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.

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jandrewrogers 5 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.

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lp4v4n 5 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.

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jandrewrogers 4 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.

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lp4v4n 3 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.

	▲	jandrewrogers an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I don't know what to say. I've lived that life and worse. There were many issues with it but cost of food was never one of them. I ate out sometimes but not because I needed to. Honestly, the worst part by far was transportation. Everything else kind of worked.

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prepend 6 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 5 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.

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bumby 7 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.