I am struggling to understand how not having enough money for food is possible in a first world country. You can feed yourself for about $1 a day per person with careful budgeting, or $30/month.
That is the equivalent of 3 hours of work at minimum wage in the UK, and if that is an amount an individual is unable to spare, then that person clearly qualifies for governmental assistance, especially one with three dependent children.
EDIT: See below comment for satisfying the calorie requirements on $1 a day, or consider that you can get 1 kg of rice for £0.45 which contains 3,650 calories.
Rewind about, jeeze, nearly 20 years for me. A dollar a day is pretty much what I narrowly avoided starvation on.
I got by on about $20/mo (in addition to free food). I would heat a solitary potato in a toaster oven for breakfast. Just the potato. After bumming a ride to high school, I would wait until lunch. I had Free Lunch (I was poor). That was usually a hamburger, a milk, and something resembling some kind of vegetable approximation. I would steal one additional hamburger and sell it for $0.50 or $0.75 (don't recall which) which was a deal to the other person. On the way home, I would stop by the store and turn that profit into a single can of Campbell's soup. Rinse and repeat. Sometimes, I could not get a hamburger to steal, so no dinner. Nothing on the weekend unless I could bum food at friend's houses (worked out more often than it probably should have). When I got to university, I could reliably get closer to $2/day and that meant that I could get a Jumbo Jack and two tacos for lunch. If I chose to not eat for a few days, I could get a Little Caesar's pizza.
There were periods of more food or less. Things got better over time. By my second year at university, my then-girlfriend-now-wife and I (and our small kid) were eating regularly. I think our budget was $30/week. I put on like 60lbs in two or three months. I had folks I barely knew tell me I was looking better. But man, I can recall just wanting enough liquidity to be able to afford a dang pizza. That lasted until well after getting my degree.
The vending machine at my college dorm malfunctioned so it would give your selection and give your change back. It went on for a couple days until, over the weekend, an acquaintance / former roommate used the trick to empty the machine. Most people were mad at him for "ruining it for everyone". I understood, though, why he did it: he had no money and no food.
If you don't mind me asking or answering, what put you in such dire circumstances growing up? Low income family, or were there other factors? Totally understand if you prefer not to discuss.
Happy to talk about most of it. It was my normal then. I like me, and my history is part of that, so, yeah, no worries writing a bit about it. Low income for sure. At one point, my dad took off to go live with his girlfriend and that left me at the house. He eventually came back, but I was on my own for quite a while. I did not have a vehicle yet and we were 10 miles outside of town in a small mountain community. Kinda hard to get a job. I heated my water and cooked my food on a wood burning stove and took cold showers for a while. I would usually get rides to school from my buddy down the street. If he couldn't, then I'd ask a neighbor. The other part to understand is this did not feel "dire" -- only in retrospect as a well-to-do software developer am I like "yeah, I guess that was abnormal." It is part of who I am.
So, more crazy story time. When my dad took his hiatus, he left the house in a state of semi-construction. He had tore down a wall to do some addition (really, no clue how he was planning on affording that). That made heating kinda hard in the mountains in winter haha. Winters would get down into the 20s (f) at times. I mostly kept to the back bedroom at that point (where the wood stove was) and took some plastic sheeting and made a partial barrier to channel some heat into the restroom. I once came home to find that raccoons had tore up all my food stores. As I was cleaning up, they tried to come back to get "their" food. Stubborn things. I was throwing stuff and shouting at them and they were just like, "yo, bro, you done? we gots to eat." Finally ran them off. Learned to be better about how I stored any extra food I might scavenge up.
To add some more color, this above was when I was about 17. Two years prior, I became a dad. So my then-girlfriend-now-wife (still together 20+ years later, and I'm paying for my oldest to go to college which feels nice) was living at a way different spot on the mountain. So I would get rides for the ~50 miles or so over to her place on weekends when I could. I did not live with her at the time for a couple of reasons. Most of which was I was determined to graduate high school and get into college, but also her situation was not much better than mine aside from some state aid.
