I think thats what i spend for 2 days of food. ANd i don't go out for restaurant eating.

33 cents and a bag of cornmeal

This cracks me up every time I read it.

It's the natural contrary of "all that and a bag of chips".

This is indeed funny, but read just a few of the comments there from the people who are scraping by. And those are people with at least some internet access. This country is so fucked up.

Hell, yes.

One of the commenters said something about seeing how well she could eat off of reception food in DC. I've doen something like that to stretch my food budgets. I always knew which churches (there's one in DC) had the nicest coffee hours and receptions, and I was always welcome--because no matter how little money I may have I'm middle-class, even upper-middle class (genteel poor).

My first year in New York was spent counting change and thinking of new ways to eat cornmeal. Those were sad times, but damn, I can make all kinds of stuff out of cornmeal!

Is there any real justification at all for the TSA liquids ban, or is it all nonsense? I remember being convinced at the time that the prospect of mixing precursors to make explosives on the plane was ridiculously impractical, but I can't recall whether or not there's any realistic reason to worry about premade liquid explosives more than premade solid explosives.

BG's point is a good one because it demonstrates that poverty is often at least as much about social capital, transportation, and information.

If you live in an urban area with lots of hotels and conference centers, if you have the social understanding of how conference attendees generally flow freely in and around their events, and if you have the ability to at least "pass" as one of them (cf. the accent thread), then access to food opens up a fair amount. At least some kinds of food.

If you live in a rural area, have no car, and can't fake being a middle-class professional, it's got to be a lot harder.

On second thought, I was just reinventing the old distinction between being broke and being poor. Sorry about that.

8: AFAICT, it's nonsense. Even the supposed threat wasn't really doable, was it?

I can't recall whether or not there's any realistic reason to worry about premade liquid explosives more than premade solid explosives.

The rationale I remember hearing was that current bomb-detection equipment doesn't work as well with liquid explosives as with solid explosives. I don't know how true that is, though.

8: I believe the TSA is sponsored, in part, by Prell.

Make sure and add to 9, "if you have the time to find out about and drag your ass around to conferences," which largely means "if you don't have a child, or children to get to and from school, supervise, and take care of." Kids also make it kind of hard to look like a conference goer a lot of the time, I'd imagine--and at least they make you a lot more conspicuous, which makes it a lot harder to steal food.

I forgot about that stupid liquids crap when I was going to San Francisco. I watched as the security guard blithely removed two $100 bottles of perfume, a $40 bottle of facial cleanser, two $15 bottles of fancy shampoo, my lotion, etc., and handed my bag back to me with a smile. "Uh, thanks. I'll check it."

Her: What time's your flight? You'll never make it back through security in time.

I can't remember whether I told her to fuck off out loud or not.

I love how the first comment on the congressman's blog says "you could have made better choices about what to spend your money on." That and the "hey, there are lots of yummy things to make with cornmeal!" people. God, I fucking hate backseat shoppers.

14: Here there are people who must be on a listserv or something for free food events, because they show up to every event in every department at my school, and I've seen them at gallery openings all over town. The nice thing about New York events is that it's really impossible to tell eccentric intellectuals from the roving moochers.

16: Some of my best friends make yummy things with cornmeal, B.

I love how the first comment on the congressman's blog says "you could have made better choices about what to spend your money on."

Huh, that's funny, I read that as having a totally different tone. More like camaraderie and almost reassurance.

19: I kind of read it that way too; as if from someone who's been there and is saying, with experience, dude, there's some other ways to make the money stretch. But even so it's annoying to the person who, whether b/c of inexperience or something else, is stuck with no fucking food in the kitchen.

Probably not to the Congressman, given that he's not *really* depending on food stamps to feed his family. But as a general rule, that kind of armchair commentary makes me want to slap people.

16: It's hard not to backseat shop, though, just wondering if you could do better. I'm embarrassingly privileged to the point where I don't really price shop for regular groceries -- whatever the milk costs, I'm going to buy it, likewise with eggs, produce, whatever. Anyone who asked me the standard politicial gotcha question of what a half gallon of milk costs would get an out of touch answer, not because I don't buy my own milk, but because within a range of possible milk prices, I don't care enough to pay attention.

That said, I was surprised by some of his shopping. Two jars of jelly on $21 seems off -- jelly seems low calorie for the money. And I would have thought that a dozen eggs would have been worth it as well. But I haven't tried to eat seriously cheap since one year of college, and even then I was doing mac-and-cheese and tuna, not having trouble buying tuna. So I haven't really got the relevant shopping skills at all.

More like camaraderie and almost reassurance.

Ha.

I thought the people proposing alternate menus and giving advice on what to make with cornmeal were, on the whole, trying to be helpful and constructive. The ones suggesting alternate menus weren't saying that he was in this predicament because of the choices he made but showing him that there are a few options beyond PB&J. Many of them were from people who had been on public assistance or lived on very limited food budgets in the past and the tone seemed much less criticism like criticism than neighborly advice for someone who has never had to live that way.

