My mother said her 1958 cookbook she got as a wedding gift suggested that 'budget conscious' (meaning poor) housewives could consider cheaper types of meat like salmon.
My ex's family if I can tell were immediately descended from impoverished sharecroppers. Grandma picked tobacco when she was a little girl. Her family when they had money ate badly cooked steak a couple of times a week. Definitely a class thing. My family being pretty much solidly middle class and from California that sort of thing just wasn't.
I grew up in a decidedly lower-class family (at least as concerns income) and my parents would have been able to afford $130 a year. Of course the kind of financial discipline that lets you save money while on unemployment benefits/working a low-income job makes it quite unlikely to spend it all on a single meal.
I'm fairly certain that a middle-class family would be able to afford a $130 meal if they really wanted, it's just that they don't feel like they are getting more enjoyment than 4 $30 meals would provide, and that's OK. Don't pretend that middle-class people have no money to spend, when in reality they just have none left over after spending it on all kinds of things.
> "Lots of families in our study cooked almost every night, in part because it was the cheapest option. But when their cupboards ran bare, they ate ramen and hot dogs, not a pan of roast chicken and vegetables, as food gurus recommend. Mothers said that if they had more money, they'd buy fresh fruit for their kids, but this was just an occasional splurge, not an everyday reality. Even the more financially stable middle-class mothers in our study talked about making trade-offs between the foods they wanted to buy for their families and the foods they felt they could afford."
Chicken, veggies and potatoes, as well as the grill, all cost money. The grill especially. That's a large initial investment - yes, you can buy a cheap grill, but then you have to buy the propane, and the food that comes off it going to be much harder to get palatable.
The lower middle class can afford decent food, just some of them don’t want to eat within their means or aren’t cost conscious.
Actually I think innumeracy is a big problem for a lot of people with low incomes. I have a relative who I suspect is innumerate and it’s both fascinating and sad when you get insight into their budgeting/estimation abilities.
I am currently poor (for an American). I do not really buy cheap food. Good quality food is my single biggest expense. It keeps me out of the ER (where I am supposed to practically live, given my medical condition). I do this even though I routinely run short on funds at the end of the month and this sometimes means fasting for a day or so or simply being short-rationed the last week. Going hungry part of the time harms my health less than eating crap all of the time.
People are people first and foremost and their current economic/social class is not the only determiner of their lifestyle choices.
The US is a pretty wealthy place. I lived in Italy for something like 15 years, and people there eat a lot of fish too, of varying kinds. By and large, they do not have as much money as people do in the US
The US is a wealthy place, but a lot of individual families aren't wealthy at all. Cheap, mass-produced, pre-prepared food (either frozen or in cans/boxes) are the cheapest things to eat. Where I lived - a few hours flight to a coast or many hours of driving - fish was one of the more expensive protein options if one doesn't want to eat fish sticks or the like. Chicken and pork were usually cheaper, followed by beef.
If it were only about efficiency, you'd probably just eat beans and rice, day in and day out, with a bit of this and that thrown in
This misses part of the equation - the stuff folks are eating are time efficient as well. Plus a good amount of folks wouldn't know what to do with lentils and rice: Cooking isn't a focus of schools. I had 6-9 weeks of cooking instruction, and we only cooked (in groups of 4-5) once every week or two and that included things like baking sweets. It is amazing how many folks don't just look this stuff up.
I hear this kind of argument all the time and I don't buy it at all. How do poor people have less time to cook than well off people? We all work the same hours.
Pasta costs next to nothing, as does rice, as do beans. Veg and dairy are a bit more but still cheap by any standards. Cigarettes and alcohol, on the other hand, are expensive. As is running a car, or going to McDonalds.
So maybe try subsidising your meals by smoking less, or drinking less, or eating out less, or walking more.
I dunno. Even when I was making minimum wage, groceries never seemed like a significant part of my budget. I never understood people trying to save 10c to get, like, the cheapest mustard possible. Compared to the big expenses (rent) food was really a small percentage of a budget, especially if you avoid stocking up on meat or alcohol.
I remember being much more frustrated by friends trying to drag me out to eat at restaurants or throwing away food. Like, one sit down meal was worth three days of groceries!
Keep in mind that the working poor are not just poor in money they are poor in time. The often acknowledged downside to extremely cheap food budgets is that they offer little variety and don't taste that good - especially not to most kids. The often unacknowledged downside to extremely cheap food budgets is that they can be time intensive, meaning mom or dad needs to cook breakfast, lunch and dinner.
He was the sort of guy who didn't really grasp economics, or hygiene. We lived in a country where you could get fish and chips cooked for you for about $5.
I agree with you. I was surprised to read she could afford to pay $25 for a meal! In her broke situation, she should be mastering the art of cooking! Then these $25 would last her for a week or longer, not for 3 meals.
Maybe I do sound judgmental, but I grew up in USSR right before it got collapsed, and I remember how our family tried to survive :-|
Some people can not afford food. I grew up in a single parent household, 2 boys who ate like horses. My poor mother could not keep up feeding us working her $12/hr job. We ate food from a store where products go before they go to trash (I believe).
People of all income groups in the US seem to have problems living within their means.
My co-worker and I were talking about how much we spend on groceries per week, and it turns out they spend about twice as much as we do (and we could cut some corners). I'm sure my mother spent half of what we spend.
She buys the big container of store brand oatmeal, we buy "better oats". My co-worker buys the cups of individually portioned servings.
My mother buys the store brand chocolate milk, we buy fairlife, my co-worker buys individual fairlifes.
$8 bottles of salad dressing, more expansive cuts of meat, $15 bags of frozen shrimp, it all adds up. And this is just groceries.
Yeh, meat and vegetables can be expensive. But, for example, a bag of lentils, a bag of brown rice, some tinned tomatoes and spices. That stuff is so cheap, none of it requires refrigeration and it's easy to cook large amounts using a single pot on a plug-in stovetop. Sure, there's a process around it, but almost by definition, if you're poor, then you've got a low hourly rate. Even these days, as a "proper grown up", if someone suggests getting food out, my instinctive reaction is "No, I can't afford that". I think the problem more lies with the sort of idea that was in a front page article a couple of days back (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5279307) the bad stuff is just so tasty - what can make different kinds of people choose to eat super boring lentils and rice over super stimulating delicious fat/salt/sugar?
Honestly I was moreso relating it to my meal plan in college. I didn't have to jump through any hoops to get food, but yes I was limited as to what I could buy. It was far from steak and lobster everyday, but I also didn't starve :)
To make food at home, you either need fresh, perishable ingredients and/or time to prep and cook. Even accessing fresh ingredients may be a hassle (see: food deserts), so eating off the dollar menu often feels like a better use of your money than making the trek to the grocery store to buy some perishables that you then have to cook before they go bad.
It's similar to why poor people buy poor-quality shoes more often, as opposed to one high-quality pair once a year.
EDIT: or cars. Poor people buy cars that are in poor condition because that's all they can afford, and they spend more money on it overall than if they could've gotten a better-quality car instead. It's expensive to be poor.
My ex's family if I can tell were immediately descended from impoverished sharecroppers. Grandma picked tobacco when she was a little girl. Her family when they had money ate badly cooked steak a couple of times a week. Definitely a class thing. My family being pretty much solidly middle class and from California that sort of thing just wasn't.
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