[rectang]

From the article:

> Being poor is you already did all those things. You cancelled all your streaming services years ago. You make all your food from scratch all the time. You never go to fucking Starbucks. You fix everything yourself. You already stretch everything to the limit. That is how you have to live every day of your life, for eternity, with no relief in sight.

[bigstrat2003]

Yes, the article says that, but I have direct experience which says the article is not telling the whole story. Some people are making all the right decisions and are still poor due to bad luck trapping them in a cycle of financial ruin. But also, some people really are poor due to their own crappy decisions. I've known them! They exist and must be accounted for in any productive discussion about poverty.

Many, many people try to act like only one of these two groups of poor people exists. For some people, that means they claim that if you're poor it's only because of your own bad decisions. For some people (including, to be frank, most of the commenters in this thread), it means they claim that if you're poor it's only because of systemic issues. Both claims are wrong, however, and both hamper us from finding effective solutions.

Whether one is poor due to external causes or their own bad decisions, they deserve to be treated with compassion and for us to try to help them. But the solutions for those two failure modes look very different and helping one group isn't going to do anything to help the other. Thus, trying to effectively solve problems of poverty in our society must include a balanced view, recognizing that both causes of poverty (systemic issues and bad personal decision making) are quite real.

[9rx]

> You make all your food from scratch all the time. [...] You fix everything yourself.

What stands out here is that if someone finds out that you can cook or fix things in my circles, they'll be knocking at your door trying to throw money at you. These are hotly desired skills. Of course, it is conceivable that if your circle is other poor people that can't offer you a good job, you'll never find those opportunities. Does this suggest that the company you keep is most signifiant? That is certainly not a new idea.

Being able to hobnob with the world's richest billionaires is probably a function of luck more than anything. But what about the moms and pops that are found everywhere? Is getting into their good graces also limited by sheer luck, or does self-control start to dominate?

[Jensson]

> Being poor is you already did all those things. ... You make all your food from scratch all the time.

If poor americans did this they wouldn't be so fat, so that is wrong. Food stamps lets the poor eat unhealthily even though they are poor, while most of the world poor means you have to make your own and not get all the industrial crap.

The other interpretation is that people who don't make their own food aren't really poor, which would mean there are barely any poor Americans. But I doubt that is what they mean.

[jandrewrogers]

You can definitely be fat making food from scratch. Making it from scratch doesn't mean it is low calorie. See also: southern home cooking.

[9rx]

I suppose that depends on what you mean by "from scratch". If first you must invent the universe, starvation is certain. If you have to produce the food from the ground by yourself, you will struggle to scrape enough calories out of it to survive. There is no hope of excessive weight gain here.

If "from scratch" means going to the grocery store to buy a bunch of prepared ingredients that you go home with to mix up in a bowl, sure. Then it starts to become much easier. Where does the line get drawn?

[simoncion]

> There is no hope of excessive weight gain here.

Uh. We can pretty confidently say that ancient civilizations had fat folks, too.

Also, butter, processed animal fats (such as lard), fatty meats... none of these are recent inventions, and they're all good at helping you to grow fat. I feel very confident in claiming that they (or things functionally just like them) have been around for a thousand years, and I expect that they've been around for several thousand.

[9rx]

> We can pretty confidently say that ancient civilizations had fat folks, too.

Not without a lot of extra help. That is why I said by yourself. If you include the input of many other people building things like a tractor you could also grow enough of your own food from the ground to exceed your normal caloric requirements without much trouble, but you're a long way from doing it from scratch at that point.

Unless, like before, you consider throwing some prepared ingredients into a bowl to be "from scratch", at which point anything goes. Perhaps opening a bag of chips is also "from scratch"? You did have to exert the effort to open it, after all.

[simoncion]

> Not without a lot of extra help. That is why I said by yourself.

One guy can totally make butter, lard, and harvest fatty meat by themselves. While it's far easier with help, it's not as if you're asking the fellow to -say- change the orbit of the sun. Fat people and high-calorie foods substantially predate modern industry.

[Jensson]

Yes, there were always fat people around in history, but not at the same rates and severity as modern Americans.

Cooking your own food reduces how fat you are on average, American poors wouldn't be one of the fattest groups in the world if they made their own food.