Along this topic, I am reminded of some ‘marshmallow experiment’ done with children. They would present the child a marshmallow and tell the child that if they could wait X minutes, they would be given two marshmallows as a reward. There were cameras that studied how the child reacted (did he wait? did he eat the marshmallow but lie about what happened when he was alone with it? did he bite off half the marshmallow and argue that the uneaten half still entitled him to his reward?)
It was to see how some people could delay gratification. I’m sure there are a lot of interesting correlations with each child’s background/family/personality and whether or not they ate the first marshmallow. I’m sure for some kids, they simply didn’t trust that they would get a second one, so ‘missing out’ was a small price to pay for a sure thing. Conversely, some kids were very precocious and knew waiting would pay off in the long run.
Adults are the same way. Some can delay gratification, while others can’t. The reasons are complicated. Look at people who still refuse to have a checking account/debit cards, in spite of the inconvenience because they simply don’t trust it (or themselves) vs doing everything the hard expensive way that makes sense to them. Some people can make sacrifices and set long-term plans by adapting their needs/wants to what best suits their long term future.
People have posted here how they struggle to comprehend how some people don’t get compound interest, saving, not using payday loans, etc. But for someone skilled at knowing this, everything about it is easy and obvious.
How much are crockpots these days? General availability?
For all people rave about them, I’d wager owning one, or even considering owning one, is a minority for middle class families. For the poor?
Franks, I’m more skeptical of the idea that the solution to a societal issue is both individualized and “SO SIMPLE, I can’t believe they’re so dumb not to know this!”
You don’t even need a crockpot, a regular one works (and it’s what was used for milennia) but just needs more tending and the ability to lower the fire without putting it off (through the years I’ve encountered many people who hadn’t correlated “the gas has a peak point” and “to lower the fire, turn the wheel beyond the peak, not towards where it shuts off”). But the fact that you need to ask reminds me of that guy who bought my toaster in “leaving the country fire sale”.
Price demanded: “whatever you people think it’s worth”.
Price originally paid for toaster: $10. Place bought: supermarket. Place I’ve bought every other toaster I’ve ever owned: supermarket or electronics-electric appliances stores.
Price he insisted in paying even though I said I’d originally paid less, claiming he wouldn’t even know where to buy one: $15.
Poll taken among friends and acquaintances on the price of toasters: those who had never bought one thought they’d be worth between 50 and 75 dollars.
My mother never cooked with a crockpot when I was growing up. I’d heard of them, but it’s only been over the past few years that I’ve used one (being on the social committee at work means hosting a lot of office potlucks).
I think people take for granted that not everyone reaches adulthood knowing the same stuff.
I dunno. When huge swaths of people act in ways that seem irrational or not in their best interest, it’s almost guaranteed that something besides individual character defects are involved in some way.
And hell yes, there are such things food deserts. This is something that’s really hard for someone who has reliable transportation to understand. But if your primary mode of transportation is on bus or by foot, a supermarket that’s even just a couple of miles away is far away. Chances are a liquor or convenient store full of junk food will be a lot closer to you. Guess which one will get the majority of your business? It doesn’t make sense to people who have their own car, who’ve been raised to never shop for groceries at the dirty liquor store. But it makes perfect sense for people who have fewer choices.
Even a place that isn’t technically a food desert can still be food desert-like. When I lived in Newark, NJ, I lived right next to a Foodtown. It was the dirtest supermarket this side of the Mississippi. The produce section was so filthy that you could get ptomaine just looking at it. So I’d get my dry goods there (where there were cheap), and then I would walk or ride my bike two miles to the town over and get my meat and produce at the Pathmark. I didn’t mind the exercise because I had plenty of time and energy. But my neighbors worked in menial labor, working multiple shifts. An hour stroll just to get some vegetables was a luxury for them.
The tougher ones probably ate the nasty Foodtown vegetables. There were a lot of poor immigrants where I lived. But I don’t blame anyone for choosing more processed alternatives. No one wants to eat dirty food.
Not sure the price, but they’re relatively cheap, especially used. Got to be honest, I don’t see the connection between crock pots and food deserts.
I’m lousy with crockpots, and I’m not rich by any means. Same could be said for most the folks I know.
I do think that, in a lot of cases, especially in the industrialized world, that an individual’s problems are often subject to individual solutions. And if not out and out solutions, at least appreciable amelioration.
The “SO SIMPLE, I can’t believe they’re so dumb not to know this!” bit is obviously loaded language. I’m going to leave that where it lies.
These same points have been made so many times, yet some people here still conflate understanding with approval or endorsement.
For all the talk of “why don’t the poor eat rice and beans” I shake my head at the middle class and rich folks dropping 3-4-5 bucks every morning or even more than once a day for fancy mixtures of coffee milk and sugar at Starbucks. Add that up for what it costs in a year and you see people’s eyes go wide. Everybody makes suboptimal financial choices as was already said in this thread.
