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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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…
i’ve bought boxed milk to take camping, but i refuse to buy boxed wine.
no, not reactionary…just plain ole stupid.
don’t even get me started on BIG SUGAR…sugar production is slowly killing the EVERGLADES…
The only valid use for powdered milk is mixing it with PB to make slightly less unhealthy “candy”.
So, remember back to the days when nobody, but nobody would buy wine in a screw-top bottle instead of cork? Because it meant the wine was cheap and undrinkable?
Fast forward to today and it is increasingly unusual to find actual corks (made from the bark of the cork tree) in a bottle? Sometimes they are plastic corks, sometimes they are glass corks, sometimes it’s just a screw-top. Turns out that you don’t have to worry about those drying out and crumbling and ruining the contents of the bottle (nothing worse than “corked” wine).
So, a good friend of mine in Berlin is an avid camper (and opera aficianado, btw). He buys boxed wine for camping – not the cheap boxed wine, but more expensive stuff (yes, you can buy Barolo in a box) because, among other things, it doesn’t go off so quickly because the air doesn’t get to it, even when the wine has been opened. Also: easier to transport in a backpack.
What a lot of folks don’t realize is that quite a bit of wine is shipped in large plastic containers and filled into bottles at destination (for example, wines from, say, Australia or South Africa or, yes, even France). They are not aged in bottles and the bottles wrapped individually in bubble-wrap to be transported across the ocean to their final destinations. (Look on the back label, often you can see where the bottles were actually filled…on your side of the Atlantic.)
Just like the twist-off cap on the wine bottle was once shunned and is no longer (never had a bottle of twist-off get “corked”), box wines are a bit behind the curve. There are actually a lot of good reasons to buy them. The better ones are good value for the money.
Heck, a favorite retsina from Greece is Malamatina, which has a crown on the bottle, for which you need a bottle opener:
NB: our favorite whites grow across the Rhine from our house, and we buy our reds in the Ahr Valley just 20 mins away (the site of the devastating floods in July – our favorite Ahr vintner lost 50,000 liters to the flood and had to wash and re-label thousands of bottles). We like good wines and have a lot right around the corner from – in this area, we drink much more wine than beer.
We were at some base locations that had a high price for milk on the local market or was not available. Alaska was one in which the cost was outrageous in the winter. The army supplied the milk to the base but it was in batches so it could be depleted in a heart beat. The race for the commissary was epic when shipments came in. Bread was like that as well. Plus the milk came frozen frequently. (Which is another story) When without, out came the powdered milk. Just not the same.
For nearly a decade a friend and I have been taking large amounts of food every 6 weeks to a Maya community a county away. The community was established in the 1980s when they fled violence in Guatemala. Others have joined them over the years. For the most part they remain impoverished, being even lower on the totem pole than the substantial local Hispanic population. We fund this with donations from friends and several local businesses that give us their wholesale prices. The food is distributed at a non-profit that serves immigrants and refugees. Members of the Maya community do the actual distributions in conjunction with the staff of the non-profit. They know the size and needs of the various families and take this into consideration when giving out the food. We have asked what they like and use and what they do not care for and adjusted our purchases accordingly.
Everything we buy is nutritious but is part of their customary diet and or suits their tastes. We are able to buy staples in 50 lb bags: beans, flour, sugar and rice. We learned that pinto beans are preferred by Mexicans but black beans by the Maya. So black beans it is, even though they are more expensive. They do not care for brown rice, potatoes or apples. Along with the staples we get 50 lb cartons of cabbage and large bags of carrots. I buy masa harina and corn husks at retail, as well as large house brand containers of salt, pepper, cumin, oregano, cinnamon and other spices. My friend gets toilet paper, cases of peanut butter, gallon jugs of cooking oil and several other items at a discount store in yet another county.
Agreed. My point was it is not unreasonable, nor unexpected that when funding a nutrition program you’re gonna hear a lot of noise about actual nutrition.
Yes, being poor sucks and the poor are not the enemy, they are basically America’s most reliable economic engine, but efforts to steer people, especially children toward actual food and not junk are not what I’d consider “picking on”, or “demonizing” the poor.
Excuses like “Poor people are too busy to shop and cook” are patronizing, not based in fact, and really nothing but “the soft bigotry of low expectations”. Asking people to shop and cook for their family is not asking a lot. People make choices based on money.
I don’t think most junk food is all that cheap. Fast and filling I’ll concede, but not cheap.
