1400-1800 calories for an average height adult male is a reasonable floor (and that's a non-obesity scale). The $1.30 per day budget might get you around 1/3 of that calorie requirement, without solely existing on something like rice.
You can get by on closer to ~$90-$120 per month, per adult, and actually bring in enough calories to not starve over time. That's a surviving floor. You can temporarily go a bit lower to scrape by ($50-$90), however that's not livable longer term, you'll suffer increasingly.
If you modestly augment with various free food assistance options (not talking about SNAP), you could stretch the lower ~$50-$90 category up to something more like the $120 category consistently.
Here's who can't practically afford that: Someone with 3 kids working 80 hours a week in service or truck driving. Or someone that is disabled. Or someone that has severe mental health issues.
There are quite a few prerequisites that you assume exist that just don't in a poor American household and the primary one that doesn't exist is time.
Beyond the time you need to plan, shop, cook, clean, you need:
-Motivation to do so
-Pots and pans
-Knowledge of cooking and nutrition
-A grocery store nearby (39.5 million Americans live in food deserts)
-A way to get there (Many can't afford cars or can't drive)
-Working water and electricity
TENS OF MILLIONS of Americans have none of the above
And whereas in other countries you may live in a multi-generation home or otherwise be able to do subsistence farming, that's not really possible without land of some sort which almost no poor people in America have.
Your list of reasons is really just betraying how little you think poor people are like yourself. You are portraying them as helpless animals.
Also, lack of motivation as a reason they can't boil an egg, so they just go hungry instead? Do you even care about reality or just scoring internet points?
Unless you're working a blue collar job in America you don't see this
You are actually claiming that there are tens of millions of adult humans, who have lived 20, 30 years, and are literally incapable of procuring one pot. You are saying they can't independently manage to acquire the cooking skills to boil rice. It's just absurd.
Meanwhile those same people are statistically obese. Somehow despite living without electricity, money, pots, illiterate and 50 miles from the nearest grocery store they eat enough to be obese (can you explain how they get enough food to eat too much despite it being impossible for them to acquire groceries at all?) and yet it is unreasonable to think they might boil an egg.
It's not a case of not understanding, or not having the skills, or it being “unreasonable to think they might” do anything.
https://butyoudontlooksick.com/articles/written-by-christine...
https://cookingonabootstrap.com/2022/04/12/its-not-about-the...
I get not understanding, but can you try not to be so obnoxious about it, please? It's clear you don't have these problems. If they seem to you to be absurd struggles to have, read some Albert Camus.
I accept there are sick people. But not all people are sick. Most poor people do in fact make themselves inexpensive food at home. That you and others want to claim it is impossible for them to do so is bizarre.
Also please go answer the question over in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36232600 of what ingredients go in the sandwich.
You haven't heard of depressed people? A lot of homeless people are depressed, which is why they don't work.
Normal people who are used to cooking at home see it as no big deal to whip up a simple meal.
Some of the rest of us encounter insurmountable obstacles in our own kitchens.
Personally, I haven't prepared a single meal at home since last October. I've been ordering delivery at an extraordinary markup.
Several bad experiences last year put me permanently off home meal preparation. I've tried all the alternatives. I'm desperate to save money; I'm desparate to eat better. I have been left with no other choice.
Basically 100% of my paychecks go to fund those meals because the alternatives are absolutely intractable, due to several of the above factors.
Most people can't imagine being unable to use the microwave or boil water.
It's difficult to explain succinctly what the barriers are, and without getting in a big debate about my abilities and limits. But in a nutshell:
Start with intractable problems with pest control. If I eat delivery, I get no bugs. If I prepare fresh meals, the cockroaches, gnats and other pests immediately descend. I can't avoid standing water/dirty dishes, and so the longer I try my hand in the kitchen, the worse the bugs get. I'm a renting tenant and 100% reliant on the landlord to do the pest control, and it's ineffective. If I want a deep treatment, I have to shut down my entire kitchen, tear it apart, and put it back together afterwards. So I am roundly cursed for even trying this.
Fitness - I'm not a young man anymore and as a beginner, my time in the kitchen is very inefficient. I could spend 2-3 hours at a time for one meal in a day. I couldn't sleep or rest enough to make it up, and living with this deficit took its toll, especially if stopping to rest meant I wouldn't eat or empty the dishes from the sink, and we're back to cockroaches.
Comptenence - since I never learned how to really cook or put recipes together, I find it amazingly hard to plan out meals and produce stuff that is appealing or even normal. I found it very difficult to collect recipes and work from them, especially when trying to manage fridge/pantry inventory, and oftentimes I wound up with something edible but really weird-tasting because I put together the wrong flavors. Or, my hunger would militate against knowing what I am doing and make it incredibly frustrating to remember all the steps in cooking.
Cooking meals from scratch requires planning and organization, which I found it hard to adapt into a kitchen context, and it was crazy-making if I was hungry for breakfast now and there was nothing but dirty dishes in the sink and I didn't know where to start.
I went to the hospital multiple times last year, because I was extraordinarily exhausted and I truly felt that my heart could fail any moment if I kept that all up. It was truly traumatic. If I could merely find a middle way to preparing simple meals once in a while, just to keep delivery costs down, I would do that, but for now, I'll follow the path of least fear and trembling.
