| > 3) The guy from a culture where the average TV viewership per capita is 4 hours and 38 minutes per day (per Neilson 2012) could never have spare the five minutes to throw some beans in a slow cooker. Also all home cooked meals take 8 hours to prepare because he says so. Finally multitasking has not been invented (serious, HN?) so time spent stirring a pot must be spent 100% focused on the stirring never a single brain cell firing on any other task. I honestly believe there is some kind of cooking phobia loose on HN. This is low quality, and doesn't add to the discussion. Here's a real case study; a mother, two children under six years old, mid-twenties, high school dropout, only has a bus pass and foodstamps. The closest grocery store is 3 miles away and she lives on government checks. How much time do you believe it would take her to go to the grocery store to get fresh produce? How much time does it take someone with kids AND a car to get to the grocery store and back? How much time have you devoted towards helping the poor? I mean actually sitting down with someone in the bottom 15% (not your friends-friend who's eating ramen at college or someone you heard of from high school) and how successful were you in training them to spend less money? These topics are fine for what they are: Affluent people trying to spend less. They lose value when people look at the numbers and say "Gosh, this is so easy, why don't the poor just do this! Why don't they just buy a hybrid and save money on gas? Or maybe order all this stuff online with their macbooks to save time?". |
That was my reaction to your last paragraph, as well. Every time there's a thread about dealing with certain challenges of poverty, someone comes along and accuses the rest of us of having unrealistic expectations of poverty, and makes some snarky remark about hybrids or hookers or macbooks.
Instead of dragging the thread down, why don't we elevate the discourse?
I personally have plenty of real case studies to go from. There was the divorced mom of 3 whose ex hid his assets so he could duck child support, who my wife and I helped move between 3 different shelters. There was the mentally ill guy on disability who I took to the hospital on occasion, and who thanked me for teaching him to shop because for the first time in his adult life he had food at the end of the month. There's the single mom, recovering from mental illness, and her son who live with me right now. There are over a dozen homeless guys who come to my church on Sunday mornings for free hot breakfast, and over 6000 families who come to our food bank each year.
Would the information in the original post, or the comment you were criticizing, help all of those people? No, but it could help some of them.
Knowing which foods give the best bang-for-buck in terms of calories and nutrients, and having some basic idea of how to combine them to make some viable meals, is a big deal for some people. Gaining the basic confidence to attempt actual cooking, instead of feeling like you must rely on pre-packaged convenience foods, is a big deal for some people. Learning certain time management skills, such as planning ahead and taking a few minutes to start beans soaking in the morning, is a big deal for some people. Yeah, this thread as a whole is a pretty theoretical exercise, but it does have valuable practical implications even for those dealing with real poverty.