That was a long read, but very much worth reading.
This part really stuck out to me:
> A few years ago, a friend of mine, in a well-meaning attempt to understand the impoverished diets of poor people, ate a Food Stamp diet for a week. On the last day of the diet, he talked about what he had learned and spoke philosophically about his renewed appreciation of healthy food as he prepared to end his restricted diet with his first good meal of the week: homemade vegetable pizza. He thought about what he had learned as he kneaded the pizza dough. He had already sliced the vegetables, and they sat piled high on the cutting board. While he had the best of intentions, what he said made me sad. He had misunderstood.
> In his week of eating like poor people, he had missed two crucial ingredients: fear and shame. While he was looking forward to breaking his fast that night, poor people don’t get to do that. They don’t get to look forward to the end of impoverishment, to a good meal. My friend would eat a healthy meal that night, and he had known throughout the week that he could stop whenever he wanted, that all he had to do if he missed healthy food was open his refrigerator. Poor people never know when their next good meal will come. They look in the refrigerator on the 25th and maybe they only have enough food for a couple more meals but they don’t get paid for a week. And vegetables are expensive. Most poor people can’t afford them. All of this causes great shame. Shame that they don’t make enough money, shame that they can’t give their kids decent food, shame that they must rely on government assistance, shame that they can’t afford the restaurant their friends want to go to on Saturday night. That shame never goes away. It is not my friend’s fault that he does not know this. He doesn’t know it because society does not talk about such things, does not want them talked about. The result is that my friend would never understand how poor people feel—never understand me—and I felt sad and alone.
It's a doublet of suffering: not just the material burden of living in poverty and being unable to provide for yourself and family, but the ideological burden of being shamed into believing it was caused by your own personal failure.
What sticks out to me is that it sticks out to you (and the author and so many others besides). I have actually been on food stamps. I never ate so well. Before I had food stamps I was just a typical working poor person. I had never spent as much on groceries as I was able to on food stamps. Food stamps are accepted at regular grocery stores -- the same ones you shop at. You can get anything you want, more or less. It's totally up to you. You can, of course, use them to buy vegetables. In fact, I was a vegetarian the entire time I was on food stamps!
It's just so odd to me as someone who has actually been very poor that according you (and seemingly the rest of the professional managerial class) I was at that time completely without agency. Nothing I did or didn't do was in my control, apparently. I was but flotsam in an ocean of systemic effects. I have to tell you, that's not how it felt to me.
I felt like a person making choices.
Poor people typically know lots of other poor people. I knew a lot of poor people. Some of them made good choices. Many of them made very bad choices. The ones who made good choices are universally doing well 20 years later.
yeah, were you a family on food stamps? Two adults, one kid? Or were you a single person on food stamps? I was a single person and like you I did pretty well, I sort of have the feeling that the dynamic would be different for a family though, it seems from what I know of family life is more problems show up and then you don't manage to take care of it the way you can as a single young person.
There's no doubt about it, which again underscores the importance of good choices. Babies aren't dropped off by a stork. You have to insert semen into a woman's body on one of like three days each month. Don't do that!
And just to re-emphasize something I said in another comment: people make mistakes and this is an extraordinarily wealthy society. I'm a strong proponent of a welfare state. I don't want anybody to starve because they made bad choices. But getting pregnant when you're young and poor is correctly described as a bad choice! Ejaculating inside a woman who is ovulating isn't something that happens to you while you're sleeping.
The correct message to somebody who has fallen through the ice in the middle of a lake on a winter morning is, "let me help you."
The correct message to everybody else is that there are things you can do to avoid falling through the ice.
right nobody ever gets ejaculated into by anyone they didn't want ejaculating into them, nobody ever ejaculates into someone when doing well and then loses job, child has problems, one of partners dies and not able to take care of child etc.
A person is in some way a sort of god that has complete control over the world and can only be brought low by making a 'bad' choice.
This is nihilism. We can acknowledge that some people have better luck than others without entirely rejecting the notion that there are good and bad choices.
This reminds me a bit of the debate about the blank slate, which presupposes that there’s one side who thinks human development is all nurture and another side that thinks it’s all nature. But actually only one of those sides exists. That is to say, there are people who think it is entirely nurture and who reject genetic explanations for behavior whenever they’re proposed, but there are no people who think it’s entirely genetics and who believe environment is never a factor.
That second group simply doesn’t exist. Every single person who believes genetics are a significant factor in life outcomes also believes that environment matters.
There is only one side that takes a hard line.
