It is also available as chocolate milk and I would freeze them for my son so he could have cold milk for lunch and it served as a cold pack too
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We used to call this “The soft bigotry of low expectations”.
The higher up the economic ladder you go the better your overall health and nutrition are. I simply cannot buy that rich and poor eat alike. The wealthy are also not being subsidized by public funds to eat poorly, so we can’t pretend that’s not a thing.
I know anecdote is not data, but I’ve lived in two of the poorest areas of NYC for forty years. I see how one’s personal economy affects nutrition. I’ve even been pretty poor myself. It has been informative.
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Classes in nutrition early on might help/ Kids have to learn somewhere and at an early age. If it’s not at home, can’t schools help here? We used to watch movies in home ec in junior high or earlier. The earlier the better. Even some cooking classes. How about real life skills being taught again?
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Nonsense. These initiatives have already been tried right here where we both live and over time reality has supplied data to those trying to solve the problem. People will eat what is cheap, fast and filling. Period.
Many if not all of these ideas are outdated and have been disproven. They just make people uncomfortable to admit. Proximity to healthier food options does not change how people eat.
So many nasty comments about how poor people eat and yet the aisles full of junk food aren’t there because poor people have so much excess cash. They are there because middle and upper middle class people eat at least as much garbage as working class and poor people.
Also give money to food banks, not canned goods. Your money will go a lot further that way because the food bank can purchase what they need for their customers at much better prices than you will pay at the checkout for your donation.
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That study has way more holes than a piece of swiss cheese.
There are many behaviors which make and keep people poor. This is just a corner of that.
Most poor children eat only two meals a day, both provided by school. The Pandemic Relief plan of spreading the child tax credit out over six months has done more to help food insecurity for children than anything recently.
Both of my parents taught public school in a big poor city and reported that for many kids the only food regularly available was breakfast and lunch at school.
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So, we eat a lot of bread, stews and some heavily salted meat and our teeth will be great?
You should also eschew the use of forks: there is some evidence that the modern “bite” (lower teeth tucked behind upper teeth) is the result of cooking the kind of food amenable to the use of forks and dull table knives (and chopsticks! The Chinese had the modern bite centuries before we developed it in the West).
Eat the way most people ate until industrialization made forks widely available. Spear meat, say, with a properly sharp knife and then use your teeth to rip off a digestible chunk. Your jaw is set, but this technique might ensure that the jaws of any children you might have will like those of their ancestors’.
And don’t forget: bread needs to make up most of the caloric intake, and any food you eat out of season is going to be pickled, dried or heavily salted. Oh, let’s not forget about cheese, which is going to make any meal that much yummier! Although, bummer, the 1700 Diet isn’t going to be great if you want things like acai berries; or spices, since, if we’re being accurate, only the rich could afford anything as basic as pepper.
Good for them! It’s too bad that so many of them died so young, but hey, their teeth were certainly fabulous!
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Cue picture of cart with nothing but Huggies, Doritos, and Chivas Regal.
Have a look at James Nestor’s Breath. It is a popular non-fiction book. Chewing is a mixed bag, because primitive man spent hours a day chewing. It may be why cro-magnon man had a larger skull.
Perhaps a large skull had certain advantages for earlier people. One idea is that Cro Magnons needed large skulls because of the difficulty in chewing their food, which included lots of meat such as rabbits, foxes, and horses. Since our food has become easier to eat, we don’t need such large skulls or jaws.
My son works with dog diets and they generally do better with a raw food diet. He doesn’t eat much bread and goes through lots of green vegetables, some root vegetables and some fish and meat. His motto is food was just invented as a way to get olive oil into people.
In any case, diet may not be the only factor in long lives for dogs or people. Dogs have to have a job. Similarly, humans like to have roles. There is the Blue Zones guy, for example, who ticks off all the factors for long-lived societies in his lectures.
I also reside in a lower middle to middle class neighborhood in NYC. Over the years whenever I’m in line at my local non chain supermarket and see someone using a SNAP card that’s the kind of inexpensive meat they are purchasing along with sundry canned goods and bags of grains and legumes. Pork chops-regular cut as well as center cut always seem to be reasonably priced at around $2-3 per pound. I’m with you on restrictions on sugary drinks, particularly sodas that have little nutritional value.
Obviously not the Reagan mythology of the “big buck buying a T-bone steak with food stamps”.
But I think the whole food desert thing has been a bit over analyzed. In just about every neighborhood there is a supermarket or grocery store with a decent array of healthy products. Many of them are your regional chains like Key Food and Food Bazaar have improved their stores so they have less of a worn down downscale vibe. I occasionally go to my neighborhood non chain supermarket but I make it a point to hit Stop n Shop once a week which is a good non Whole paycheck alternative. Plus the Shell gas points are quite useful to me.
A coop in Berkeley had an SOS line. It was a list of things for that week which could be bought with the resources then provided by welfare and which would provide decent nutrition.
Yes. If cash is donated to a food bank they can multiply the value of the money by adding it to matching cash grants and then using it to purchase bulk quantities of food. They can also use it for diesel fuel to get their trucks around to collect and distribute food. Some of the matching grants are greater than 1:1. Your donation will go much farther than what you could do buying retail. Those bags of food the stores have prepared for shoppers to buy and donate are greatly appreciated too. Volunteers open and sort the food into cases to donate to their clients. But the convenience of buying a bag comes with the cost of paying the retail price.
Food banks are a nice place for people to volunteer. There’s plenty to do and surprisingly few conservative types.
Happy Holidays.
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Thanks for this! I read it a couple of months ago and at work we decided to make a ‘September Back to School’ donation to the Food Bank. We bought umpteen cakes/frostings and many other things on the list. Somebody found can openers by the dozens. When we arrived at the Bank the workers cried. They wrote us a letter a couple of weeks later to tell us every single item we brought was snatched up. Keep posting and posting this list!
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Classes in nutrition (8th grade girls mostly?) were awful, back in the day. I remember only rice pudding being taught. I’d never eaten it in my life!! Did anyone really LEARN from instructional videos shown in class? You want to see junk food? Go to a truck stop.
as jimtoday says, People will eat what is cheap, fast and filling.
I lived in WNY. I have to say that even though we were a small school, we got a pretty good education. Shop class for boys, home ec for girls, that later included boys, too. The teacher was wonderful. We learned so much from her. When I taught in another district nearby, the home ec dept was also excellent. Teacher was very knowledgeable. Vocational ed classes were also offered, and students were bussed there for afternoon classes.
Like everything else, there are some good and some bad experiences. But those life skills we learned paid off for many of us.
We could do that again if we wanted. Some schools do, I think.
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lol, i would buy powdered milk…and container of chocolate milk and mix the powdered milk with the choclate milk…kids never knew the difference…i would also make jello with orange juice…i had a ;sitter who was on WELFARE.[KY]…She got some really great cheese and peanut butter…i would buy it from her…worked for both of us…
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i’ve bought boxed milk to take camping, but i refuse to buy boxed wine.
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no, not reactionary…just plain ole stupid.
don’t even get me started on BIG SUGAR…sugar production is slowly killing the EVERGLADES…
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