Eventually, graduated high school, got a (nearly) full academic scholarship to a nearby university. By the second year, an uncle had given me a small truck so I was mobile and able to do graphic design work for the university. My wife and I were able afford a (very) small wedding and move in together. Things have been hard, but they always are getting better. I've worked in photography and design during school, after in insurance, stocks and mutual funds, I've been a math teacher, did some construction, and most recently I am a software developer. I've really found my calling here and I have been blessed with a fantastic company to work for, great friends at work, a healthy family (now three kids), and a very supportive wife. We are living the dream and we are so very far removed from our humble beginnings. It really was a lifetime ago. I really don't regret a thing (though it would have been nice to have been as well off as we are now much earlier haha). I've known folks with really messed up history and I've heard real horror stories of how others have grown up. My story is really not all that bad.
Not throwing shade, but since the comment you replied to assumed the availability of public assistance, did you find that to be available in your experience?
This kind of comment can only come from someone well off.
Poverty is not simply a problem of money, but of time and opportunity as well. When you're poor, you can't take advantage of opportunities to save money, because your needs are immediate, your coffers low, and your ability to store limited. You work long hours, hungry all the time, and then go home exhausted, unable to even think about spending time planning and preparing meals or dealing with the growing mountain of paperwork, or worrying about what broke that needs fixing.
I've been in this situation, and it's not fun. At one point, I spent a month living on bean sprouts and instant ramen, because that was the only thing within walking range that was chaep. You get calories, yes, so you don't die. But your brain suffers, your judgment suffers, and you're tired all the time. I'm shocked I didn't get scurvy, tbh.
When you're in the poverty spiral, it's almost impossibly difficult to pull yourself out.
While I haven't had to live with hunger all my life, I've been through some months of real hunger, with no money to buy food. Your description above comes very close to my (foggy) memories of the experience. It changed me. Things that I remember:
- like you said, I was constantly tired because of the constant feeling of hunger. I was mostly one minded, thinking about how to get any food.
- I was also grumpy (low blood sugar), didn't talk almost at all (although I was sharing my room with other people so there was plenty of opportunity to speak). Also made me feel like the lowest person around, useless, because I would just wait around until my room mates would prepare something to eat hoping that they'd invite me to share, that was really bad for self esteem. I was starting to think (could be real, but in my state of mind at the time I can't be sure) that my room mates were going hungry/delaying eating to avoid me being there so I started going out just to let them eat and not feel bad of not being able to share
- it didn't help that I got fired from my first job after 2 weeks of work (and they didn't pay me anything)
I got out of it by blind luck, a friend found someone that was looking to hire someone with my skills and told me about it.
Cooking skills are hardly a skill. 10 minutes watching a youtube video once should give you all the knowledge you need to cook almost anything. Baking can be more of a challenge, but anything involving a frying pan or a pot? I'd be legitimately worried if you can't figure that out within an hour.
I'll give you 2, and to a lesser extent 3, as knowing where to buy produce cheaply, and what meals can be cooked in under 15 minutes, does take a little more effort. But using "I don't know how to cook" as an excuse is more of a sign of raw ignorance to me. Putting a cup of rice in a rice cooker and a chicken breast on a stove is not difficult.
I've been cooking for 30 years, I've made a living out of it, and no it's not that simple. You talk like someone who has never cooked anything outside of a microwave.
But using "I don't know how to cook" as an excuse is more of a sign of raw ignorance to me.
That wasn't what was said, and misrepresenting the content of other people's posts is a sign of raw trolling to me.
Not disagreeing with the overall point, but there is a difference between "haute cuisine" and cooking a meal. There is a lot that you can do that basically equates to slicing ingredients, seasoning with salt/pepper, maybe putting some sort of oil on the ingredients, and throwing it in the oven for a specified amount of time.
Once budget isn't a concern, buy a sous-vide machine and your chances of screwing up your cooking go down drastically.
>I've been cooking for 30 years, I've made a living out of it, and no it's not that simple. You talk like someone who has never cooked anything outside of a microwave.
Okay come on here, you know I did not post this to attack cooking as a profession. I have no doubt that you can make a tastier dish then I can.