It's kind of accurate though, to make bad choices at the grocery store. I get frustrated when conservatives bemoan the bad choices that hypothetical poor people make. Being human means making bad choices.

Two jars of jelly for $21? Oh my, he has no idea what he's doing.

Also, I thought the people proposing alternate menus were in the spirit of the blog because he was doing this as a way to educate himself about how to live on that amount of money. I'd think part of that would be wanting to learn how others manage.

And when you're actually really really poor, and not just faking it for a week, you probably work a horrible job, and walk to work in 100-degree heat, and by the time you get home, you don't really care about food anyway, because that might require you to cook, so you buy beer instead.

No, two jars of jelly out of a $21 budget, not for a $10.50 per jar.

Well, I think that what happens with backseat shopping is that one ends up saying that anything that adds flavor to a high-starch diet is a 'bad choice,' and I mean, come on. Poor people deserve to be able to eat jelly!

Which I realize isn't at all what you're saying, LB. Just that in any given situation one can second-guess people's decisions, but if you're talking about what people do over time, I think it would be pretty hard to honestly expect that (say) someone would never buy jelly b/c it's too expensive. What one could tolerate for a one-month experiment and what one should be reasonably expected to do for a year at a time or more are different things.

I agree that most of the suggestions were offered in a helpful spirit.

Right. George Orwell has a nice essay somewhere on exactly this sort of thing -- going over a practical, nutritionally balanced diet that one could pay for with some ridiculously small sum of money, and making your point, that no one should be expected to live like this. MKF Fisher too -- she's got a recipe in some essay for vegetable grain sludge that's the cheapest conceivable diet, but the point of the surrounding essay is that it's just not reasonable to live like that.

22: ?

As far as the bad choices -- one thing I didn't realize until I was an adult was the pathetic selection of decent food in grocery stores in high-poverty neighborhoods. Seriously, have you guys ever been to a Save-a-Lot? Even the cocktail nuts are prepared with peanut oil or cottonseed oil, and are much saltier than the salty roasted nuts in other grocery stores. And forget fresh produce.

I've eaten off a budget of around that amount quite recently. I spend a lot more than that now, but it's only been 5 years since I had a food budget of about 10 or 12 pounds a week.

I could eat pretty well for that amount, even now. There'd be no luxury food items but there'd be meat and fresh veggies and some flavour.

The problem is that eating well for that sort of money is time consuming. Both in terms of shopping and in terms of cooking time and usually requires knowledge that not everyone has easy access to.

Meanwhile, Rebecca Blood has been doing an "Organic Food Stamp Challenge" on $74 a week for two people. She's managing wonderfully, but seriously, she lives in the Bay Area, where one of the very very few things that is actually cheap and plentiful is lovely organic produce year-round. Meanwhile, you have to pay quite a premium in living expenses to get near all that nice food. Plus she is counting things like her weekly deliveries from a CSA (again, hardly available year-round in most parts of the country). With a CSA, you don't usually get to pay along as you go, but rather in a lump sum at the beginning of the season -- another way that having money makes it easier to save money. Also, do you think they take food stamps at all? I suppose it's possible.

Although this has probably been discussed elsewhere, simply being able to get to a good grocery store without incurring more expenses is important. Like, if it costs you another $2 to bus to the grocery, plus $2 for your kids...well, that's a problem. Which makes it much easier to go to the corner store where (even at a fairly well-stocked one like mine) they don't have cornmeal. And everything costs at least fifty cents more than at the regular grocery. I spend less shopping at the co-op than buying analogous stuff at the convenience store.

The one thing I didn't care for in the website comments: the people who said "buy some garlic" or "spend the 33 cents on a little milk"...like where? Back in 1930? They charge for each trip on the time machine, you know. And I shop at places where you really can buy bulk stuff, just not milk and not for 33 cents.

17: I was invited to a press preview of an exhibit at the MFA but couldn't go to it (it was on a weekday morning: it's like they think if you have a website, you must not have a job.) An arts reporter in Boston later told me I should have gone, that they are hilarious--large number of attendees are former reporters, retirees, etc., who no longer write anything but are on the publicity lists and just show up for the free food.

The one thing I didn't care for in the website comments: the people who said "buy some garlic" or "spend the 33 cents on a little milk"...like where? Back in 1930?

Yeah, that was pretty ridiculous.

I haven't read that comments thread but ""buy some garlic" is pretty good advice. A bulb of garlic costs about 25p here, and would last you a week. And the 'fake' risotto you're making with a half a stock cube, some bacon offcuts and half an onion is going to taste a lot better with a garlic clove in it.

Brooklyn's Food Co-op takes food stamps. Everything's marked up exactly 19% above cost, and there's a huge variety of stuff (both organic and non). I could make it on $21 of Co-op food, easily, and probably even manage to have fancy cheese if I wanted. But in my old neighborhood, when I was poor, the only produce at the bodega was a couple of expensive flyblown bananas and some sprouting potatoes.

