| |
| ▲ | lp4v4n 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The yearly cost of food for one person without children in the county of Los Angeles(I selected an expensive area on purpose) is showing 4,428 USD. That's about 12 dollars a day. I don't even live in the United States but that value looks pretty low if anything. | | |
| ▲ | jandrewrogers 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Anecdotally, I can easily eat for $12/day even in Seattle. There are days when I probably spend half of that. We aren't talking beans and rice here, these are diverse satisfying meals. It does require you to cook though. | | |
| ▲ | lp4v4n 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I don't doubt you can eat three meals with 6 dollars, but it's crazy how solipsistic people are when it comes to food. Not everybody can buy food in bulk and cook at home. A 10 oz ham sandwich will probably cost you more than 2 dollars even if you buy everything at the supermarket. I don't know why people are so reluctant to admit that 12 dollars a day is not much for groceries. | | |
| ▲ | jandrewrogers 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I don't buy anything in bulk, that isn't a prerequisite. There is no getting around the fact that $12/day buys a lot of good groceries even in expensive cities. Cooking is trivially learned, especially these days with the Internet. The people claiming that eating on $12/day is challenging are really saying that they can't support their affluent lifestyle on $12/day. Which is true! But it reeks of learned helplessness. As someone who lived decades of their life in real poverty, I find most of the discourse around a "living wage" to be deeply unserious. Things that are completely normal and healthy in low-income communities across the US are presented as unachievable despite millions of examples to the contrary. Living well as a low-income person is a skill. It is obvious that many people with strong opinions on the matter don't have any expertise at it. The only reason I still regularly eat the same kind of food as when I was poor is that it is objectively delicious and healthy, cost doesn't factor into it. I can afford to eat whatever I desire. | | |
| ▲ | lp4v4n 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I used to live 80 minutes from my workplace and I had to get there by public transport because I didn't have a car, cooking at home and taking my food to work was not always possible, especially during the summer. And I used to live with three other flatmates and we shared a small fridge. I'm not making this up, it was my life a few years ago. I ended up spending more than what I wanted eating out because preparing my food was not practical or sometimes not possible. >The people claiming that eating on $12/day is challenging are really saying that they can't support their affluent lifestyle on $12/day. Which is true! But it reeks of learned helplessness. I guess I was affluent and didn't know it. |
|
|
| |
| ▲ | prepend 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I can easily cook all my meals for $12/day. I don’t consider daily or even weekly restaurants part of a necessity for life. | | |
| ▲ | lp4v4n 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | People have commutes and work shifts that don't always allow them to buy food in bulk and cook their own food. Not everybody is like you. Restaurants have never been a necessity for life, but I guess that for a lot of people you should be upper class to eat out once a week. |
| |
| ▲ | bumby 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That’s pretty surprising, honestly, because there are other areas considered much lower COL that are within spitting distance of that value. |
| |
| ▲ | Larrikin 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | What does eating pretty well mean to you? Maybe you don't even if you think you do? We don't know without your budget or a receipt from your typical grocery run | | |
| ▲ | NewJazz 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Also some folks are just smaller than others. | | |
| ▲ | bumby 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | They do try to account for this in their method. Men, women, and children of different ages all have different amounts of assumed food intake |
| |
| ▲ | bumby 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Mostly what the typical nutritional guidance has advocated consistently over the last few decades, with maybe slightly higher protein intake. 6-8 servings of fruits and vegetables a day, fairly liberal amounts of dairy and lean protein, lesser amounts of red meat. Grains like breads/rice for additional carbohydrates. Admittedly, avoiding eating out regularly is the #1 way I keep food costs down, though. |
| |
| ▲ | etchalon 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | My household food costs are about 20% more than what the calculator shows (and that's a very minimal budget) Behold, "averages" are not perfect. | | |
| ▲ | bumby 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Are you following the USDA thrifty food plan like the methodology assumes? | | |
| ▲ | etchalon 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | I don't perfectly weigh our groceries every week to hit the exact counts they recommend, no. But we stick to the essentials, utilize different stores for the lowest prices we can get, and don't purchase nonsense. | | |
| ▲ | bumby 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Would you agree that large uncertainties can bring into question the validity of a model? Ie “averages” with large variances are not often very informative | | |
| ▲ | etchalon 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I agree that the very term "averages" implies "an average". | | |
| ▲ | bumby 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | It’s the second time you’ve had a snarky reply so I can’t tell if you’re having a good faith conversation. The average wealth between me and Elon is several hundred billion dollars. That gives you very little information about me. Which is why people can hang too much inference on a simple average. Like Nate Silver said in The Signal and The Noise, the real discussion for the data literate is about uncertainty in models, not just drawing conclusions from “averages” |
|
|
|
|
|
|