So it is here. There isn’t a side that thinks everything is environmental and a second side that thinks you can overcome anything with choices and hard work. The side that thinks choices and hard work matter also acknowledges that environment is very often a factor and that there may be situations that are insurmountable. It’s the other side that takes a hard line, that never acknowledges the role of choices, that always cowers from telling people that there are things they might do to improve their situation.
Of course life outcomes are a mix of nature and nurture. And of course (even though choices matter) there exist people who make all the right choices who nevertheless are held back by external factors. But believing what I just said entails admitting that choices do matter!
I'm pretty much here with you as a UK prole, for what it's worth.
I constantly feel like middle class individuals just don't "get" what it's like to be poor. It's really common for there to be this sort of "woe is them" mindset, as if they're talking about farm animals or something that fundamentally has less intelligence/autonomy.
The vast majority of my schoolfriends who worked hard, focused on the correct things, and budgeted well, did well. The ones that went to prison or had children at age 18 didn't. None of us are billionaires, but neither are we all some sort of sub-human, toothless, brainless mass.
One of the amusing things about having money now, is that I have to "play along" to some extent. I can't just tell someone that they're an idiot for trying to find a place in London when they're a single person without any real income to speak of, even though 99% of people back in my hometown not only think that's not unreasonable, but that it's completely self-evident.
Some people face real barriers. Try being born into a country in which a Western visa costs a month or more of your wages. Hell, try just being on an H1-B. The way we talk about "poverty" in the West makes an absolute mockery of that.
My family became suddenly very poor when I was in highschool and then in the first years of me going to uni. Like living in a half-finished house in the countryside with no electrical power for a couple of months-poor (when things had really become bad).
That was happening 20 to 25 years ago, and in the meantime I have managed to attain a middle-class status, sort of (I still don't own an apartment, never mind an actual house), enough to say that I can't complain about my present financial situation.
Even so, I'm fully and acutely aware that my choices alone wouldn't have made all that possible. I also needed luck, lots of it, and the presence of people whom had no obligation to me whatsoever, at least on paper, but who nevertheless helped me at some crucial points in my past. Yes, it was my choice to make good on that help and to take advantage of some of the luck I had, but, again, my choices alone, without said luck and without those people that have helped me would have meant nothing.
My girlfriend has EBT and she eats just fine. Vegetables are much cheaper than processed food. Maybe at one point in time it was true that processed food was cheaper and a necessity to get by on food stamps but these days it’s much cheaper to buy and eat unprocessed food like rice, bread, peanut butter, and lentils.
Those are just things I eat because I’m not a great cook. My gf cooks things like pies and casseroles.
Another thing that weirds me out is how many different kinds of junk and processed foods are EBT eligible.
Is that a historical thing? In the US you get a SNAP card and can buy fresh produce at the store. I shop at a low-income focused grocery store (because it’s the same stuff but cheaper) and most people are using SNAP benefits and carts are always a mix of healthy stuff to unhealthy frozen junk.
You're going to get pushback on this commonsense understanding of the world, but I've been on food stamps and of course you're right. "It's more complicated than that." No it isn't. Poor people shop at the same stores as everybody else. The food is all there. "They don't know the difference between healthy and unhealthy meals." How stupid do you think poor people are? They know how to prepare a healthy meal. The notion that this is just completely beyond the abilities of poor folks is risible. "They don't have as much time to prepare meals." Yes, they do. They have time to prepare a meal. Of course they do. Maybe not every single night, but they can make it work. (In fact, in the United States upper-income earners work more hours than those at the bottom [0].)
It's just an endless array of easily-overcome excuses (mostly from people who have never been poor and don't actually know any poor people).
Work hours are not usually the issue. It is the wasted hours on all the things where a high earner can trade $ for time, versus the poor person that need to use an hour to save a dollar of cost.
Upper-income earners have different choices than the poor. Travel choices - Uber versus the bus, a car that works versus an clunker that costs maintenance and heavy breakdown side-effects. Appliances save time: dishwashers, your own washing machine, and a clothes dryer. A comfortable bed in a quiet and safe neighbourhood with helpful neighbours. Upper-income earners can buy services that give them time: cleaning, takeaways instead of cooking, supermarket delivery, childcare, massages or other re-energisers, good healthcare, yada yada yada.
When you get $40 dollars disposable in your pocket after household expenses for 40 hours work (ignoring travel), spending an hour to save a dollar is sensible.
Ideally if they worked an extra marginal hour, they would get a large marginal increase in disposable income. Somehow that doesn’t seem to work in reality (for many reasons, sometimes perverse government incentives).