8- Debunking of the original "binary explosive" plot. Basically, it's too hard to control the reaction to make to explosives on a plane- you need things like ice baths and decent glassware.
About the only thing I can think of is that they don't want gasoline or other smuggled items getting through- if you have enough flammable liquid you could do pretty significant damage on a plane (although probably not bring it down with less than a gallon or so.) But obviously peanut butter is not gasoline, so the blanket ban is ridiculous.
By the way, I'm travelling next week, does anyone know if solid foods (bread, cheese, chips) are allowed or do you have to buy them after security at a 400% markup?

There was some little booklet series produced in Britain in the late 80s/90s called, I think, "counterblast" or some such. I bought one by a woman who'd been on public assistance, and in it she describes a day having to go to some government office with two little kids--at some point, having dealt with frustration and bureaucracy for most of the day, she buys the damn kids two ice creams with her bus money. And then she adds, I so loved this, a snarl about "anyone who wants to tell me I shouldn't have wasted my money like that can go straight to hell."

Sometimes you just gotta buy the kid an ice cream.

38: Oh, I have no problem with buying garlic, just the idea that you can buy any for 33 cents...maybe if you sally on down to the co-op and break off a few cloves, I guess.

38: Oh, I have no problem with buying garlic, just the idea that you can buy any for 33 cents...maybe if you sally on down to the co-op and break off a few cloves, I guess.

re: 42

Well, here, you could. Easily. It's about 40 - 50 cents a bulb in our local supermarket and about half that in one of the 'Asian' grocers.

But it's totally impractical to go to Great Britain on $21 a week.

I was wondering about the 33 cents on milk thing too--whether it's possible to buy, say, a half pint of milk that's near the expiration date at a "Smart N Final" type store for a quarter, or something.

41: Yeah, it's amazing how many middle class people expect the poor to display boundless self-discipline, planning skills and fortitude every day in every aspect of their lives: "Sure, we'll give you $21 a week for food, and you can spend eighteen hours a day trudging around completing the bureaucratic requirements and finding the very bestest deals on nutritious food and cooking proper meals; me, I get home after nine hours of work totally knackered and send out for Chinese."

35 - I think Ryan's blog said that he specifically eschewed driving to someplace where the money would be more stretchable (like a Costco or a co-op) in order to make the challenge more realistic. Also, he seems like a great Congressman, but he's a fratty kind of guy, and I suspect he doesn't know how to cook. The next couple of days are going to suck for him.

whether it's possible to buy, say, a half pint of milk that's near the expiration date at a "Smart N Final" type store for a quarter, or something.

I don't really think it is. Maybe if you have cultivated a special relationship with your grocer, but even then I really doubt it.

43: But as far as I know, 33 cents UK is less than 20 cents US, right? The pound is pretty strong right now.

re: 45

Heh, yeah. But it was my understanding that the UK was generally more expensive than the US (for just about everything) which is why it's a surprise that you couldn't find some garlic for 30-40 cents.

re: 50

Er, you're running the calculation the wrong way. 30 UK pennies == about 60 US cents. But I was already doing the conversion for you. When I said garlic costs about 40 - 50 US cents here I meant 'at current exchange rates', etc.

re: 47

Yeah, I grew up on benefits, and my parents pretty much did exactly that -- spent a LOT of time and effort calculating the best way to get the most nutritious and tasty food for the least expense. However, it really isn't reasonable to expect that of poor people in general. [And I say that in a non-sarcastic way, it really isn't reasonable to base social policy on the expectation of herculean self-control and skill on the part of those in poverty]

47: Don't forget to add, "but you can't compare the two, because I made better choices than you did, so there."

I love how he comes to realize what a huge tragedy an everyday setback becomes. This was something I used to argue with Max about a lot--he'd say the reason someone was a good person was that she was easygoing about stuff or really pleasant all the time, as opposed to one of my friends, who was touchy. I kept trying to explain that being rich makes it easy for people to be "nice," because the stress they're under isn't about stuff like "Holy fucking shit I just dropped the spaghetti I just made for the entire week." I mean, sure, it's really annoying when bourgeois people aren't nice and easygoing, but you can't hate on poor people for being irritable.

51: My head hangs in shame. I am slinking away in mathematical defeat, metaphorically speaking.

51: My memory (again, from the late 80s) is that it's surprisingly easier to find small sizes of cheap food (a single clove of garlic, a little container of milk) in the UK than it is here. You guys have tiny refrigerators and corner shops and there are still plenty of middle-class folks who stop at the shop every other day or so; here, grocery shopping is a weekly or bi-weekly expedition, in the expedition, to the ginormous grocery temple, where one stocks up.

Ah, I remember various Tory wankers trying this in the 80s to prove that being unemployed really wasn't so bad. Results were hilarious. If you weren't unemployed yourself...

Still, conservatism is so often the doctrine that "just barely enough/one accident away from disaster"="efficiency!" At one point in the 1990s, the NHS was ordered to maximise its occupancy rate (like a hotel) with the inevitable result that there were no more hospital beds as soon as the winter flu rush began.

Is there any real justification at all for the TSA liquids ban, or is it all nonsense?

no, it's real. The binary explosive thing is science fiction, but this was always disinformation; the target of the measures was good old fashioned nitroglycerine, which is not always easy for the dogs to detect if it's in a sealed container.

