Cracked said something I can agree with, weird...
The 5 Stupidest Habits You Develop Growing Up Poor | Cracked.com
Quote:
#5. You Develop a Taste for ****ty Food
When You're Poor ...
Shockingly, when you're buying food based entirely on 1) how long it keeps and 2) how cheap it is, you wind up with ****ty food. When I was growing up, we knew that the first of each month was grocery day. That's the day that our food stamps came in. Nowadays (in the U.S., anyway) it's all done on an ATM-type of plastic called a link card that gets reloaded with "food only" money on the first of every month. But the idea is still the same: new month, new food. So when our food money arrived, to avoid multiple trips to the grocery store and burning ****loads of gas that we couldn't afford, we bought our entire month's worth of groceries all at once and stored it like ****ing squirrels. When you do that, you need **** that won't spoil.
Forget about fresh produce or fresh baked goods or fresh anything. Canned vegetables are as cheap as a gang tattoo, and every poor person I knew (including myself) had them as a staple of their diet. Fruit was the same way. Canned peaches could be split between three kids for half the cost of fresh ones, and at the end you had the extra surprise of pure, liquefied sugar to push you into full-blown hyperglycemia.
If it wasn't canned, it was frozen. TV dinners, pot pies, chicken nuggets ... meals that can be frozen forever, and preparation isn't more complicated than "Remove from box. Nuke. Eat." Because of that, by week two, half of everything we bought would be freezer burned. Just like with the canned food, you grow up thinking that this is the way it's supposed to taste. It's not that you grow to like it, necessarily, but you do grow to expect it.
Once You Escape ...
To this day, my kids won't eat fresh green beans. There's such a huge difference in texture and taste compared to the canned version that they're honestly like two different foods. None of us will eat homemade macaroni and cheese. If it doesn't come out of a box, it tastes weird. And the list is a mile long. We've eaten these things for so long, we've grown to prefer them to the fresh version.
People who have never been poor love to point out overweight people in the ghetto and sarcastically exclaim, "Yeah, it really looks like she's starving!" And they have no idea that the reason many of them have weight problems is because everything they're putting into their bodies is dirt-cheap, processed bull****. Grab a TV dinner and look at the nutritional information.
Fresh food is expensive and takes forever to prepare. It goes bad quickly, so it requires multiple trips to the grocery store per week, which is something most impoverished people can't do. And since all of those time-saving frozen meals are high in salt and fat, they take up residence in the expanding asses of the people who can't afford anything else.
When you finally get to the point where you can afford those grocery trips and fresh ingredients and have the time to prepare them, your taste buds freak the **** out. They're not used to it. Vegetables are supposed to be squishy, aren't they? Is chicken supposed to have this texture?
No, it's not like you're eating food for the first time, staring at asparagus in wide-eyed bewilderment, not knowing whether to put it in your mouth or rub it on your skin until it absorbs right into your body. But a lot of this new stuff sucks by comparison because it's not what you've been trained to eat -- the flavors and textures are all wrong, and there's a real temptation to keep eating the same **** until it stops your heart at age 43.
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I agree with Anticipation and I believe I agree with Big3. There are points on different sides that are valid.
The feeding a family of 5 thing (I can only imagine, I only have to worry about myself and one other on our food stamp budget) at McDonalds vs. Whole Foods is interesting, but to put it in perspective, at McDonalds, for 15 dollars to feed 5 people? Everyone gets 2 McDoubles or 2 McChickens and a value fry, and hopefully you're in a state that doesn't tax like Oregon (1/50 chance or so [I don't know what other states are sales tax free]) because that 15 dollars will end up being 16 after tax, if not 16.50 (I guess dad will have to take the hit and forfeit a dollar menu item). Altogether, 2 McDonald's burgers and a value fry would leave the average working man still hungry ... although the kids will probably be okay with it.
I've never shopped at Whole Foods or seen one for that matter but I understand what kind of establishment it is. Anyway, I'm going to be generic here so if they don't sell some of this stuff I don't know any better, but Top Ramen individual soups cost roughly 25-30 cents each. Everyone can have one for less than two dollars. That's not great for you, and that's not super filling, but at least everyone got theirs for under two dollars. That leaves roughly 13 dollars left. Buy some ground beef. You can probably get 2 pounds and a box of hamburger helper for under ten dollars. Buy a thing of milk and that's dinner for 15. There are a lot of combinations of things you can get at the store for cheap, because no one wants to eat top ramen everyday, or any particular meal over and over again. Get some mac and cheese and a pack of hot dogs. Mac and cheese hot dogs for the whole family will probably cost less than ten dollars.
McDonald's is fast-food (duh); it's as easy as show up and eat. So that's nice... but on a budget, you should know that there aren't a lot of combinations so it will get old really fast. Maybe as an occasional treat you could grab some dollar menu items for the family, but it is NO way to live day to day on a budget.