found the time to write, what was it, 98,000 words of fanfic?”

So people should take no time out for what makes them happy?  How very Purtian/Republican of you. 

Phylosopher, I was giving the benefit of the doubt through much of this, but your privilege (and fuck I hate using that word) is blinding.  I give up.

I’m going to bed, but as the person who first used value added on this thread, I think, let me clarify that is in no way the way the term was intended.  “Value added” is a food science/bureacratic term for for processed food.

phylosopher, guy, just so you know…by using a particular type of terminology you don’t lay claim to it for all time.  Terrible things happen in this world, and one of them is that other people will use the same words you use and mean entirely different thngs by them.  It’s unfair, I know, but that’s the way it works, and I don’t see much prospect it’ll change. 

Adapt or else…

And it’s funny, how even I got sucked into being compassionate and understanding of Alara’s situation, since I also lived with a disabled person growing up.  Then I read her post where she’s found the time to write, what was it, 98,000 words of fanfic?

I have an idea, why don’t you take the condescension that you call “compassion” and “understanding” and keep them both far, far away from me and mine, m’kay?

<blockqutoe>And atheist, gee I wish you’d stop using that moniker, it gives the rest of the secularists a bad name.</blockquote>

Oh noes… I disappointed a concern troll with an enormously swollen self-regard! How tragic.

Wow! I just read this entire thread and I am happy to say that I have a better understanding about what a big, gaping asshole phylosopher is.  While I had a sneaking suspicion about this after reading the threads about breastfeeding, I now know that phylosopher is a completely myopic asswipe.  Go on phylosopher, become a libertarian.  You are officially a big enough asshole to join their ranks!

Okay then! carry on!

I see the junior high bus just stopped at pandagon.

This makes me so angry. Why do they hate on poor people so much? I was one of those poor people for years and I hated it. No car, lousy jobs, holes in my clothes. And I worked hard too. Some of the hardest working people I know are dirt poor. Their skills aren’t valued, indeed they are valued as people because of their lack of skills. Anyone here ever read Nickled and Dimed?