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Comment by trentgreene | Hacker News Reader

I kind of hate that your being downvoted b/c your perspective here is a very common one.

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.

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I know fast-food and microwaveable tv dinners are cheap and "worry free" but you pay the price with your health. Consider it like achool abuse. You get away with it several times but eventually your health will deteriorate.

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.

I can say with 100% certainty there was not 30 minutes to cook dinner alone.

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.

And yes, to your point, you will eventually rack up a ton up health problems with this lifestyle… to the articles point, being poor is expensive. It you have the option to not be poor, definitely take it!!

Depends really how you trade speed for complexity. To be honest at the end of the meal I had no more than 2-3 items to wash. Of course this means your dinner will look and taste "poor" but it's way "better" than the microwave pizza/dinner.

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.

We _definitely_ wanted it. Badly. It was not a case of “not wanting it.” It was a case of:

- 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.

>> - a lack of cognitive energy, probably stress induced from managing the above two.

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.

The cognitive energy is the least important point by a country mile. Again, you can’t optimize your way out of severe poverty. It is not a problem of mental fortitude, self induced or not. I feel like statements like the one I’m replying to miss the point entirely.

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.

This is a really arrogant attitude that reeks of the 'pull yourself up by your bootstrap' bullshit.

IDK if it’s arrogance — it can be interpreted that way, but I think a more generous interpretation is that it’s really hard for people who haven’t been poor and chronically food insecure to understand what it’s like and the situations that lead to it. Which makes it hard for the conversations to be productive.

Do Americans in that situation serve much pasta? Pasta is generally cheap, stores well and cooks quickly. You can serve it with pesto out of a jar, butter/oil/pepper, or various other tomato-based jar sauces if short of time.

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).

Yes. Tons of pasta and chili too. Hamburger is (or at least used to be) pretty much the cheapest beef you can get.

Yep, ditto. You can sometimes score good deals on meat that’s turned brown from oxidization because it’s unsellable to most folks. Tastes fine, same nutritional value

> Fruit / veg in general is pretty expensive when looked at from a cal/$ perspective — you pay for a lot of water there.

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.

You’re right, I’ll be a bit more specific.

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.

I was also raised by a single Mom and can attest to a similar experience. Although I don’t remember a great deal of fast food. It was a kind of luxury thing we had a few times a month. I remember my Mom trying to avoid it. We were also on assistance and ate out of food pantries a lot. We had lots and lots of canned food e.g. soup and various kinds of vegetables, and they gave us ridiculous amounts of cheese. You basically take what you can get. My Mom used to trade excess cheese blocks with my grandmother for laundry detergent.

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.

As another child of an overworked single mom, allow me to cheer for your comment.

The amount of paternalistic "just make better choices!" nonsense in this thread is giving me a headache.

My experience was the opposite. We were dirt poor and had home cooked meals all the time, it was way cheaper than fast food or microwaveable meals.

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".

True, maybe the fast food was a luxury we had cause my mom worked at McDonald’s for a minute. Fast food is sometime cheaper / free-er when you have someone on the inside.

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.

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