EVERYBODY likes high fat, calorie laden food. MMMmmmm… calories.
A difference between socio-economic groups is that wealthy people often have other factors that compensate for that craving - the wealthy have access to entertainments and travel that poor people don’t. For many poor people, food is one of the few comforts in their life. Instead of a trip to the mountains for a ski vacation or a tour of Italy they’ll “gorge” on food, or have a feast/party/whatever. What else do they have? We make sure the poor don’t starve, but we don’t grant them anything beyond that. If your only avenue of entertainment is sitting on your ass in front of a TV eating snacks is it really a wonder you spend your spare time doing that?
If you’re stressed or depressed and can’t afford a doctor/therapist/drugs well, food can be a form of self-medication.
At the subsistence (or worse) wage jobs I’ve had in recent years generally the only food available in the break room is candy in the vending machines. When you’re only given the legally minimum mandated for breaks, including meals, and your employer is located in an area without access to truly healthy food it’s either bring food from home or eat junk for lunch. Make the wrong choice you’ll spend more and be fat, even if the food strokes the primitive part of your brain and makes you temporarily feel better. The processed food industry spends BILLIONS to fine-tune their recipes to appeal to people… is it any wonder people like to eat the food? You’re expecting the average person to stand up to such research and development?
(Quite a few of the people I currently work with DO bring food from home. Or get decent selections from the grocery side of the store. Those folks tend to be of a healthy weight. The ones that don’t are, to be blunt, FAT. How anyone can do the job I do - on my feet 6-8 hours a shift, lifting and carrying boxes and stock - and stay fat is a bit puzzling to me, but some manage to do it.)
I disagree. Babies are not born with these attributes, so anyone that has them, has learned them. Not all learning requires teaching, but it generally helps a lot.
Then they are “best educated” only for certain very narrow values of the terms.
I readily agree that the premium on time is a significant obstacle for many poor people.
Desire to learn is, IME, a more inherent attribute than almost anything mentioned in the thread–babies are born with it–but it requires nurturing to survive childhood.
Yes, but making healthy food in a hot pot/on a hot plate is a different skill set from using a standard kitchen which is different than using a campfire or crockpot or microwave.
I’ve done a LOT of cooking styles - from standard kitchen to microwave to open fire to hot pot. I’ve only had a crockpit a very few years and despite my cooking skills there is still a learning curve.
One upside to the internet is that you can, if you have any idea how to use a search engine, easily locate tutorials on any cooking method you care to name. Thank goodness most libraries these days provide free internet access. It’s an option, and when I first got my crockpot, during some rather dire financial straits, that sort of thing was a godsend. Also for figuring out how to cook whatever weird vegetables someone gave me or I found on the mark-down shelf at the grocery store.
But someone who has been poor all their life and eaten only a very restricted set of foods will probably be less inclined to experiment than someone such as myself, from a different soci-economic background with a wide variety of foods and cooking styles.
I see this in my life - those who are poor now but haven’t always been are very different culturally than those who have always been poor. I feel like I barely grasp the real problems here, much less have any real solution to them, and it’s frustrating when I see bias and prejudice get in the way of understanding (which, yes, is why I sometimes get very snippy about these topics).
There are huge issues in our society surrounding poverty, not the least of which is that financial hardship are seen as both a personal and a moral failing. We judge the poor, judging some as deserving of sympathy and others deserving only of scorn and contempt.
The wealthy can get away with some mistakes because they have the money to compensate for poor choices or poor judgement (up to a point). We don’t judge the fat wealthy because, well, if they’re wealthy they must be doing something right and/or be good people with just a flaw here and there whereas someone poor who is fat is some sort of loathsome creature to all too many people. Also, again, the wealthy can compensate - they can hire personal trainers, join a gym or exercise in a safe neighborhood (just try to jog in the ghetto without getting mugged), hire cooks to take the decision making about meals out of their own hands and put them into the hands of people with a better skill set. The poor can’t do that, they just don’t have the money/resources.
Heck - wealthy fat people have more access to bariatric surgery. Imagine trying to get that as a fat poor person with no or limited health insurance!
It really comes down to two things that no one on either side of the debate ever wants to acknowledge.
RENTING is a valid lifestyle choice if you just want a room or a small living space in someone else’s building. Maintenance costs and sometimes little extras (included cable or Internet, a pool, a tennis court, etc) are included. The money you spend is gone forever, no exceptions, but it’s a sweet deal once you realize you don’t have to deal with a lot of crap that homeowners have to deal with.