My point was only that the basics of cooking is incredibly easy. One pot meals for example are exactly that, dump things in a pot and cook them. Even screwing up the order in something like Chili will still give you an eatable, tasty meal.
>You talk like someone who has never cooked anything outside of a microwave.
I have, and generally they act like it's a hard undertaking, so I give them easy recipes. Chili, Bratwurst, Curry, these are all meals that can be made in a limited number of dishes on the cheap. Serve with rice, and you can drastically cut your food cost.
EDIT: Honestly, I thought you were saying I hadn't talked to people who haven't cooked outside a microwave. I didn't realize you were actually attacking me. I've cooked quite a bit outside of a microwave, thank you.
Whatever the cause might be, the fact remains that for some reason many impoverished people don't prepare the meals economists imagine they would. Calling this "raw ignorance" is a non-explanation. To say nothing of education and knowledge, impoverished people are also often dealing with an incredible number of problems spanning mental health and social issues, and it's not hard to imagine how these problems might individually or collectively keep a person from doing something so apparently simple.
>Calling this "raw ignorance" is a non-explanation.
I called blaming cooking skills an act of raw ignorance. And I'll stand by that, even if people here feel the need to downvote me for it. There are thousands of meals that can be made with bare minimum skill, if you can cut a vegetable or put something in a pan.
Knowing what meals to make is admittedly harder, which is why I said so in my comment. But saying "I don't know how to cook" is not a valid excuse.
If you're living on a dollar a day, you probably don't have access to youtube, a working stove/microwave, or cooking utensils.
Also, if all you have is a couple dollars, you probably can't even buy the ingredients. It's always cheaper in bulk, at membership stores like Costco that you can't afford.
I imagine in 1st world countries, the total amount of calories is less the issue, it's malnutrition. School lunches are garbage. Sometimes the food at home is garbage is the parent is ignorant enough.
This is the same as saying "I can't understand how people are overweight. Everything has a calorie label and 10 minutes on youtube will tell you how to figure out how much you need". You're ignoring the externalities - not knowing how to cook (sure it's easy, if you were shown. Otherwise, where do you start? ), not having (or properly prioritisng) time - shopping, meal planning, cooking, cleaning up all take time that these people currently can't see a way to get.
I doubt that $30/month figure is plausible for someone without high quality preparation and storage facilities and great discipline. But it seems like a pointless discussion to me; there is no place in the US you can't avail yourself of a SNAP card and an average of $126/person/month (www.cbpp.org figures.)
If a kid isn't being fed it isn't for lack of funds, it's some other dysfunction. I have no doubt such dysfunction is indeed prevalent, but correcting it would involve a direct intervention of the day to day behavior of individuals. And while it may be easy to hypothesize about such a world from the comfort of your $5000/month Seattle apartment, in the real world people -- including both the parents and the kids you have in mind -- don't want it, will resist it and so the whole thing becomes another shit show at the end of which you'll still have kids going hungry.
Hasn't there been a huge push since the 90s to make accessing SNAP and other "welfare" services harder to access (long complex enrollment processes) and harder to keep access to?
Other than that sure you can eat fairly well on $4/day - if you have decent access to stores, storage to stockpile bulk purchases when on sale and appropriate pots/pans/knives, a stove, perhaps an oven, refrigeration, etc.
There are a lot of people who lack several of those prerequisites.
> Hasn't there been a huge push since the 90s to make accessing SNAP and other "welfare" services harder to access
There has been a huge push of a narrative to that effect. Actual USDA enrollment rate data doesn't reflect much success in these supposed policies however; current enrollment (over 40 million) is far above any point in the 90s (less than 30 million.)
You are struggling because you have lived an easy life and don’t actually know what the true cost of eating every day is. I would offer up my next pay check to the local food bank to see you take 30$ and live a month off of it.
I skimmed that post and it uses the classic technique of "if I have to buy something for 10$ but only eat part of it I count the amount it costs me for that day" - that only works if you have the money to buy in bulk, which is not the case for the majority of people who get dished out the "you can eat for almost nothing!" advice.
Where do you get it? How do you get it from there? Where do you keep it before cooking? How do you prepare it? Where do you keep it from spoiling? How do you keep it from being stolen?