#41: yes, Counterblasts. They were produced by the Observer newspaper so the Guardian website might still have them.

I kept trying to explain that being rich makes it easy for people to be "nice," because the stress they're under isn't about stuff like "Holy fucking shit I just dropped the spaghetti I just made for the entire week." I mean, sure, it's really annoying when bourgeois people aren't nice and easygoing, but you can't hate on poor people for being irritable.

Say, this reminds me of a story from when I was very young and my family was making just enough not to get food stamps. My mother tells me that the one and only time (!!) she ever saw my father cry was when he dropped the brand new glass jar of generic brand dry-roasted peanuts before he had gotten to eat a single one, and they were too mixed up in shards of glass to salvage any. The peanuts were his weekly treat food.

re: 55

When I lived in shitty parts of Glasgow it was pretty hard to find good fresh produce in those areas. You either had to travel to one of the supermarkets -- usually a bus or underground ride that cost the equivalent of a US dollar or two -- or you had to know where the 'ethnic' grocers were and be prepared to shop in them (something white working class people generally didn't do).

The UK is really mostly like the US, I think. Most people who have cars do weekly or bi-weekly shopping at big supermarkets and use their corner shop for bread, milk and newspapers.

On the other hand, when I lived in nicer parts of Glasgow, I could find great cheap produce from local shops without a huge amount of effort. Oxford is the same, but again, only if you live in the right bit.

and by the miracle of an unfeasible memory for these sort of things, I now pass on the information that the pamphlet was called "Mr Bevan's Dream" and the author was Sue Townsend (later to make a stack of cash from the "Secret Diary of Adrian Mole" books).

55: you evidently were here before Britain became one enormous Tesco.

57: But I haven't gotten close to a bomb sniffing dog in a US airport for ages -- I could be carrying on pounds of plastic explosive for all they know. If the only justification is that it's less detectable than solid explosives, but they aren't working at detecting the solid explosives, than what's the point?

(And really -- there's a difference in detectability between liquid explosive in a sealed container, and solid explosive in an equally well sealed container? That seems unlikely.)

61: ps And before Tesco's war with Denmark.

Plus, ideas are our most potent weapon. What, TBA is going to start screening for ideas?

But I haven't gotten close to a bomb sniffing dog in a US airport for ages

the idea is that they come and find you.

Plus all the solid explosives (believed to be) available to the terrorists require cumbersome detonators which are difficult to smuggle through, but nitrog, while it is nowhere near as unstable as cartoons will have you believe (it's the lazy fisherman's explosive of choice) can be set off with a box of matches. It's the specific explosive nitroglycerine that these proposals are aimed at.

34: I've heard of at least a couple of CSA groups which have been about bringing fresh produce into the inner city, and they definitely take food stamps. There's one in DC. I believe that some of the people were motivated by the fact that Anacostia doesn't have a single grocery store. I think that there's

ttAm, Haymarket in Boston allows you to buy fruits and vegetables pretty cheaply too. (It's where all of the leftover stock gets sold.) You have to look pretty carefully though. Some of the sellers try to put molding vegetables in with the good ones.

9: If you live in a rural area, have no car, and can't fake being a middle-class professional, it's got to be a lot harder.

I agree that there are real benefits to urban living, but I think that the hardest place to be poor would be certain kinds of suburbs. Depending on the climate, people who live in rural areas can grow some of their own vegetables. The South is poorer than the North, but you can get at least two growing seasons generally. Maine is pretty poor, but the season is much shorter.

I agree that there a

If it's really nitro they're after, why not just ban clear liquids? Presumably nitroglycerin isn't still combustible if you mix it with apple juice.

If you say so.

Presumably nitroglycerin isn't still combustible if you mix it with apple juice

a mixture of one part nitroglycerine to one part "presumably" has been responsible for a fair few missing limbs my friend.

Ok then.

10: I thought it was a clever thing to note.

conservatism is so often the doctrine that "just barely enough/one accident away from disaster"="efficiency!"

Never a truer word spoken. See the comparison between engineers and accountants. An engineer reads "This structure has three redundant stabilisers" and thinks "Oh, that's clever design". An accountant reads the same thing and thinks "Oh, that means we can get rid of two of them."

REDUNDANT != UNNECESSARY, people.

If the poor didn't go spending all their food stamps on nitroglycerine, they wouldn't have to eat raw cornmeal the last two days of every week.

I'm still remaining dubious on the detonator front. How hard could it really be to make a detonator that would pass as a cellphone/laptop/whatever other perfectly normal piece of carryon electronics; which would be easier to get on a plane these days than a box of matches.

55:51: My memory (again, from the late 80s) is that it's surprisingly easier to find small sizes of cheap food (a single clove of garlic, a little container of milk) in the UK than it is here. You guys have tiny refrigerators and corner shops and there are still plenty of middle-class folks who stop at the shop every other day or so; here, grocery shopping is a weekly or bi-weekly expedition, in the expedition, to the ginormous grocery temple, where one stocks up."

This was well-written.