BUYING is the only decent financial choice as you own what you buy and even if it goes down in value, you can still sell it for something. You also have complete freedom to customize it as you want. There’s more work involved in a house (or an owned condo for that matter), but it is an asset, whereas a rented room is not.
You’re still not getting what even sven is saying. Perhaps her example of sleeping in a converted closet is foxing the issue a little, let me try another example.
Some immigrant families save a ton of money by having 10 family members share in a 1BR/1BA house. That’s obviously a great financial decision – rent/10, utilities/10, shit we weren’t using the living room for anything anyway. why don’t YOU do that? Hmm, I think its because you don’t want to not because living alone or with a nuclear family or with one or two close platonic friends is the optimal financial decision. Living alone or with a few others in a home that objectively can sustain more residents doesn’t feel culturally normal. Maybe its because living like that would make you feel poor or make you miserable because of personality conflicts? Isn’t spending money to show some kind of status, or gain emotional comfort, the kind of thing you shouldn’t do?
People buy houses because that’s how they want to live. Not because it’s the ultimate personal finance decision. There are far far far far cheaper ways to live, but in our culture, living cheaper is shameful/weird/what poor people do. There are some financial benefits but they are a)variable by region b) wildly overblown compared to living at a very minimal level.
Living alone or with a few others in a home that objectively can sustain more residents is what feels culturally normal. Maybe its because living with 9 other people that like that…
Sorry I haven’t read the whole thread so this may have come up, and I know it’s a slight hijack, but really it’s on topic just a little swerve.
Anyway: I think it’s important to keep this in mind when assigning “blame” between lending institutions and loan consumers when home ownership decisions go bad.
Lot’s of these people, really the only thing they know to do is trust the professionals. If the professionals themselves are assuring them that what is in fact a very bad loan is actually a great loan, these guys can’t know any better than to believe them.
Of course, but its also frustrating to watch people make excuses. Yes, its a pain in the butt to educate yourself. Its a pain in the butt to delay gratification. There are plenty of poor people whose poverty is being made worse by their own actions - actions they KNOW are not smart, but they choose to do anyway.
What people should do is both acknowledge that poverty is difficult - but at the same time, not make excuses for the behaviors that encourage poverty. That’s no more useful than saying “of course you can’t help hitting your girlfriend, you were abused as a child yourself.” Instead we should be saying “boy, life gave you a shitty hand, and overcoming that shitty hand is going to be difficult…but it can be done - no one can do it for you, you need to make the effort, but if you make the effort, its worth it.”
The second thing we need to acknowledge is that these behaviors are not unique to the poor. My sisters first marriage fell victim to late stage affluenza - he’d grown up around money and had no idea how to live on his post college income. Yet no one made excuses for my ex-brother in law “oh, poor thing. Of course he went into bankruptcy, his family had ALWAYS gone to Vail, he didn’t know any better. Of course he didn’t know how to save any money or have any financial discipline - when Dad is a Executive VP for a Fortune 100, that isn’t a skill you are taught. Where would he have learned to cook, they always had a cook and a maid - you can’t blame him for eating out every night of the week, no one ever taught him to use a crockpot. (of course, his meals were at trendy brew pubs, not McDonalds). It isn’t his fault that the economy changed on him and Daddy couldn’t slip him into a near six figure a year job out of college.” Sounds pretty ridiculous, doesn’t it? Yet, the young man went into bankruptcy for those very reasons and no one made excuses for him. Why do we give him the respect of allowing him to take responsibility for making his own decisions, but treat the poor like they have the IQ of toast and can’t figure out how to scramble an egg.
Most of us enter our adulthood unprepared for the real responsibilities - getting your paycheck to last until the next payday and keeping enough for rent. Being able to cook and do your own laundry. Not living in a pigsty because suddenly Mom doesn’t pick up after you. And frankly, most people figure it out across all income levels - at least enough to be functional (I’m almost 50 and seldom make my bed, but my dishes don’t mold in the sink anymore). It might take time, but they figure it out. But there are still people well into middle age and beyond who can’t figure out why they are still bouncing checks when there are checks in the checkbook. Why they don’t have money for the mortgage at the end of the month (but a really cute pair of boots that were on sale).
An aside: I have, over the years, worked with a lot of nurses who were so obese, I couldn’t figure out how they could do their jobs in the first place.
