I don’t think that there is too much of a difference between frozen chicken and frozen pizza. Cheap and bagged frozen chicken is not as ‘processed’ as pizza but it is still processed. Totinos pizza takes up to 25% of the time to cook of frozen chicken (10-11 mins vs 45) if the chicken is thawed.
Frozen chicken and rice is not home cookin, but a step up from a nuked meal to me.
When I’m thinking of ‘grand meals’ what comes to mind is fresh veggies and/or spices that I probably mispronounce and have no clue as to how they taste.
Luxury! We had to eat the beak and feathers!
And being in a close-knit family where everyone is expected to help out is a great insurance policy. If you’re living on the edge and you get knocked down, who are you going to turn to? Family. Even if the family is also on the edge. Family will always have your back, so investing in it is important.
The bad food thing is a no-brainer. For one thing, a person inherits the eating habits of his or her upbringing. A person doesn’t just magically transform their eating habits once they become an adult. They look to what their parents did.
There is one other thing to consider, do they have a stove/oven or a fridge/freezer?
I live in a hotel and do not have a stove/oven. I do have a mini-fridge, microwave, and a coffee maker.
Technically I’m not supposed to have microwave, and a coffee maker as you are not allowed any cooking appliance, but I moved in here when they weren’t enforcing that policy, they are now.
Opulence! We got that plasticky looking thing in the center of the feather and only the nostrils of the beaks.
Lucky you! We only got the cluck. And we had to split it among both parents and eight kids.
Looking to family is a great insurance policy, and so a great adaptation to being poor. However, it can also have the effect of preventing someone from being not-poor.
Being not-poor requires the ability to accumulate reserves. If you have a large and needy extended family, there is simply no way to accumulate such reserves, because there is always going to be someone who immediately needs money to face a legitimate crisis.
Their immediate needs are always going to outweigh your rather vague ‘need money for a reserve, to invest in various ways to escape poverty’. So doing your duty by your extended family can keep you poor (but keeps building a social network or reciprocal obligations that makes that poverty survivable).
Hahaaa!
Meh. I grew up in a neighbourhood so tough, as kids we called a bedtime story with a happy ending an “alibi”. 
Can you really imagine having the motivation and energy, not to mention time, to go back to school if you’re working two jobs, raising two kids, and have zero savings? And having a degree isn’t a guarantee of anything anymore. Case in point: all the recent college grads working at Wal-Mart and Starbucks, saddled with heavy debt and no prospects.
If you are working hard labor, as many people are, a chicken breast and a bit of rice may not be enough food. And, you may want to leave taste aside, but people who are actually poor don’t have that luxury. Your meal tastes gross and boring. Food may be one of the only small pleasures the working poor have, and now you’ve taken that away as well? And why? It doesn’t sounds like you’ll save much money, and it isn’t even nutritionally complete. A decent frozen supreme pizza actually might be better for you, with the veggies and all. It’s certainly more enjoyable to eat.
I’m sorry if I came across as confrontational, but I’ve seen a lot of similar discussions on here, and I find it somewhat frustrating. Being poor is exhausting and depressing. There’s not a good way to place yourself in their position, because if you are truly poor there is a ton of shit piling on you all at once. Questioners want to “set aside” taste, and availability of cooking implements, and lack of accessibility to a decent grocery store, and the difficulty of transporting multiple fresh ingredients when you don’t have reliable access to a car, and lack of time, and how expensive cooking equipment is, and lack of storage for all those ingredients and supplies, and all this other stuff, and sure, if you set all that aside being poor is easy. but actual real poor people can’t just set that stuff aside. That’s their daily, lived experience and it is grinding. And that’s just the food issue! Real poor people have a million other things going on in addition to that.
I’m just tired of people who’ve never experienced that type of hardship judging the people who live it every day, and will probably never break free, and have little hope of seeing their kids or grandkids break free. Class mobility is mostly a myth; studies back that up, and it’s a feature of our society that many people simply overlook. When one person can’t improve their lot, maybe it’s them, but when huge swaths of the populace can’t, maybe its something endemic to our culture. But you aren’t interested in the systemic factors that create poverty; you want to know why poor people don’t eat rice. I find that attitude insulting and ignorant.