AWB, in 17: we totally had that mailing list when I was in grad school ("vultures@ai"), and while I wasn't at any serious risk of starvation, it added a lot of variety. It seems like a natural extension of the stuff-recycling mailing lists we had, which led to friendly competitions to be the first to pick up some wacky piece of old electronics or labware.

Seriously, find that list and get on it.

Ok, i admit i don't live like a poor person, but i've priced out the cheapest sources of calories and protein, although i excluded totally non-nutritious shit like ramen.

Sacks of flour are by far the cheapest, and milk and eggs and whey tubs are the cheapest protein. Also canned tuna (fucking ew btw.)

Beans, even canned, should be a major staple.

Peanuts/peanut butter are quite cheap, especially considering its pretty nutritious.

Vegetables, other than onions and carrots and maybe those disgusting tins of spinach, are about the only vegetables that aren't really expensive.

I were trying to economize i'd skip the fresh veggies and probably flavor with some cheap hot sauce and garlic powder.

I just read this dude's blog and he has no idea how to cook.

The peanuts were his weekly treat food.

My Grandpa's, too. What is it with the old guys and the dry-roasted peanuts?

65- There are chemical tests for nitrates if that's what they really care about- isn't that what the wipes they use are testing? And they toss all the bottles into a giant bin, so are they really treating the things they find as if they could be dangerous?

Vegetables, other than onions and carrots and maybe those disgusting tins of spinach, are about the only vegetables that aren't really expensive.

Almost all vegetables are more expensive than vegetables, though. Besides yoyo.

They are worried about aboiling liquid expanding vapour explosion (BLEVE).

82- Easily avoided by just opening the container in question, which they already do. There's no reason, once they've opened something and determined it doesn't smell like a flammable chemical, to throw the stuff out, and there's no reason to limit the volume to the arbitrary limits they've set. Sure, don't let people carry 5 gallon jerry cans on a plane (which has always been illegal anyway,) but a bottle of water isn't going to blow up.

My father loved him some dry-roasted peanuts. Salty and crunchy yet filling! The generic jars were really cheap, too, which I'm sure was no small part of it. Oh, how vividly I remember when there was no such thing as fancied-up store brands, and instead all my family's shopping looked like something out of Repo Man.

And they toss all the bottles into a giant bin

When they first started doing this, at RDU, they were *pouring* the liquids into a common bin. And more than anything in the world, I wanted to go drop a chunk of dry ice in the bin so it would all start smoking.

But then I thought going to jail might be teh suck.

84- Little did you know you were part of the Dharma initiative.

84: My dad, too, would eat POTTED MEAT FOOD PRODUCT spread on SALTED CRACKERS while drinking BEER.

POTTED MEAT FOOD PRODUCT

Steve, Don't Eat It!

86: Well, I do adore The Third Policeman.

My church had a guest speaker from Project Bread which organizes the Walk for Hunger in Boston. That raises a lot of money for food pantries (good for families) and weekly dinners (mostly serving homeless people with addiction issues).

They've also branched out into advocacy. They've been working to raise the Massachusetts' school lunch standards above the Federal ones. And they were able to get more people signed up for food stamps. Massachusetts had one of the lowest participation rates among those who are eligible.

I think that it's really important to get people who can actually cook into school cafeterias. One of the problems is that they have to work with surplus food that's available because of farm subsidies.

There's also a program at one of the better value supermarkets (*not Shaws* which is pretty expensive; Market Basket is the best value) to give coupons to people on food stamps who buy a certain amount of fresh fruits and vegetables. This actually makes business sense, because, apparently, a lot of lower-income people are not loyal shoppers in the way that middle class people tend to be.

Still, one woman got up and asked a question about how to encourage people to make healthier food choices. The woman from Project Bread fielded the question very well. She mentioned that there was some work being done at the Harvard School of Public Health on making a food pyramid that would be relevant to Latino families, but you could see that she felt a little bit uncomfortable with the question. She was comfortable with education, but she didn't want anyone to set up the poor people's food-choice enforcement police.

The white, liberal woman felt perfectly comfortable manipulating the mothers' choices and imposing her own choices. She was well-meaning, but she didn't really respect the autonomy of the recipients of givernment assistance.

87: My sister likes deviled ham.

87, 91:

I love a fried spam, egg, and cheese sandwich. Mmmmmmm good.

On the one hand, I think food stamps already represent a pretty crummy amount of non-autonomy (why not give money instead?). On the other, I have a (highly) half-baked theory that if there was some sort of WIC-ish thing where, I don't know, part of your food stamp allotment was for fresh fruits and vegetables and milk and stuff, then there would be a greater incentive for those stores in poor neighborhoods to at least stock that stuff.

Project Bread

Oh, cool! I went to a wedding last year at which the bride and groom had donated to Project Bread in lieu of giving favors to the guests.

Still, one woman got up and asked a question about how to encourage people to make healthier food choices. The woman from Project Bread fielded the question very well. She mentioned that there was some work being done at the Harvard School of Public Health on making a food pyramid that would be relevant to Latino families, but you could see that she felt a little bit uncomfortable with the question.