“Semi-homemade” is the way most people cook. Period.
When I worked at the grocery store, most of the TV dinners and convenience meals I saw in carts were being purchased by senior citizens. My grandmother, who was a wonderful cook, always had a stack of Banquet potpies in her freezer, for when she wanted a hot meal but didn’t want to do a lot of preparation.
p.s. I also do not understand people who claim that they don’t have time to cook, but take each family member to a different fast food restaurant, or women who, if their husbands prepare a meal and it’s not what she wants to eat, take the food off the table and make something else, even if the kids say they are hungry and want to eat it.
This has nothing to do with renting versus buying. Or with my post that said renting is PERFECT ACCEPTABLE if that’s the way you want to live.
All I said is that owning is the best way to make sure some part of your living expenses can be recouped at a later date. I also said, in that very post, that people will willfully ignore that fact because it doesn’t jive with how they want to live.
I think there is a difference between an excuse and an explanation. I can say someone is responsible for eating healthy and still understand and fully sympathize with why they don’t.
Talk about discipline and self-control always sounds great. But poverty saps both. Our lives are all governed by the same law of allocation. Poverty isn’t just low financial resources. It also subtracts time and energy.
A poor person may decide to spend all their “discipline” on getting to work on time (since they are more likely to be fired for being a few minutes late) versus worrying about diet. They may decide to concentrate more on how to keep the kitchen roach and rat-free than on the best crockpot to buy. If you’ve been spending all day on your feet and you’ve only got a little energy left by the time you get home, perhaps you want to spend it on doing the kids’ laundry and drilling them on their spelling words rather than chopping vegetables and washing dishes. If the closet grocery story is a 30 minute bus ride away, but there are five different fast food restaurants on your block, and you’ve only got an hour to get everyone fed before you’ve got to go back out for the second shift, then your “discipline” is probably going to point you to Micky Dee’s. Because at least you know the kids will not complain about another night of hamburger and french fries, like they might beans and rice.
Like most Dopers, I went through a few years of low income. Even though it was a temporary situation for me, this experience made me more compassionate. But for some people, it seems to make them more judgmental. I don’t get this at all.
Life saps both. Depression saps both. Ill health saps both. Kids sap both. Working more than 45 hours a week regardless of if you get paid a little or a lot saps both. There is nothing special about poverty that saps discipline and self control that aren’t similar to dozens of other problems people have.
And yes, like a lot of Dopers I went through my poverty years, but I also went through my depression years, or my kids toddlerhood when I was working, or when I was raising two kids, working full time, and finishing my degree while my sister had cancer. I have successful friends that grew up eating government cheese as the kids of alcoholics and drug abusers. Poverty doesn’t get special compassion, there are lots of circumstances that deserve our compassion that make it difficult to be a grown up and work through our lives. Nor do I think it is really compassionate to claim that it takes some sort of special knowledge to be able to hard boil eggs - that isn’t compassion, that’s patronizing excuse making. Trial and error works fine (and soft boiled eggs still are edible).
Find me a thread where people are calling sick people out for being lazy and making excuses, and maybe I’ll understand what you’re saying.
I’ve gone through hard economic times and relatively easy economic times. I also know that I’m no bastion of discipline and hard work, though I do try my best with both. Perhaps you feel confident that you are more disciplined than the average overweight poor person who doesn’t have the privileges and advantages you have. Perhaps you feel as if you are in a good position to lecture others about responsibility. But I don’t feel the same way. Just because I spent a few years struggling doesn’t mean I understand how it feels to be poor.
Here’s a significant difference between wealth and poverty in regards to all those discipline and energy-sapping life things:
If you have money you can pay to have your laundry done by somebody else - if you’re poor you have to do it yourself
If you have money you can hire someone to look after your kids or tutor them in their homework - if you’re poor, not so much.
If you have money you have more choices in what sort of take-out food you choose or who you hire to cook for you - the poor, not so much.
If you have money you can hire a housekeeper - if you’re poor you do all the work yourself or it doesn’t get done.
If you have money you can hire an exterminator - if you’re poor you buy whatever’s at the local store and hope it’s enough to get rid of rodents and roaches and ants.
Basically, it comes back to money giving you more options, ALWAYS giving you more options. Money compensates for at least some bad decisions, poor judgement, and bad luck. If you’re poor you’re bare to the world with no cushion.