Going by UK prices as that was the subject of the article and what I'm familiar with, you can get 1 kg of long grain rice for £0.45 (~$0.60), which contains 3,650 calories. 1kg of lentils is £1.40 ($1.83) and contains 3,530 calories and a healthy amount of proteins, minerals and vitamins. A female needs 2000 calories per day, so for £0.67p ($0.88) you can get 1000 calories from rice and 1000 calories from lentils and meet your minimum requirements, and have some money left over to buy salt, spices and veg.
Other staples such as oats, beans, pasta are at similar prices (1kg of oats can be found as low as £0.75 and contains 3650 calories) and can provide additional nutritional diversity, but there is no question that you can meet your minimum calorie requirements with $1/day, at least in the UK.
This may not be the most appealing diet to some (although spices go a long way into making cheap palatable dishes), but if the alternative is going so hungry you are unable to move without grabbing on to furniture, you cannot afford to complain about the taste of a bland bowl of a rice.
You buy off whatever veg is on-sale (e.g. the Aldi Super 6) - citrus can be less than a pound per kg, so 12 cents can actually get you a whole medium-sized orange (you buy a pack for 50p and eat it over the next few days). Cabbage, broccoli and misc frozen veg are generally more cost-effective, however.
Based upon that diet you'd get 0% of your Vitamin D, 5 % of your vitamin A, and 15% of your calcium. You'd get 4 grams of fat, no sodium, and barely any potassium. You'd be getting 180% of your recommended carbs for the day.
I doubt that would be sustainable over the long term.
You can take supplements or research the other low cost foods that compensate for the deficiencies (spinach, eggs, fish oils, etc.). Do note that the primary goal is to obtain enough calories to avoid suffering from hunger and dizziness, not achieving the most optimal and sustainable diet (although a rice, beans, oat & veg diet is doubtlessly a far better base than the typical low-income western pattern diet of fast food and sugary drinks).
Obviously you'd obviously want to find ways to increase your income in order to have more than a $1/day to spend on food, but you'll never get there if you're starving.
If your budget is $1/day I doubt that supplements are in the cards, and it's obviously not sustainable, as part B of this nutritional plan is "get a better job".
You can do $2 a day pretty easily in my opinion. Basically you want rice (or pasta) and beans to be the bulk of your calories, and anything else just adds flavor. Helps that in America you generally have access to $2/lb boneless chicken breast (and I've gotten drum sticks for 69c a pound before, but those are more of a pain) at one of your grocery stores, and rice and beans are almost free (25c-50c a day), even in smaller bulk sizes such as 5lb bags. Potatoes, carrots, bananas, and apples are examples of fruits and vegetables that are generally incredibly cheap.
Once you get up to $5 a day per person it really feels like you can eat any thing, once you start following a budget. I've met people with budgets around $400 a month for one person, though that usually includes a lot of eating out.
Seasoning is something people seem to miss a lot. Just garlic powder, paprika, chili powder, and of course salt and pepper can bring a dish up to something you could see eating at a restaurant.
Right? It's not even that hard. In Indian cooking the 'tadka' method is used for lentils and beans (also called chonk, chaunce, vaghar, etc.). It is basically heated oil with some spices thrown in and gently fried (not burnt), this tempering is then mixed in with the rest of food. Here is a good example:
If you can't prepare lentils in a way that you'd describe as tasty, then you owe it to yourself to look up any of the thousands of youtube videos or recipes that prepare it a thousand different ways.
You can make some extremely delicious meals with lentils, especially yellow and red split lentils, given the right spices, which are also pretty cheap.
What about cheap functional vitamins? It used to be that the pills were small and you could buy a year's supply in one spicejar-sized bottle.
Is there anything like this still available?
That is the equivalent of 3 hours of work at minimum wage in the UK, and if that is an amount an individual is unable to spare, then that person clearly qualifies for governmental assistance, especially one with three dependent children.
EDIT: See below comment for satisfying the calorie requirements on $1 a day, or consider that you can get 1 kg of rice for £0.45 which contains 3,650 calories.