It's a sticky issue. Education is really important - like the anti-diabetes program on fruits and vegetables that was launched in a number of black churches.

Education goes both ways, though -- in New Orleans a few years ago (pre-Katrina) a group of black and Latino families were agitating to get something other than milk for the subsidized school lunches, because so many of the kids were lactose intolerant. You can see how a group of well-meaning white nutritionists who have a simplistic "milk=healthy" paradigm in their heads could really benefit from some awareness-raising on that issue.

Whoops, that was me.

Wow, that would be maddening, wouldn't it.

I remember reading somewhere that your basic BRC burrito was actually pretty nutritious for the money, but that doesn't seem possible.

BRC=Beans Rice Cheese? That sounds right -- complete protein in the beans + rice, and nothing particularly expensive in it if you don't load up on cheese.

This is reminding me -- and I'm hoping someone with a better memory than mine can fill in the details -- of some government agency putting together a compilation of recipes for common household products, then cancelling the publication under pressure from household-product manufacturers. Late 70s, maybe? Anybody?

60: Yes, thank you.
61: Yes, I think I was there just as it was getting well under way.
97: Beans + rice are awesomely nutritions for the money; that's why they're a staple American combination.

Re. education, "choices," and knowing how to cook: I think a part of the problem is that the vast majority of us don't know how to cook, and if you're poor enough, you don't get much opportunity to learn, since learning to cook means being able to afford untried recipes, ingredients, and mistakes. I have to give credit, though, to the whole public schools nutrition movement--PK, who's always been good about trying new things and being interested in the science of nutrition and food, has gotten noticably more conscious about all this stuff in the last year. To the point where he now claims (erroneously) that he has never liked Coke, and is adamant about "no fast food" when we're in a hurry.

Man, what's not to like about beans and rice? Here I sit at probably the 75th percentile of US income, and I still eat beans and rice about twice a week.

98. Yep, Beans Rice Cheese. A little salsa and an apple seems like a good lunch for under a buck.

You know what else is a good cheap lunch? Hum bao. In fact, I think I'm gonna get some clothes on and take my dad out to the Hawiian place, where they're called something else but are still the same delicious cheap goodness.

I think a part of the problem is that the vast majority of us don't know how to cook

This seems to be the diagnosis du jour -- I guess it must be true. It's very weird to me. Certainly I'd be screwed, financially, if I didn't know how to cook up a big pot of vegetable-bean soup.

I'm gonna get some clothes on

Your epidermis is showing!

I'm for education. I don't mean to suggest otherwise. It's just that it reminds me of someone who said that he couldn't imagine how anyone could buy conventional bananas once they knew about the terrible pesticides in them. It was only a 20 cents/pound difference. I thought, well, I can imagine a lot of people for whom that would make a real difference.

I can't quite explain what bothered me about the way that she asked the question. It may be that she just assumed that the only reason that people don't buy more fruits and vegetables (and why is fresh better than frozen?) was that they were dumb and uneducated. She had never considered the fact that those things are expensive per calorie or that the supermarkets in really poor neighborhoods are often not very good.

Re the liquids thing, whatever validity there may have been to the original rules, it's awfully hard to continue taking it seriously when the list of exceptions now looks plenty long enough to allow anyone with three functioning brain cells to bring on all the liquids they want. OTOH I suppose there's enough screener discretion built in to ensure that the exceptions aren't available to scary brown people, so I suppose we're safe.

think a part of the problem is that the vast majority of us don't know how to cook

I certainly was amazed when I left home to live in student accommodation that some of my room-mates had literally no clue. Some of them couldn't (literally) boil an egg. And also extremely thankful that we'd been made to cook a couple of meals a week as part of our weekly chores since we were about 13. Having vegetarian hippy parents has its upside.

My sister and I left home knowing how to make a couple of dozen different (and cheap) veggie meals which stood me in good stead for years and which still form the basis of a lot of simple staple meals for me, to this day.

Compared to the average politician, that congressman is freaking awesome.

I cook a ton (and believe myself to be pretty good at it, too) but always have to refresh my memory about what method goes with what amount of time for hard-boiling eggs. I have a block.

If Ryan were really living on a $21 per week food budget, he wouldn't be flying on planes, and hence would not have had his PB&J confiscated by the TSA. Still, it's cool to see politicians getting in touch with issues that affect people beyond those wealthy enough to make campaign donations.

None of my currrent roommates cook. I've decided that it's because they haven't been graduate students: just enough income not to despair, but far too little to eat out.