Get up at 5 am to get ready for work. Eat an instant oatmeal and a coffee
6 am - on the bus for work - need to make 2 exchanges because Hartford sucks for mass transit.
8 am get to work. Have a yogurt and a banana for lunch because that is fast and you are ‘on a diet’
5 pm get told of the mandatory 2 hours overtime because your company is too cheap to staff appropriately
7 pm, try to hitch a ride with someone left in the building because the busses have pretty much stopped running, next bus past the drop which is 6 blocks away is going to be about 8 30. Give up, take a cab home.
8 pm clean house, try to figure out what is clean for wearing to work the next day because laundry didn’t get done again - mandatory OT again and no laundry in the building. Give up and go to bed at 830 after nuking anything from the freezer.
More or less what my friend Sandi had as a life when I knew her 2 jobs ago. Only saving grace was no kids. Shortly after I left the call center she got a second part time job to make money for christmas presents. So, even less time to do things.
Yes, the poor have to deal with irrational bus schedules, lack of in building laundry facilities, the need to shop for small amounts frequently because they don’t have their own ar to transport/space to store larger amounts of groceries. Long work hours or even a second job means less time for doing anything other than sleeping working and traveling to and from work in a weekday. If you have kids or a dependant parent/sibling, lose even more time that could go to cooking even simple meals.
Hell, for most of my time i Connecticut, I have been forced by the job market to live an hour to an hour and a half in good traffic from my employment of the time, and I love to cook and many times was not finding adequate time to do much cooking. Especially some of the jobs that had me working 60-70 hours a week.
[and I always scrounged money to bu spendy footwear, but it also lasted years, I still have boots I bought close to 20 years ago, and some very nice and expensive black leather dress mary janes that in 1991 cost me $120 up in Boston. Well worth the money and still going strong, though puppy nibbled at one tiny spot that careful polishing hides.]
You hit it on the nose when it comes to the expensive shoes, aruvquan. I good pair of leather boots will last forever, while a pleather cheap pair will peal and leak and fall apart over and over. A good genuine leather handbag will last forever. And no one likes to hear this, but it is true…if you have been poor and struggling forever and you come to the realization that it is always going to be this way?..yeah, you go ahead and splurge and get the kids an xbox when the job bonus comes around. You just want to see your kid’s eyes light up once in a while, even if it means spending on a luxury.
Your other points are being responded to, so I’ll just take this one. First the obvious, these things are meant to be an escape, so having to pay the premium for someone else to cook for and clean for your shitty party is kind of the whole point.
Secondly, and I think not obvious to you based on the rest of the thread, not everybody is equipped to host their kid’s party by themselves. The case of living in a studio or one bedroom apartment or with roommates should be obvious. Or they may have a house with a yard but it’s in a bad part of town and the other parents won’t let their kids come over there. You could put something together at the local park, but odds are your kid and their friends have seen every nook and cranny of that place anyway, since where do you have to send them the other 364 days a year (other than school), and they want to see somewhere new.
Now, people do manage to work through enough of these problems, but the less money you have to make problems go away, the more every decision point in life becomes a careful balancing act, and generally the poor are no better balancers than the rich.
I know if I had to to work two shifts in a paper uniform and a hairnet, listening to complaints and angry bosses and being treated like shit all day long, being able to come home to a three-piece meal from Popeyes and a large Coke would be the only way I could make it.
Yeah, I might have some cellulite eating like that every day. But I wouldn’t be planning on laying out on the beach anyway.
I asked the hamsters to find this oldie but goodie:
In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell is quoted as saying “poverty trumps genius". IOW, his research found that even the most intelligent people are unable to “maximize their potential” when they have constantly deal with immediate issues of day to day survival. Over time, it becomes a learned behavior where you just constantly focus on the short term.