One commonality amongst the less-well-off people I know, is that they are all tired. They can’t decide to spend another hour at their job because they are physically and mentally drained after a days physical work, and dealing with stressful people/children all day. Doing an hour on something different can make perfect sense to “earn” their $1.
I am not disagreeing with your main point - I do also see my friends spend their time and money poorly (in my opinion from an outside viewpoint).
Anything can be overcome, humans can do anything (get out of poverty, convert to healthy living, run marathons, stop smoking....) yet the majority (of a huge sample size of humans) is stuck in their way, held down by environmental conditions and, if you will, by limits in the human condition or whatever. If it could be fixed by telling people to "try harder" they would have by now, no?
The answer is to alleviate the environmental conditions. You have mentioned in another post that you have benefitted from food stamps for a while (did I understand that right?), allowing you to eat healthy; other people need that and maybe a little additional help with food, housing and clothing (all of it basic human rights anyway and relatively cheap to provide for in a modern society) to reduce the pressure and higher order effects of not having that safety net.
> You have mentioned in another post that you have benefitted from food stamps for a while (did I understand that right?), allowing you to eat healthy; other people need that and maybe a little additional help with food, housing and clothing
Absolutely. There’s a false dichotomy that runs all the way through this entire debate, which says that in order to demonstrate that we are compassionate and that we care about the plight of the poor and working class we must also insist that their condition is never the result of personal choices, but always external factors. This makes no sense. It is not particularly hard to keep two sets of books, one that says we should help those who need it and another that tells people who can benefit from this message that they do have agency, that their choices matter, that they can do things to improve their situation.
People need to believe that their actions have consequences. And the good news: it’s not a lie. Actions do have consequences. There actually are things you can do to improve your situation. That’s a hopeful message, not a cruel one.
And yet, there will of course be people who for whatever reason are unable to improve their lot in life. We should help them. There’s no contradiction here.
You sound out of touch with society. Many poor people don't have time to cook. They might have multiple jobs that take up all of their time. Transportation is a big issue as well. And any disability they may have.
Most of America has horrible public transit. I don't know if it would even be possible for me to get onto a bus from my house to the nearest grocery store without first walking a mile. Some of the bus routes in this town turn what would be a 15min trip in a car to a ~2hr trip with a transfer in the middle.
In 2011, I briefly lived in a house in Northeast Tacoma, right by Dash Point State Park. Beautiful area. No buses. There wasn't even a sidewalk on the road I had to walk along to get to the bus. It was a mile walk from my house to a bus stop in Federal Way. From there I could get to a hub and get on another bus to anywhere I wanted. It was awful.
>You sound out of touch with society. Many poor people don't have time to cook. They might have multiple jobs that take up all of their time. Transportation is a big issue as well. And any disability they may have.
This is not been my experience. Poor people having too many jobs to cook just isn't a thing that I saw growing up as a migrant worker (and with, very, very unstable housing, no hot water, abject poverty, etc.) If anything, most of the poor people I knew had no job or a side hustle under the table for cash because any income would reduce their benefits. Regarding transportation, again, people usually go with someone that has a car and pay in foodstamps or buy them somthing at the store or give a little for gas. Or walked if it was close enough. Granted, I did not grow up in giant metropolises, so it might be different there. Regarding disability, nearly every poor person I knew was trying to get disability classification, because it meant constant stable income. If you are disable and can't cook for yourself, in the US, you can get people that will come to your house and help you for free (paid by the government, I know many people that do this as a job).
It’s hard for me to feel bad when everything possible is in front of you and you still make a poor life decision. You can be poor and still be willfully unhealthy, same as the rich.
I think that is a specious argument that is unrelated to the larger point - in 2022 SNAP benefits provide poor people with enough free food to eat healthy, if they choose to.
When you are poor, you have to be frugal in all things. Even "free money" needs to be spent judiciously. Junk foods will extend your dollar further and are typically faster to prepare than alternatives.
That's just not true. People who live in actually impovrished countries don't eat junk food; they eat rice and eggs. The US has a %40 obesity rate. That doesn't come from "extending your dollar." Poorer people have an even higher obesity rate on average in the US. That doesn't suddenly mean that "junk food will extend your dollar further."
What we really need is to limit food stamps (or SNAP, EBT, whatever name) to healthier options. Junk food and fast food may be easier but becoming obease is a terrable financial decision which will increase medical cost, may cause diabetes, drain evergy ect. all which have a disproportionate effect on poorer people. I don't blame people for taking the faster and tastier option but the government should not allow food stamps to buy soda, doughnuts ect. in place of cheap eggs, rice and beans.
