Food for thought

[wallwalker]

Food for thought. Inspired by this.

Pop tarts will keep on a shelf darned near indefinitely. In contrast, fresh fruit spoils after a week, if you're lucky. Same with most meat and fresh vegetables. Bread's slightly better, but still a crap shoot; I've had some loaves of bread last me for weeks without spoiling while others were moldy after six days. I'm not sure what's going on there, frankly. And milk/dairy lasts... maybe a month, if you're careful about sell-by dates and can store it properly. (Not accounting for freezing, here. Freezing helps, if you have the means.)

Anyway. Say you're missing some of the conveniences that you've thus far enjoyed in life. You don't have a reliable fridge/freezer, or the one you have is shared and you have little space. Maybe you don't have a reliable stove. Maybe you don't have a lot of free time - maybe you work two jobs to make ends meet and still have to feed a family. Maybe you don't have a car to drive back and forth from the store; you have to take a bus or get a ride from a friend, if you're lucky, and if you're not you walk. (I've had to rely on walking to and from a store for all of my groceries before; it was not fun. And that was with a grocery store that was only a little over a mile away!) Or maybe you don't have a home at all.

My point is, under those circumstances... which of the above foods is going to look more attractive to you? The "healthy" or "real" food that you might not be able to store properly, that you might not have the resources, time, energy or any of the above to cook, and that will more likely spoil before you can actually eat all of it? Or the pop tart, which keeps forever in a little box on a shelf, can be eaten out of hand without any trouble, and will keep you alive and nourish you enough to get you through a few hours?

It's not enough to just tell people that pop tarts aren't good for you and that they should buy "real food." Education is important - it's a good idea to teach people how to cook and keep a kitchen, because so many of us just don't know - but it can't make up for lack of time, proper cookware, or proper storage and facilities. It is possible to eat healthier on a lower income if you have the knowhow and the proper tools, but it has to be taught with the person's individual situation in mind; there's no one-size-fits-all solution. And it's too easy to get stuck in that way of thinking - "Well, X worked for me, so it'll work for everyone." Sure, you can get cheap fresh produce in bulk - IF you have a freezer, or a lot of people to help eat it. Otherwise half of it will spoil, and no matter how cheap it was, if it goes bad before you can eat it, you've wasted the money you spent. Sure, you can get to a store that sells decent food for a decent price - IF such a store exists within a distance that you can reasonably travel to, then travel back while carrying said food. Tall order, if you don't have a car and the store isn't right down the street - if it's on the other side of town, well, some towns have decent mass transit but other towns don't. For so many people, fresh food is a luxury, for those and so many other reasons.

I'm not saying that eating as healthily as possible isn't a good thing, mind you. I'm a strong believer! If you have a choice between an apple and a pop tart to eat today, and choosing one over the other isn't going to cause any big problems, I would say to go for the apple every time. But I just want people to acknowledge that it just isn't always possible to eat the way that the guidelines tell us we should eat. There's no way to find solutions if people can't recognize the problem.

Comments

[squeemu]

That's a good point! I've never thought about people without access to a fridge/freezer, although I've had a problem with the "Buy healthy food, not processed!" for awhile. Not because you should buy processed, but because processed food is way cheaper.

In conclusion: I just want people to acknowledge that it just isn't always possible to eat the way that the guidelines tell us we should eat.

This.

[wallwalker]

I keep wanting to do a side-by-side comparison of costs of processed foods versus the ingredients you would need to actually make those foods purchased fresh (or relatively fresh - I mean, I wouldn't grind my own flour for a pizza, since I really don't have the means.) I've never really done it before, and I've seen a lot of arguments on both sides - Mark Bittman, for instance, does a lot of talking about how junk food is actually not cheaper than cooking at home, although I didn't see a word in that article about dealing with the lack of resources and facilities needed to safely store and cook the food in a timely manner OR the know-how needed to do so properly, which is two-thirds of the equation. (He did at least acknowledge that, say, canned beans and frozen veggies are not vile and disgusting shortcuts, which I get from a surprising amount of sites about cooking. "Everyone can learn to chop their own veggies! It saves you money and it isn't that hard!" Yes, but I'm terrible with knives, and I'm not going to risk injury when I can buy that onion pre-chopped and in an easily-storable medium for only a few cents more. If I find a really good deal on whole onions and have someone to share them with if they're in bulk, then yes, maybe I'll chop and freeze them myself.)

I want to do it now, though. I'm very curious.

[crankyoldman]

It is possible to eat healthier on a lower income if you have the knowhow and the proper tools, but it has to be taught with the person's individual situation in mind; there's no one-size-fits-all solution.

Amen! Despite being something of a foodie, I get really bothered by sort of yuppie attitudes to food.

[wallwalker]

Me too. And I understand that so many of them are trying to help, but they're not putting themselves in the places of people who have to live without the things that they're used to. Things like the Food Stamp Challenge back in 2007 are a step in the right direction, I think.

[owlmoose]

Yes. I get really bothered by the difficulty that some of our most influential foodies (Michael Pollen, Alice Waters) seem to have acknowledging these issues. Well said.

[wallwalker]

I admit, it's hard to think about when you're used to having such amenities! But I think that it's important to do it - to put oneself in the places of the people one is trying to help.

This post about street life and the mistakes that authors tend to make about it in fiction was what got me thinking about it. Specifically this segment:

Food costs money. Not just to buy it, but to get to the grocery store and back again; that might be a subway trip, a bus trip, or the thirty minutes to walk the mile and a half to pick up no more than you can carry/haul back the mile and a half to the barely-affordable apartment. If I could, I'd take a clump o' urban fantasy authors and send them off to the grocery store with ten bucks and the instructions to come back with food for a week. If I were being really generous, I'd say twenty.

At this point I was thinking, "Oh, I can do this. Beans and rice are extremely affordable if you buy them dry, and one bag can get you through over a week -"

If I were being really generous, I'd allow food that requires a kitchen for cooking, or that needs to be refrigerated.

And then I stopped. Because until reading that, the thought of not having a stove to cook those beans and rice on didn't even occur to me. I might've grown up in relative poverty, we might have had to buy all of our drinking water because we didn't get clean water from our well, but we always had a kitchen.

Which is also why, I think, some of the worst bootstrapping I've ever seen doesn't come from yuppies or "experts." It comes from people who've been through hard times and got into a better situation afterwards, and who are now trying to encourage people who are also going through hard times. Except that their hard times are not the same as my hard times, and the circumstances that surrounded their improvement in fortunes are going to be different as well. Sure, there are things I can do that might give me a better chance, but they don't have the right to get mad when I try them and find they don't necessarily work for me, or to tell me that I'm just doing it wrong/not believing in myself enough, because I am not them.

That got off on a bit of a tangent. Whew.

[squeemu]

That post you linked to was really interesting!

...that's all. :D

[stealth_noodle]

This! So much this. I feel like so much time and effort is spent on telling people what they should eat, and so little on making it feasible for them to eat that way. I'm pretty sure most people know that a Pop-Tart is less healhty than fresh fruit, but what does that matter to someone whose only accessible source of groceries is a convenience store?

[wallwalker]

I'm pretty sure most people know that a Pop-Tart is less healhty than fresh fruit, but what does that matter to someone whose only accessible source of groceries is a convenience store?

Exactly! If that's as far as you can go for your food, well, that's as far as you will go. And you'll eat what you can fit into your budget. I've seen precious few convenience stores that sold healthy food for reasonable prices. (I've been told that in some areas, convenience stores will actually sell individual bottles of beverages like Ensure for a dollar or two apiece, as a meal replacement.)