I cannot imagine buying food at the dollar store even if you are poor.
Eggs, beans, rice, bread, potatoes, apples, bananas, are among the cheapest foods at any grocery store or supermarket.
Eggs, beans, rice, bread, potatoes, apples, bananas, are among the cheapest foods at any grocery store or supermarket.
It’s not just a matter of unit price, but also time, convenience, and cal/$. Fruit / veg in general is pretty expensive when looked at from a cal/$ perspective — you pay for a lot of water there. Potatoes, beans, rice are pretty slow cooking, and require dealing with dishes after.
So for my single mom, it was pretty hard to provide anything but
1) fast food (decent cal/$, extremely convenient)
2) microwaveable tv dinners (Meh cal per dollar, but long shelf life, extremely convenient)
3) PB / lunch meat sandwiches (basically god tier for poor chow)
For reference, my mom worked many jobs and got maybe 4-5 hrs sleep a night. Adding 30 minutes for a days worth of meals was a lot.
You have to want to eat healthy and set the appropriate mindset. For example instead to order that fastfood crap just eat some simple raw, "spartan" food(bananas, boiled meat or even fried meat etc). I have some good experience with that working long hours on my own startup(s) without distractions.
I doubt you don't have 30 minutes to "prepare" your dinner. After all you don't really prepare much. Just boil or fry whatever raw food you have.
Of course convincing kids to eat not very tasty food may be a different story but it's doable because I've seen that too.
At some point you may start to appreciate the simple food and hate when the chefs put you sugar and all kinds of "flavours" in your food.
At a certain point you’re balancing how much sleep you need to perform at work (4-5 hours) and the amount of time you’d spend commuting and working (~16 hours a day). When you throw in errands, cleaning, maintenance, and maybe 30 minutes in passing period leisure, there really isn’t time to cook.
If you have kids perhaps the solution is for each one to wash its own plate(s). My point is that you can be poor and eat healthy but you have to want that.
- a lack of time
— a lack of resources (just two folks, no expendable income)
- a lack of cognitive energy, probably stress induced from managing the above two.
I think this is a particularly rich western country thing though, the method of being poor you describe works great when you have an extended family who can pool resources. But for a single mom and young child, you can’t smart your way out of it. It’s like trying to optimize a triple a game to run on twenty year old hardware —- just ain’t the cycles, have to reduce the workload.
I think this is really the most important point. We know we should do better but we lack the cognitive energy. I can totally understand it.
Getting yourself on the right track is hard but at least you can develop a mental story you can control and stay "in the zone". I can't imagine how hard it is being poor and single with children, always being distracted by thousands of small issues.
It’s a problem with not having enough time or money to eat well. That’s the take away. The cognitive stress is just a bonus.
Put another way, we totally could have eaten better if we had more time or money. It’s highly unlikely we could have eaten better if we had more mental fortitude.
To reinforce that point, my mom was a very fit person who prioritized eating well before becoming poor. Ran, mountain biked, ski-ed.
After I got money, pretty much all my disposable goes into health and food to fuel. Lift, cycle, surf, run. In high school, I wrestled explicitly because coach would buy me food. It wasn’t mental fortitude or will that was lacking.
It was just time and money.
I have children so can empathise with anyone short of time and trying to accommodate juvenile palates, but pasta with some sauce options is one of our fallbacks - the two youngest like pesto. Rice is another (trivial in a rice cooker).
I’d have to ask her about time and sleep but I remember it being more hectic than it was strained. This may not have been as true without the assistance we were able to take advantage of. I remember being woken up very early (around 4-5 AM) to be taken to a baby sitter. I must’ve been 4 or 5 at the time. I would sleep in the car along the way.
Buy 10 kg of rice, a bag of beans and some frozen veggies for under $20, cook it all at once in a big pot. You've got 10 meals for under $20 and maybe an hours time.
Put it in the fridge/freezer and you've got healthy meals for a week that cost $0.50 each.
Not sure how a single $10 meal at fast food could be considered "a cheaper alternative".
And yeah, if you have the time, highly recommend the bean and rice / boiled dry staples route. Way better. But if you don’t have the time, can be hard to pull off.
I agree with your post overall but would quibble with this point. Maximizing calories isn't a very good goal. Eating fewer calories but more fruits and vegetables would be an improvement for most people in the US, regardless of socioeconomic status.
When you’re really poor, if you buy food naively or based on what is recommended nutritionally for financially secure people, it’s very easy to end up in a situation where you spent all your cash but are still hungry. If you keep doing this, you’ll lose too much weight, get sick, and won’t be able to work. So you have to keep in mind the amount of satiety you’re getting for your cash when you buy food. Fruit and veg have tend to have very low satieties for the $, despite being nutritionally very valuable when you do have sufficient calories.
The amount of paternalistic "just make better choices!" nonsense in this thread is giving me a headache.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/11/22/23472207/bird-...
Food in the US is insanely cheap. Wow.
$4.78 USD at the cheapest store here, and this is on special.
I was about to say that this is roughly what supermarket eggs cost here in Switzerland but then realised that your price was for a dozen and I was thinking a box of six.
Eggs here are often sold in units of one (you fill your own box with however many eggs you need) and cost about US$0.80 per egg.
Food inflation is real but not experienced the same way by many Americans who consume mostly processed foods, which are less vulnerable to commodities shocks. So I can't be too surprised the HN crowd hasn't noticed. But eggs are apparently specially fucked[1] due to an avian flu outbreak, so you're kinda cherry picking. Cherries btw, have seemingly doubled in price, but pre-pandemic was the cheapest they'd ever been in the past 30 years.[2]
More importantly, I think you're missing the point the article and OP were making: dollar store supply chains for these goods suck compared to grocery stores that are optimized for this. Whatever inflation has done to raw goods is amplified at these small dollar stores.
