[devchix]

Not irrational at all. I've often wondered at some ascetic values of the very rich: cold showers, building a cabin with your own hands, short duration of rough wilderness living, and in your quoted case, abstemious diet. Humanity spent generations trying to escape those conditions, poor people will never willingly engage in them. Is it because the rest of rich people's lives are elevated away from those conditions, so it's a choice to embrace it, and thereby redefining the thing's perceived values?

Yet another data point on why the poor are playing the lottery, eating crisps and not virtuously buying and cooking rice and lentil, there's a game-theory-ish idea that the poor understands that as much hard work and lentil they could shovel, they stand little chance of getting out. So with the money they have they buy the best value thing possible, discounted for future possibilities; and those best value things are junk food, lottery tickets, sometimes expensive (relative to their circumstance) and flashy things like clothes or phones.