All of a sudden I’m remembering when, newly wed, me and hubby and our newborn twins lived on 9k a year-- in NYC. I remember thinking how women who only had WIC to feed their babies kept them from being hungry, we had to supplement the formula allowance (once I had to stop breastfeeding) with one third more formula than was allowed.
Once they were a bit older (say a year or so) the one thing that they loved to eat was tortillas. Flour (corn flour was best but white flour did in a pinch), salt, a little fat, water and a really hot frying pan.
Man, this is really bringing back memories. They’d smell the tortillas cooking and climb into their feeding chairs in anticipation. And they liked them plain too. No butter or jelly or meat for them. I should make them again and see if they love them now that they are over 20 and jaded.
I suppose I should add a certain anecdote. In fifth grade I was in the “gifted and talented” program and one day we had a surprise educational lesson about world economic disparity.
We were divided into three groups. The “rich country” group got McDonalds for lunch. The second group got a nutritionally sufficient but bland meal of rice and beans. The poor group got maybe just rice.
Of course the two poorer groups ended up “begging” off of the rich group, which made a deal with one of them to get food in return for acting as security to protect from further begging.
Chicken backs or wings, generic boxed food, powdered milk, watery soups and things like that. My mother-in-law told me that during the Depression she and my father-in-law were living with his parents, and some nights they would open a can of pork and beans and split it four ways.
I’ve seen chicken wings mentioned over and over. The price of these is getting ridiculous, there’s such a shortage that restaurants are offering ‘buffalo tenders’ made from wing-shaped breast meat. Wings were cheap in grandma’s day, not now.
I was gonna say, where’s the government cheese up in here? And then you came through.
My dad grew up starving poor in post-war Europe, and many of my students on the Indian reservation I worked on were starving poor, and both my dad and my students ate the rinds of citrus fruit and bananas. Accurate or not, that’s become a yardstick of poverty for me.