[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/11/why-egg-prices-are-surging-b... [2]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WPU01110203
If DOLLAR GENERAL qualifies, for many poor communities it's the only option in town.
Frozen burritos did so I didn’t complain too much.
But you see people with SNAP pushing around carts full of things that aren't eggs and beans and potatoes... and why would they? The maximum monthly benefit for a family of 4 is $939/month, you can buy whatever you want with that.
<insert excuse that poor people can't cook or don't have time or ...>
And the correction, when applied, is always to the detriment of a huge number of other people who actually needed the help.
This is how we get means-testing, SALT caps, and bad immigration law. We have got to be more humane than this.
Maybe. But this is how America works. We wont let you starve to death. If you're truly physically disabled, we won't leave you to die. But beyond that it's up to you. And in exchange, what's "up to you" is limitless and celebrated and compensated endlessly. Other societies make this tradeoff in a different direction. But I'm happy there's at least one place on earth that doesn't.
It's up to you, but please be aware that you will be playing a rigged game.
In this game, those with money will be competing with you. They will also make the rules. In most situations they will also be referee.
Therefore please make every effort to be born into at least some money. That is, by far, your best chance of success.
Of course we are not heartless. We let a tiny number of previously poor people rise up to serve as both inspiration, and example to the rest. This helps re-enforce the idea that you too can rise up if you just worked "a little bit harder."
Unfortunately we cannot raise the standard of living for everyone - since most of you simply don't deserve it. Plus your cheap labour is necessary for our current comfort levels.
But I sleep well at night since my life is completely deserved, clearly we all had the same opportunities, I just worked harder than you did.
The standard of living has been rising constantly throughout American history
Perhaps by statement is better said as "we can't raise the standard at the same rate for everyone."
This isn't a universal rule though. Many countries have raised the standards of the poor in proportion to the rich. But you'll see fewer billionaire yachts or private jets in those places too.
Yes you will
> If you're truly physically disabled, we won't leave you to die.
Yes you will
Do you really think that as a nation that lacks so much empathy for the poor, THAT’S where we suddenly realize someone’s humanity? No, in fact if someone is at this point, most Americans would probably not even notice (and some amount would likely celebrate) their passing. If the safety net lets someone fall this far, why would it catch them now?
Just think of the blind eye we turn to people experiencing homelessness— as if their neighbors aren’t already wishing them harm while sipping a bottle of wine with their family and friends during their holiday dinner.
I used to live in downtown Phoenix and I’d have people trying to feed me when I was just riding my bike random places. Like, I’d be half a block away and they’d shout out “hey, man, you hungry?” And this is just people who would roam around looking for people to help not counting the permanent places that served food on a regular basis.
If you’re willing to accept help ‘merica has enough to go around but you have to show up to the shelters sober and have to at least put in the barest minimum of effort to maybe, just maybe, appear to be trying to improve your lot in life.
I spent nine years driving a cab and a big chunk of that job was hauling people to/from medical appointments because they didn’t have transportation (or couldn’t afford to drive) and the state was paying for their medical care. Once Uber/Lyft came to town that’s pretty much all I did and I kept pretty busy.
Unless you're a diabetic, then fuck you. Die.
Somewhere well below frozen burritos and pizzas: https://efficiencyiseverything.com/calorie-per-dollar-list/
Cooking takes time. Working too many hours (for good reasons) robs you of that time. Cooking adds other time-consumers, shopping, washing up and so on.
Equally, once you have a skill set, cooking doesn't need to take a lot of time. If you are lucky you learned to cook growing up, or if you have the time you can learn to cook as an adult.
While your nan breads are perhaps not the best example of quick cooking (flour isn't necessarily the best starting point) it's true that stir-frying some veggies, or anything with eggs etc can be done in a couple minutes.
But cooking quickly takes skills, and practice, and acquiring those takes time.
As an anecdote we required our children to learn to cook young, and by 13 cook a regular meal for the family once a week. Ultimately some enjoyed the process more than others, but all are able to feed themselves quickly, and with little effort. If I have one bit of useful advice it us to encourage kids to learn how to cook for themselves, and for others. And yes, alas, I'm aware of the cost in money and time in doing that.
Where it gets hard is over 70 hours a week.
And more importantly, you and I as engineers are going to operate in drastically different mental spaces than someone that has to work 60h weeks solely to survive. Someone that needs to work between multiple jobs, or deal with physically intensive jobs or customer facing jobs are not going to able to turn off after work as easily.
My parents were fishermen and would spend way more than that out in the bay due to the necessities of the job. When you're done with that work, after hauling bait and working on the boat you have zero energy to do much else afterwards.
In reality people who work more than the standard working hours (40) are effectively undercutting everyone else in terms of price per hour worked. Working more hours for the same pay is not something to be proud about; it is an attack on you colleagues. The overwork behaviour causes increased competition, where everybody's expected work hours will silently increase ('why don't you work as hard as they are'). The employer will of course be happy, because they get a better deal. Giving away your time for free shouldn't be something honorable.
It's a bit different if you are getting compensated for the extra hours, e.g. if you are the founder of the company, or are getting good overtime pay. But I still think there needs to be moderation.
Emolyees should be working less than they are today, not more. 40 hours is already too much to have a balanced life. I think a more reasonable level would be somewhere around 4x7 = 28 hours per week. But instead of moving an inch towards that level, our societies have gone in the other direction, where unpaid overtime is the norm.
I hope we can see a attitude change about work / overwork in my lifetime. But I'm not very optimistic about that.