Then you can start with pasta which takes slightly longer to boil and you can get a pre-made jar of pasta sauce to put on it. You can even put cold pasta sauce on a hot pasta and it will warm up.
Neither of these dishes will harm you if you mess up cooking them, and both take less than 30 minutes. Practice makes perfect, so you can iterate and try new things.
I've had pretty intense past problems in the past, I found the best ways to address them are keeping all food and sealed containers, preferably glass jars with a ceiling lid. Doing dishes and avoiding standing water also helps. The idea is the star of the bugs. If there is no food they won't come looking.
As a side note not intended to be aggressive or attacking, if the idea of boiling pasta or Ramen induces fear or anxiety, you should seek medical help. Not everyone is typical, but everyone has the opportunity to learn and grow.
As for out of touch, I grew up eating government peanut butter and free school lunches. Lots of years that is all I ate. Food assistance is great and we should do more, but jeff bezos hording wealth isn't causing people to starve as gp suggests, food is incredibly cheap. The idea people are starving is rediculous.
You realize that there are people who are homeless and who live in areas that don't have any support systems for homelessness (e.g. homeless shelters), right?
You have proposed that a homeless person obtain a phone, find a library that'll mail books, obtain a mailbox, have a book mailed to them, presumably pay for return postage, all so they can obtain recipes to cook on a stove they don't have with utensils they likely lack with ingredients they can't afford.
Homeless people aren't in that situation because they needed someone to write down "how to make rice in a pot", nor are they likely to have discretionary income for your proposals.
And I feel like you do not understand that the average American is not homeless.
If you are homeless you are not going to be a person who is spending >$40/mo for food and needing a cook book to make cheap food interesting to eat. You will just buy cheap food until you bootstrap yourself back to a house and a stable job.
People who spend >$40 per month on food who live 40 miles away from the nearest library.
But of course, there will always be people falling through any cracks. That does not mean that the original piece of advice isn't sound, though.
Moreover—can you put beans, rice, eggs, and mixed veggies in a sandwich? Because a sandwich was one of OP’s “$40/mo” suggestions. A food budget where a simple ham and cheese sandwich is an unimaginable luxury is ridiculous to propose as a reasonable target.
Not to mention the spoilage that goes on. The rice and beans can keep long-term, but you'll need to do logistics on chicken, tortillas etc to keep fresh ones in the pipeline without wasting any, which you can't afford either.
Look, I've had food boxes before. The food box is an amazing wondrous bit of charity where you can get a ton of free food just for asking. There's cereal, I've gotten big hunks of frozen meat, dry beans and rice, I've gotten bits of candy and such, lots of staples, powdered milk, canned chickpeas and spinach and you-name-it.
However the food boxes only go so far. They won't cook the meals for you. They won't give you the utensils, pots and pans. You don't get any fats, oils, herbs, spices, or seasonings. they won't tell you which ingredients combine in a flavorful way. You don't get any recipes that use these ingredients and don't call for something you don't have.
Now you boil some water, throw in some beans and rice plain, and cook until soft. Go ahead, throw in some string beans for vitamins, and some kind of protein. Spoil yourself! Then try to choke that down in the absence of salt, butter, or anything that might impart flavor. How long until you're going to just kill yourself?
Our knowledge of what is healthy is spotty at best, but plenty of countries that eat a lot of ham and cheese (France, Spain, Italy) are fairly OK health-wise, so it certainly seems to indicate that there is nothing seriously wrong about either.
The entire problem is solved, everyone, crisis over.
The argument seems to revolve around the fact that there will always be people who are way worse off than most others. It’s not particularly more surprising than the fact that there will also always be people who are way better off than most others.
> Deaths attributed to malnutrition more than doubled, from about 650 in 2018 to roughly 1,400 in 2022, according to preliminary death certificate data from the California Department of Public Health. The same trend occurred nationwide, with malnutrition deaths more than doubling, from about 9,300 deaths in 2018 to roughly 20,500 in 2022, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
> Malnutrition is particularly common among older people, especially those who are ill, low-income, homebound, or without reliable access to healthy food or medical services. It can result from not eating enough but also from poor eating habits that lead to nutritional deficiencies. The majority of deaths in California from malnutrition last year occurred in residents 85 and older.
Also in the same period there were around 300,000 deaths due to obesity with around 30,000 in california.
The claim was that no one dies of involuntary malnutrition. The claim is false.
It's completely obvious that OP meant that otherwise healthy people aren't starving to death. That used to be common, millions of otherwise healthy people died in famines in Ireland and Ukraine and China not so long ago. People that were healthy couldn't find a way to get their hands on enough calories and they wasted away and died, and their children wasted away and died, gradually over months. That literally doesn't happen in the US and hasn't for a long long time, and if you are claiming it does you live in a land of make believe.
That sure sounds like the "low-income, homebound, or without reliable access to healthy food" bit from my quote.
> It's completely obvious that OP meant that otherwise healthy people aren't starving to death.
The chances of zero people having done that in a country of 330 million people "in decades", as asserted, is quite slim.
https://www.mtshastanews.com/story/news/2021/02/05/living-an... is a case of a physically healthy man starving to death in SF.
https://www.newsweek.com/2023/01/20/starved-death-american-j... is a case of someone starving to death in jail for want of $100 bail.
I rather suspect other examples can be found.
Like the parent said, you seem to be disputing my original claim out of spite and in bad faith.