I had a family member that used to work for the county in the SNAP-like assistance program.

He was aghast at the state of the average family. No, not the average one coming to the county for assistance, just the average.

The average household in the county was without a kitchen. Maybe a dorm fridge, maybe a microwave or a hotplate, typically neither. A Winnebago had better food preparation than the average county resident. Oh and the household thing was a huge misnomer, as census-wise the physical house has 3+ households in it. People were crammed in!. Plumbing problems were huge deals!

Like even considering to bake a cake on your own was laughable. You didn't even know of anyone that you could borrow an oven from. The poverty in the county was, and remains, shockingly high.

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kragen 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I'm renting an apartment with a broken oven. I bought a used electric tabletop oven from the thrift store for US$17, several times larger than a toaster oven, with bimetallic thermostat and mechanical timer. I live in Argentina, but my memory is that rich-country thrift stores and garage sales have even lower prices, because there are less poor people competing to buy their wares. When my mother moved to Japan, she furnished her whole house from the sodai-gomi. For free.

My experience with poverty is that the main obstacles to things like cooking isn't lack of resources like ovens exactly. Rather, it's more like lack of autonomy; maybe someone will take your oven away because they are afraid you'll set the building on fire, or because they want it, or a combination. Or you're just mired in learned helplessness to the point it doesn't occur to you. Or you're not functional enough mentally to keep the oven clean enough to use. Or the police sweep your camp and your oven goes in the dumpster along with your birth certificate. Or maybe you can get the oven but your work shifts lack the predictability to be able to plan meals ahead of time.

But it's almost never because you can't come up with the US$17.

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bluGill 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

SNAP like implies some poverty. They are likely not representative. Though it is still shocking.

i'm also shocked how many people I know who eat out often at fast food. I can make a better meal for less and it will be healthier as well. Even hight end resteraunts are obviously reheating the same industrial froozen meals.

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mschuster91 a day ago | parent [-]

> i'm also shocked how many people I know who eat out often at fast food. I can make a better meal for less and it will be healthier as well.

A burger at McKing takes what, a minute to order, a minute to eat, and a minute to dispose of the wrapper paper.

Making a burger on your own? At least an hour worth of time just to buy the ingredients, drive home and store them appropriately so they don't go bad (which assumes you have a car in good working order and a fridge + freezer that work), another hour worth of time to cook it, oh and after you've eaten it you need to properly store all the leftovers...

It is not a coincidence that the rise of the popularity (and availability!) of processed ready-to-eat or fast food more or less correlates with women entering the workforce - one might even say that minimum-effort food was a requirement for women to work.

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bluGill a day ago | parent [-]

I that shopping trip is once a week- it isn't a big deal. I spend an hour a day cooking, which does add up though-

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mschuster91 a day ago | parent [-]

> I that shopping trip is once a week- it isn't a big deal.

... if you have a car that's roadworthy enough, time for the drive, money for the fuel, and even then, access to fresh groceries is not a given in the first place because there's no place selling them. 39 million Americans live in food deserts [1], and in places that are not food deserts, actual groceries can simply be unaffordable.

And then, once you have the ingredients, you need to store them. A bunch of stuff will only keep fresh if you have a working refrigerator, in some cases a working freezer... both are far from given. In really small apartments, you might not even have the space for even a small fridge, or you might be so poor your electricity is cut off. Or the apartment is too infested with rats and cockroaches to keep any kind of food that doesn't need (or goes bad in) a fridge and is not canned, which seriously limits the food you can prepare for yourself.

Oh and theoretically Costco or whatever large scale loads of food might be cheaper as well, but again, you need space to meal-prep and even more space in fridges and freezers to keep the food edible for a few days.

Poverty is fucking expensive in the long run because the lack of upfront money for stuff like a car, fridge and a residence with enough clean space forces people to use expensive options such as ready-to-eat meals or fast food - or to go and fill their caloric demand with ultra cheap soda that's in the end just sugar syrup.

Oh and the homeless, they got it even worse, they don't have any other option than that because they don't even have a safe roof over their head. And yet, people look at them eating burgers or soda and saying paternalistic condescending bullshit like "if they just saved on the burgers and soda they could afford an apartment", yeah no that's not how things work.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_deserts_in_the_United_Sta...

	▲	bluGill a day ago \| parent [-]
		Slow down, the vast majority of those eating fast food are not poor. They are not living in a good desert. They have car anyway, and access to groceries isn't a problem. They have a house or apartment with a working kitchen so they can store everything. Costco is cheap, but so is Aldi with much smaller package sizes - I don't have a costco membership because Aldi is so close it isn't worth going often (we go about once a year, but with a friend who has a membership). Every place I've lived have also had discount grocery stores (Most Americans like me do not live in a good desert) - and the fast food just down the street still had a lot of customers. The above are the people I'm talking about shocking me. They have the means to get cheaper and better meals at hand, but they don't use it. Don't get me wrong, we should have conversations about poverty. However lets not mistake the majority situation for poverty in conversations. There are people who have all means to do eat better available and choose not to.