That’s not really true. Shit jobs and low standard of living are the default. That is to say, we would all be cleaning shit and living in a shanty until someone figures out a way to get rich. The problem (as Gladwell points out) is that in order to develop the skills needed to become a software developer, lawyer, engineer, or anything else requires hours and hours of hard work. And it’s tough to log those hours if you have to drop out of school to make ends meet.
Cost issue aside, when I was home from college, I used to work some low-level jobs over the summer. Warehouses and light industrial and so on. I also managed to drive 40 minutes to New Haven to take some summer classes I needed. One nice thing about poor people jobs is they tend to have definitive start and end times. It was a lot harder for me to take business school classes working a professional job where I might be asked to stay late or travel.
Of course, I was only working for beer money. I lived with my parents and wasn’t supporting a family. Of course, I would argue that you shouldn’t start a family until you are somewhat stable financially.
Which comes down to the root of the problem. At what point does a poor person blame an environment where they can’t succeed vs working a bit harder to reach their goals.
How much time do you spend worried about how poor you are?
Chances are, if you are are like most Dopers, you live in a home that’s a nice, but could do with more space and has a few quirks. You probably have a few pieces of furniture from Ikea and probably some clothes from Target. You probably keep an eye on grocery expenses and stay away from out-of-season fruit or those $7.00 jars of pasta sauce. You probably take a vacation now and then, but would consider, say, a month in Paris or on Safari to be a “once in a lifetime” trip. You probably have a retirement fund, but will obviously have to step down your expenses when you retire.
Or maybe you are a step up. You have a newly remodeled home in a neighborhood with top schools. You buy your furniture at Crate and Barrel and your clothing from J. Crew. You shop at Whole Foods, and are able to take nice long vacations to exotic places. You are looking forward to traveling more when you retire.
Or maybe you own a couple of nice homes which you furnish with antiques, get most of your clothes tailored, and don’t really know where the housekeeper buys the food from. You may summer here and there. When you retire, you expect your wealth will continue to grow.
Anyway, my point is, wherever you are on that scale, you probably aren’t freaking the heck out all the time that you aren’t at the next step. You are probably thinking more about spending time with your family, having a bit of fun, making the next promotion at your job, and generally staying on track.
Likewise, the person in the cheapo apartment, wearing clothes from thrift stores, eating generic mac and cheese and looking forward to a camping trip? They are thinking about the same things. They aren’t necessarily spending all day thinking about how deprived they are (though they would probably welcome more money- who wouldn’t?) For most of us, the income scale we are dealing with is just kind of the way things are. We are slowly improving things (and that guy at McDonalds is probably working his way to assistant manager, and feeling that is progress), but we don’t consider that to be the real “meat” of life- that space is for our families and our friends.
It is. His real name is Mack Leighty.
Another thing to think about- there are lots of ways that middle class people get family help.
It’s not uncommon for families middle class families to help pay for an education. They may also pitch in with generous “graduation” gifts, a nice shopping trip when you get your first apartment, maybe some help for the wedding, and perhaps a bit towards the downpayment on your house. There are lots of little extras as well-- stuff like the car that gets passed to you when you are 16, or being able to slum it on your parents insurance until you are 26.
My point is few of us live totally sustainable lifestyles, and most of us have some sort of favor system with our family and friends that get us through rough times. The main difference is that when you are poor, the rough times are a bit rougher.
As a professional cook, I can honestly say that, after spending all day cooking for a living, the last thing I want when I get home is to spend another 30-60 minutes in my own kitchen (cooking something I’m probably going to scarf down in 10 minutes). Also, being a single guy living alone has its own problems. For example, I’d certainly like to eat healthier and include fresh fruits and vegetables in my diet. But unless I want to go to the grocery store almost every single day, I’ve found it very difficult to buy anything in a small enough quantity that most of it won’t go bad faster than I can eat it. I like cheese. But I can’t eat a block of cheese faster than it grows mold. I end up wasting half of it carving the moldy spots off.
Well, I did. While my mom’s cooking was certainly healthy, it was also flavorless and boring. Or, in the case of the dark green vegetables she loved serving so much, so vile-tasting (to me) that I couldn’t keep them down. As an adult, I go for what tastes good to me.
From one of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books:
"“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”