Rep. Ryan just published a week-ending wrap-up post. Summary: he admits to cheating by having a bag of peanuts on an airplane and sneaking a pork chop at a fundraiser and he discusses the changes he hopes to make. I thought he did a good job describing the problem:

I'm coming away from this experience with some hard lessons learned and a newfound understanding of this issue. First and foremost is that it is nearly IMPOSSIBLE to make due on this amount of money. I know many people have written in saying that Food Stamps are meant to be a supplement to other income. Well, yeah that is how the program was intended, but it has been 11 years since we've added ANY value to food stamps, 10 years since we've raised the minimum wage and in that time inflation has risen, the price of milk has risen, the price of produce has risen. NOW we find ourselves in a position where with gas well over $3.00 a gallon in many places those who earn the least among us use their food stamp benefit not as a supplement, but as their sole source of income for food.

and has some good ideas for a bigger picture:

Just allocating more money to the program is the first step. We need to have the courage to reform the current system. Our Food Stamp Program NEEDS to address the malnourishment that many children and families experience on food stamps....I want to have the Government study farm subsidies and figure out how we created a system where the raw materials used in creating all these horrible processed foods are subsidized but many fruits and vegetables are not. Check out this article from the New York Times Magazine by Michael Pollan for more information. In addition I would like to create a program to bring food stamps to farmers markets, and farmers markets to inner cities so that good produce is available to those who need it. This is a win for the farmer, a win for the consumer and a win for the food stamp recipient.

Aw, right on, Tim Ryan.

I don't get those of you who are amazed that people, in general, don't know how to cook. I mean, restaurants? Fast food? Frozen food? Pre-made stuff in the grocery stores? Is it really a bit surprise that it's perfectly possible to grow up not knowing how to cook? Didn't all of us who *do* know how to cook, and like doing so, actually kind of make a point of learning?

I kinda feel like the amazement at other people not knowing how to cook is of a piece with the shock that some people actually eat at McD's. Come on.

Say, I guess he could have bought another head of garlic with that 33 cents: "No money for meat, milk, juice, fresh fruit or vegetables, save for a single head of 32-cent garlic to flavor the tomato sauce."

If Ryan were really living on a $21 per week food budget, he wouldn't be flying on planes, and hence would not have had his PB&J confiscated by the TSA.

It's true. The poor don't know how good they have it.

First and foremost is that it is nearly IMPOSSIBLE to make due on this amount of money.

Is our Congresspeople learning?

Maybe I should be thankful -- he could have said "Make jew," I suppose.

re: 115

No, I didn't make a point of learning. I was made to learn, growing up. I'd imagine in the same way that the vast majority of people -- women, in particular -- have done in the past.

I see not knowing how to cook as being a huge, gaping hole in someone's life knowledge.

There's a difference between not knowing how to cook and sometimes choosing not to cook. I'm not amazed people sometimes eat at McD -- I sometimes eat there. Ditto convenience foods, restaurants, packaged meals, etc.

So do I think not knowing how to cook is a huge gaping hole; but once things like packaged cake mix and the like hit the American grocery stores, people stopped *having* to. And then the next generation discovered feminism, and the demographic that would've insisted on cooking from scratch insisted, instead, that cooking and other domestic skills were to be avoided at all costs.

I'm mostly talking about the middle class, of course. But here in the States, anyway, my experience of the working class is that they tend to eat a lot of crap and packaged foods and don't really know how to cook anything much more complicated than spaghetti with sauce in a jar.

And yeah, I know that's not always the case; but it's largely the case.

113: One helpful thing the government could do to get better food to poor people is to refrain from harrassing and arresting Food Not Bombs activists. There'd still be the burbs and rural areas to worry about (and there is a lot of malnutrition in those places) but a lot of major cities could improve their total nutrition significantly with a little benign neglect in that direction.

re: 120

Yeah, you're right about not having to cook for a lot of people.

It was quite striking when starting college that the kids from working class families tended to have mothers who had done all the cooking for them so, while they had a minor clue about what cooking involved, they hadn't ever really had to cook themselves. The kids from the middle class families, on the other hand, had parents who didn't cook, either.

The UK is very like the US in that respect, I think.

Czech Republic is very different -- the women/girls can all cook because they've been brought up spending hours assisting their mothers with incredibly labour-intensive traditional cooking. Of course they largely choose not to. And I don't blame them, seeing 'traditional' kitchen culture of that type, I'd be pretty fucking resentful at spending countless hours every day stuck in the kitchen cooking, too.

I've seen some ads, mostly for rooms in the Peninsular regions, posted by families renting out rooms with separate entrances &c. Many of them have the feature that the renter is not allowed the use of the family's kitchen (nor do will the renter have h/h own). It boggles my mind, it does.

112: Graduate students without the expense of a social life can afford not to cook, too.

I cook a ton (and believe myself to be pretty good at it, too) but always have to refresh my memory about what method goes with what amount of time for hard-boiling eggs.

I have actually had great success on multiple occasions with the following method:

1. put egg in water to cover; turn on heat to medium-high-ish.
2. take a shower.
3. pour hot water out of the pot; pour in loads of cold water and some ice, peel egg & yadda yadda.

Perfection!

& yadda yadda
This is where I always go wrong.

I use the 'chinese' method for hard boiling eggs. I found it in a chinese cookbook.

Place eggs in cold water, bring water to boil.

Immediately the water comes to the boil, take it off the heat, tightly cover the pan and wait 10 minutes.

Done.

122: But didn't the "working class" always, er, "fail" to cook? I thought that was where a lot of patronizing charity attempts in the late nineteenth century came from, as well as Home Ec in the early twentieth--lots and lots of popular discourse about how the poor didn't eat properly, whatever properly was at the time, and how they would do it if only shown the way. A lot of reliance on bread and dripping, or semi-fast food from street vendors in the nineteenth, at least. Tinned fish, too, I think.