As was also said you CANNOT have savings if you are getting welfare, food stamps, social security disability! You can’t, if you have more than two grand in the bank you are cut off. You could secretly sock it under your mattress, and now you are committing a crime called fraud and you’ll never be able to do anything with the money that leaves a paper trail. So you can eat nothing but dry beans and scrimp and save, then posters here will call you a fraudster. So you make sure not to save and spend it and then you’re a fool who fritters away money.
I quoted Dangerosa’s post earlier because it squares with my experience.
There are sizable communities of Burmese, Indian, Hispanic and (to a lesser extent) east African peoples where I live. Often times these groups are as poor as the native born working poor in the US, and many are even worse off. These people don’t speak the language, are let loose in a culture that is foreign to them, and have little in the way of experience with the job market in the US.
They don’t eat fast food for every meal, even though they move into the areas that are suppose to be food deserts. The same areas where poor, native born Americans have been eating junk food for generations now.
Middle class people are dumb with money, no doubt about it. But that doesn’t mean eating shitty food is any less a bad idea.
Who here is calling anybody a fraudster? I can’t speak for others, but if a poor person scrimped and saved while making sound nutritional choices, the last thing I would do is insult them. Just the opposite actually.
No one here has called anyone a fraudster, I was trying to explain why some poor people receiving government assistance have no incentive to save money.
If you’re getting government assistance there is a small limit on how much savings you are allowed to have, so if you secretly hide it in your mattress you would be committing fraud. Like I said you’re not allowed to have savings, so if you scrimp and save you either are cut off or become a criminal.
Their parents and grandparents were accustomed to cooking from scratch in their native countries, and they were exposed to and taught how to do this from a young age most likely. They know it can be done, they were taught the little tricks and time saving tips. Basically they were exposed to the idea culturally.
It is kind of like if you grew up in a family of car mechanics, you’d scoff at people going to Jiffy Lube for basic maintenance and paying a pretty penny for it.
I agree, it’s the culture that is different. There’s nothing inherent in the geography that keeps people from eating vegetables and whole grains. That’s why I’m skeptical of the idea of food deserts.
And who don’t realize that (depending on location) a taxi ride with the trunk full of long-life groceries can cost little more than a bus ride. There are lots of strategies one can use… but the key thing is, many people will not think of one they haven’t seen before! That’s the whole point of education, isn’t it, exposing people to ideas we hadn’t encountered before and which most likely wouldn’t occur to us.
Those immigrants were already familiar with the idea of getting big sacks of rice and of beans and dosing them out; they may even have done it themselves before. Add a bit of tomato one day, a dash of herbs, a bit of egg or meat… and you vary texture and flavor. Some fall in love with rice steamers: make a load, dish it out as needed! These are strategies that many of them already knew; they just need to know which is the nearest convenient place to obtain ingredients at a good price; learning some new recipes (for those who hadn’t cooked before, learning any, period) and the names of those ingredients in the new language are definite pluses. It’s not as if you can rely on the supermarket’s workers to be able to help you find the cogollos or the congelados, being able to ask about “lettuce” or even “vegetables”, and for the “frozen section” works better (knowing that the frozen section doesn’t only include ready-meals is also good).
People who never learned to cook before being let loose, specially those whose own parents’ idea of cooking is “stick last night’s pizza in the microwave” (that is, those who can’t even call mom and ask “how do you roast a chicken?”) do not have those strategies. We all tend to fall into the routes/ruts we already know, whether good or bad.
Sorry what I meant was IF someone did that then they would be called a fraudster(and they would be) by the same posters now calling the poor foolish for not saving.
I was just trying to get across that the poor are living under very different pressures then the middle class or wealthy, and some things that seem stupid or illogical are just the result of totally different conditions. Not all, of course there is waste and laziness and stupidity, but you find that in all strata.
I agree. Poverty is like a lot of social issues. Most people realize that the truth on an issue probably lays somewhere in the middle, but it’s those people at either extreme who make the most noise.
I think it’s unfair to expect poor people to eat the worst quality fruits and vegetables though, and then scold them if they decide to pass. Assuming that you wouldn’t buy from a dingy grocery store that smells like vomit, why would you expect different behavior from someone else?
Not only are immigrant families often equipped with survival skills that native-born poor don’t tend to have, they also have better human resources. Like a mother who doesn’t work outside the home, or extended family members (grandparents, uncles, cousins) living in the household. And at the risk of saying something offensive, people from countries with a very low baseline of poverty tend to be less inhibited about a lot of things that native-born Americans are taught shouldn’t be done. Like, why would ptomaine poisoning be the first thing to come to my mind? Because we are a germ-conscious culture. Processed, individual wrapped food may not be healthy, but at least it offers the illusion of cleaniness.
The immigrants aren’t buying their produce from dingy, vomit scented stores either. And I’m not scolding anybody. Folks can eat what they like, and I’ll continue to believe that neither poverty or food deserts are keeping people from eating healthier. It’s the culture that’s to blame.
