"She then wipes down the family’s small refrigerator, stuffed with lukewarm milk, Tropicana grape juice and containers of leftover Chinese."
Eating out is a great way to stay poor.
Eating out is a great way to stay poor.
The first is that when you have a refrigerator that's sub-par and don't have a freezer, you have to buy the smallest quantities of anything perishable; that means it's expensive as hell. There are things like rice that you can buy in bulk, but if you're in a place with bugs and rodents (like they are), you're screwed on that too, generally.
The second is that if you're in a homeless shelter, you can't cook. At most, you can make a sandwich, but that goes back to point #1.
Eating out isn't a convenience for them; it's survival.
Blasphemy!
In order to have food stored, it basically has to be packaged in plastic or glass. Peanut butter. Jelly. Bread.
A jar of peanut butter is the perfect food for someone without fridge or pantry. It can be stored at room temperature, it is calorie-dense, it is cheap, and it actually has some nutritional value.
If I am ever forced to live at poverty income without basic residential infrastructure, I would definitely walk to the nearest actual grocery store and carry back peanut butter. You can also keep eggs around a while, even in the US, if you can replace the cuticle (removed during processing) with wax. I'd probably cook them in their shells with an electric kettle, dip them in paraffin from plumbers' candles, and put them back into the container.
Refrigerators are easily found used for under $100 (just like the flat screen TV from someone else's example here).
Eating out, at a minimum, is 2-3x ingredient cost.
Besides, you're reading way more into my comment than was intended. Its substance was:
"To save money, don't eat out."
You're projecting.
I would hope 2). Because here's the thing: we can't extricate ourselves from our history, and the people closest to the problem have a lot more information about it than those moralizing from afar. There's a bunch of questions you don't bother to ask yourself:
Was the container of Chinese food actually purchased or found? Who knows. Probably, but the parents don't seem to make a habit of it: the daughter makes her siblings PB&Js. And is it a crazy expense? Also who knows, but buying a couple containers of cooked white rice in NYC isn't going to be crazy expensive.
Are there nearby grocery stores to buy actual food? Maybe, but more likely the nearest places will be liquor stores selling shitty food for outrageous prices.
Does the facility they're in provide the means to cook raw ingredients? Probably not.
Is the electricity supplied consistent enough to trust having more than a single meal in the fridge? Who knows.
And perhaps the biggest thing: do the parents have the capability to plan to cook and to succeed in that endeavor? You might say that "these people deserve to suffer if they can't manage to cook rice and beans," but here's the thing: maybe they can't. Maybe they never picked up that skill, maybe drugs have destroyed their capabilities for planning more than a minute ahead. But regardless, they can't.
In tech, we recognize that we have to build systems out of potentially faulty components. But when we're building a society, there's a strain of thought saying that you shouldn't design for fault, because if a component is faulty, it deserves to be dumped into a garbage bin.
That's perverse.
"I'm curious: if you found another engineer who was in a messy codebase doing something something seemingly crazy, would you 1) assume they're an idiot or 2) reserve judgment until you know more?"
I might say:
"Having a messy codebase is a way to keep having bugs."
That's analogous to my original statement.
"In a good month, their combined efforts can bring in a few hundred dollars."
They are in a situation where they cannot afford to save money in most conventional ways.
Spending $100 on a fridge that they can't properly use (because they can't cook in a shelter) isn't a wise appropriation of a significant portion of their monthly income.
The mom is drinking a beer on the bus, isn't she? I'm guessing that because it's in a brown paper bag.
When you're poor, homeless, and don't own a car, moving refrigerators is not practical.
When you're poor and living in a nightmare hole of a shelter, your nice new fridge might well be just taken from you.
A friend of mine recently, moved into social housing. I donated some of my furniture to him for free. I also paid 50 euros for a moving van and 20 to have some guys help me.
The furniture cost $0 to him, a little bit to me.
Reading Daeken's comment would be a good start toward turing that around.
It's an effective piece -- it's able to wring fresh emotion from people who've been hearing similar stories for decades and have become desensitized. But it's not a policy discussion, and it's not even a good starting point for a policy decision.
Source: former journalist.
If you have some method of heating, you can add pasta and rice and beans and oats and sweet potatoes and lentils.
If people are really lacking these tools, I'd be happy to write a check to a New York charity that provides them.
No, this isn't a technical problem. It's bigger than that.
(re your last point, I don't see how this family is going to take advantage of incremental assistance like that)
Whether that's true or not depends where you live. The US and Europe have developed different systems for egg production and storage.
Obviously none of the things I listed will form a complete diet, but if you are eating mostly take-out they are probably a superior substitute for some fraction of those take-out meals.
Eating normal food, with some organics but not all, is reasonably affordable if you're willing to cook.
That takes longer, but results are better.
I don't know how people afford to eat out. It seems that unless you go Taco Bell (and there's no shame in that) two people is $25-50 per meal.
A culture of independence.