Also a lot of the early crappy working class housing didn't have too much by way of kitchens; those reform villages (like, I think, Saltaire in England) were remarkable partly because they each had a fully-functioning kitchen.

Also, in the US generally as soon as there were convenience foods the middle classes were using them, even before WWII. The gracious lady of the house who does her own cooking--I think that's sort of a fifties/sixties invention. (In the fifties, she used convenience foods; in the sixties, fancy gourmet stuff.) Before that, one aspired to have a cook or a scullery maid, or one was not a gracious lady. Shirley Jackson (1950s), for example, wrote about having a sort of maid-of-all-work who did a lot of the basic cooking as if this were the norm; so did MFK Fisher's family (1910-1920s). And those people, though middle class, were not rich by any means.

Cooking may have taken up a lot of time for the classes who cooked, but it wasn't neccessarily a paradise of properly cooked, home-made meals.

re: 128

I don't know about the 19th century, say, but certainly both my sets of grandparents cooked. As did my mum, and the mums of all of the kids I grew up around.

wasn't neccessarily a paradise of properly cooked, home-made meals.

Yeah, a lot of the food my friends ate when I was a kid was pretty boring stuff. Mince and potatoes; pie, chips and beans, that sort of thing. It was, however, still largely home cooked.

I suspect that may be slightly generational, though. I'll bet my (much) younger brother's peers' parents don't cook as much.

I'm sure there's always been a certain amount of hysteria about the diet of the poor, and (in the UK at least) it's my understanding that apart from a few periods it's generally always been pretty bad.

Surviving on the Food Stamp budget wouldn't be hard, though, if you had a one burner stove. You just switch to a generic, terribly monotonous third world diet, which would be rice and beans, potatoes and cabbage, corn meal and beans, or something like that. You'd want to supplement it with greens of some sort.

Cooking isnt that hard. You get a cook book. You experiment. You fail. You learn. Start with easy things: eggs, steaks, rice, chicken.

Move to more complex things as you decide you are bored with eating the same damn things. Make some mistakes. Learn and do it better the next time.

It is actually a great way to hang out with your family with some music in the background.

Of course, those darn kids never let you have time to do it, with soccer, baseball, swimming, PTA, etc.

I'm sure there's always been a certain amount of hysteria about the diet of the poor, and (in the UK at least) it's my understanding that apart from a few periods it's generally always been pretty bad.

Yeah. There's a long tradition in Britain of well-off, well-spoken, well-meaning people being convinced that some cookery lessons and a good fingerwagging would make the poor much happier, healthier (and for that OK Computer touch, more productive). This usually founders on the rock that they're poor, for fuck's sake, and what they really need is more money, not a load of annoying posh wankers bossing them about.

My last exposure to the Food Stamp program wasn't good.

I was at Wal Mart at around 10:45 pm on a school night. All the lanes are crowded. I have maybe 30 things. As I am walking toward a lane, a lady with a basket full of junky food cuts in front of me. She has her 8 or 9 year old son with her who is very overweight.

Her friend with another overloaded basket asks if she can cut in front of me. I decline.

The lady in front of me paid with Food stamps, and was rude to the cashier.

Intellectually, I knew that the incident shouldnt be a reflection on Food Stamps, but I grumbled about it for weeks.

Frowner's certainly right about the diet of the industrial poor, whether employed or not and their cooking habits, being a staple of middle class concern for a long time. There is the passage in The Road to Wigan Pier where he finds the tripe cooking, although at least that was something. Correlli Barnett assembled several accounts of complete cluelessness and abandon in the book called Audit of War in Britain, something like Decline and Fall here (although that has a Waugh sound that suggests to me it wasn't quite that). Noting that this observation has been, as I said a staple of middle-class concern doesn't make it wrong, of course.

"Knowing how to cook" is a relative thing. I often prepared our family meals when I was in High School, sometimes Sunday dinner as well. A typical meal would be baked chicken (shake 'n bake), mashed potatoes—those made from scratch—a vegetable warmed up in a saucepan from frozen or canned. Occasionally a root vegetable, like carrots, parsnips or turnips from scratch. Also I can remember when I lived alone baking a fish with au gratin potatoes once just for myself. But I was rudimentary, because except for baking my mother was too. Family recipes that required time and care, such as brown bread or raisin bread, or baked beans, I never learned from her. When I pulled KP in the army I remember admiring how much better and intelligent the cooks were about preparing basically the same style of meals I had grown up with.

But most of the time I ate in diners, or actually paid for a dining-hall meal—at U of C!— just for company, to see and talk with other people. I would drive to a truck stop in South Holland from Hyde Park sometimes, just to talk to the people there.

When my wife and I got together she started cooking right away for both of us, on such a higher level that my cooking-for-self self went quite dormant. The exception to this, in the normal American way, is barbecuing, which she assigned to me from the beginning, even though I couldn't even start a fire to begin with.