> What we really need is to limit food stamps (or SNAP, EBT, whatever name) to healthier options.
That'd be super fun for me, as a person with MS. I literally don't have the energy to cook a lot of the time, and am often only awake for 1-2 hours when I'm not at work, during which time I already have to shower, do chores, pay bills, etc.
Oh, and I'm hypotensive and on medication that often means I don't feel hungry. Junk food is great because it's so easy to eat even when you don't feel hungry. Eating healthy foods often results in me severely undereating calorie wise which causes more problems. Junk food is also easy to snack on at work because I don't get sit down breaks some days. A little salt every few hours keeps me from fainting.
And RIP anybody with any kind of dietary restrictions.
The grocery store has food for all manner of diets and it takes SNAP. I don’t think your story negates the crux of the matter. It’s great junk food is healthy for you.
If it were restricted, I'd have major issues eating because what is and isn't healthy would be determined by upper-middle class people who work in think tanks and based off of some weird ideal diet, completely ignoring the varying health needs and ability levels of the people actually using SNAP.
Hmm… junk food is generally more expensive than rice, beans, canned veggies, frozen veggies. Look at the prices for a bag of chips and it’s pretty expensive.
I sat down with someone who said their family was starving because they couldn't get enough food from their snap benefits. We went through how much they had and put together a healthy basic menu (rice, beans, etc.) that would make sure no one was starving and they still had about 50% left over to use for buying whatever nice to haves they wanted. I suggested the look for items that were on sale to add to their basic menu. We had even factored in buying pots and pans.
They looked at what we had put together and said, "My kids won't eat that."
While they definitely had financial difficulties to overcome, it wasn't a lack of resources that was their biggest barrier.
>They looked at what we had put together and said, "My kids won't eat that."
This is very common for people I know these days (including my own kids, sadly). It is interesting that when I was young (and we were very, very poor) we (the kids) never had an option. We could eat what we were given or not eat at all, that was the choice we got. And we mostly ate what we were given.
Makes me think of the “delayed gratification” experiments. Someone who is of means probably has an easier time delaying gratification because they have the means to figuratively “break the fast”. They also know that they have the resources to get somewhere in life. But what if you don’t? What if that “instant gratification” is all that you can expect to get for a good while?
Relevant Orwell quote "And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you"
> Makes me think of the “delayed gratification” experiments.
Since debunked[1], mind you - "Celeste Kidd published The Marshmallow Study Revisited in which she disproved the conclusions made in the original Marshmallow experiment"
This doesnt really square with the insane fraction of food stamps spent on soda. Im lowish income and can easily afford peppers, onions and garlic. bulk stuff like sweet potato is cheap. My rice and chicken stir fry would take like 20-25 min of work at a fast food job to afford.
You got dependents? Does cooking require any utilities? Let's say you can only afford one. You going to sleep by the oven or do homework by candlelight? How many illnesses are you away from homelessness?
This part really stuck out to me:
> A few years ago, a friend of mine, in a well-meaning attempt to understand the impoverished diets of poor people, ate a Food Stamp diet for a week. On the last day of the diet, he talked about what he had learned and spoke philosophically about his renewed appreciation of healthy food as he prepared to end his restricted diet with his first good meal of the week: homemade vegetable pizza. He thought about what he had learned as he kneaded the pizza dough. He had already sliced the vegetables, and they sat piled high on the cutting board. While he had the best of intentions, what he said made me sad. He had misunderstood.
> In his week of eating like poor people, he had missed two crucial ingredients: fear and shame. While he was looking forward to breaking his fast that night, poor people don’t get to do that. They don’t get to look forward to the end of impoverishment, to a good meal. My friend would eat a healthy meal that night, and he had known throughout the week that he could stop whenever he wanted, that all he had to do if he missed healthy food was open his refrigerator. Poor people never know when their next good meal will come. They look in the refrigerator on the 25th and maybe they only have enough food for a couple more meals but they don’t get paid for a week. And vegetables are expensive. Most poor people can’t afford them. All of this causes great shame. Shame that they don’t make enough money, shame that they can’t give their kids decent food, shame that they must rely on government assistance, shame that they can’t afford the restaurant their friends want to go to on Saturday night. That shame never goes away. It is not my friend’s fault that he does not know this. He doesn’t know it because society does not talk about such things, does not want them talked about. The result is that my friend would never understand how poor people feel—never understand me—and I felt sad and alone.
It's a doublet of suffering: not just the material burden of living in poverty and being unable to provide for yourself and family, but the ideological burden of being shamed into believing it was caused by your own personal failure.