
The Food of My Youth - axiomdata316
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/07/09/the-food-of-my-youth/
======
joefourier
Why are stereotypical American "low-income" foods largely processed meats and
junk food (e.g. boxed macaroni and cheese, spam, Vienna sausages), instead of
staples like rice, oats, beans, lentils, etc. which also keep easily but are
far more nutritious, tasty and just as cheap, if not cheaper on a per-calorie
basis?

This is genuine curiosity, as I grew up in a region where the average income
was much lower than the USA, but the food consumed by lower-income individuals
was much healthier and fresher. We'd eat things like red beans and rice,
curries, acar (a type of spiced pickle) and often cook meat over wood fires to
save money on gas for the oven.

~~~
dbatten
1) Cheap junk food is marketed, whereas cheap staples aren't. Basic
white/brown rice is a commodity. There's no differentiation, and ultra-slim
margins, so nobody's trying to market it to you. Easy Mac on the other hand...

2) Taste. To us adults (and mostly upper-middle class adults to boot) on HN,
rice and beans may sound more appealing than cheap mac and cheese with mystery
meat. Take a poll of 3-year-olds and you may get a different result.

3) Ease. Staples like rice and beans are only _really_ cheap when you're
buying them in dry form, bulk. This means you need to season them and cook
them, which can be a long process. (My wife and I recently tried to save on
black beans by cooking ourselves rather than buying canned. The result was
good, but by the time you chop onions for seasoning, add other ingredients,
monitor the beans, drain and cool the beans, and wash the crock pot, cutting
board, knife, various spoons and measuring implements, etc., well, it ends up
being a lot of work.) If you're a single parent working two jobs to support
your kids, 5 minutes of preparation is meaningfully better than even, say, 20
minutes of preparation.

~~~
felipemnoa
>Staples like rice and beans are only really cheap when you're buying them in
dry form, bulk. This means you need to season them and cook them, which can be
a long process.

I don't know. You make it sound as if it were difficult to cook these staples.
During my college years these were the easiest things to cook, along with
pasta and tomato sauce. Basically it was just a matter of filling the pot with
water, dropping the ingredients and then just wait.

Similarly with tomato sauce, add the ingredients in a pot and just wait.

~~~
thebooktocome
Adding rice and water to a pot and heating it has about a hundred failure
modes that make the result unpalatable and ruins the reagents. Even when it
goes correctly, the result is pretty bland, particularly to someone used to
packaged food.

One cannot merely put the ingredients of tomato sauce into a pot, heat it in
some arbitrary way, and expect the result to be recognizable as tomato sauce.

~~~
morsch
_One cannot merely put the ingredients of tomato sauce into a pot, heat it in
some arbitrary way, and expect the result to be recognizable as tomato sauce._

That's literally the description of a famous tomato sauce[1]. You can add a
cup or two of water and a pound of pasta _to the same pot_ at some
indeterminate time towards the end of the process.

Feel free to argue that arbitrarily heating it may involve burning it.
Whatever. Pasta with tomato sauce is ridiculously easy.

[1] [https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1015178-marcella-
hazans-...](https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1015178-marcella-hazans-
tomato-sauce)

------
moate
When I was a kid there was a time we were on food stamps. My sister used to
make "poor man's ice cream" (basically chocolate milk poured over ice) and the
food I remember the most is ALDI brand frozen burritos. Eventually we got more
money because my mom got a job working in New Jersey for a large insurance
company. After high school I went to culinary school because I wanted to cook,
in part because poor people food made me feel poor.

After I moved out, I was working in restaurants and wasn't making much by
American standards, but I could make myself food that wasn't poor people food.

This stuff clings to you. Some people fight it, refusing to go back. Other
people remember the little comfort they were able to get from the foods of
their childhood.

Food is so fundamental to life in so many different ways. It's about being
cared for. It's about showing someone else you care. It's about literally
providing life to another human. There's so many strange cultural hang ups
about what it should and shouldn't be. It's used as a way to identify people
who don't belong to your group, to shame "the other" or to try and fit in when
you don't feel comfortable. People convinced that there are right and wrong
choices.

------
hprotagonist
_And when the Man handed over our food stamps, we were called moochers, a
drain on our country. It’s no different now—worse even, as those people on the
Hill try to pass a bill that would make people earn their food stamps. Tacking
on work requirements—implying that foster kids are too lazy to pay for their
own food, that mothers like mine, whose husbands went off to serve and never
came back quite the same, are just not trying hard enough to make ends meet._

Ow.

------
xutopia
This hits me in the feels. My parents weren't the richest in the world but I
was fortunate enough to have food on the table without resorting to the
equivalent of food stamps in my country.

The struggle is real for some people and we just don't know how much it hurts
us years later. Even today whenever I have access to cereals other than the
cheapest kind I have this uncomfortable feeling like I shouldn't eat something
that expensive.

------
taion
This was such an unexpectedly powerful piece of writing. Thanks for sharing
this.

------
sctb
We've updated the link from [https://longreads.com/2018/07/18/defined-by-
want/](https://longreads.com/2018/07/18/defined-by-want/), which points to
this.

------
mirimir
Damn, very moving article!

I don't want to get into what I ate as a child. Too crazy.

But I was for sure poor as a young adult in the US. So we ate lots of rice,
beans, and whatever veggies were discounted or ready to trash. And for
additional protein, eggs and beef heart.

------
teddyh
Again, I find myself obliged to link to this excellent article:

 _The 5 Stupidest Habits You Develop Growing Up Poor_

[http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-5-stupidest-habits-you-
devel...](http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-5-stupidest-habits-you-develop-
growing-up-poor/)

 _#5 You Develop a Taste for Shitty Food_

~~~
nightski
Then you grow older on a professional level of income, learn to appreciate
great food and realize your food budget averages $1000/month. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

~~~
codeafin
As Misao Okawa who reached age 117 said, eating delicious things is the key to
longevity \- though western "delicious things" are way different to Japanese
"delicious things", I still like to lie to myself and proceed to order the
bread pudding.

------
leekyle333
1\. For children mac and cheese tastes better (and a lot of adults). It's
highly palatable. 2\. Rice and beans are cheaper but are small bags of rice
and canned beans cheaper than some other highly palatable thing that's easier
to make? (It takes a lot more time to make dried beans). 3\. Decision fatigue-
it's really hard to make healthier decisions when you're poor, overworked, and
tired. When you go to the grocery store I'm sure your looking for something
that will quickly release some dopamine. 4\. America has a pretty sad food
culture and while they're might be some amazing asian or Mexican grocery
stores with good cheap stuff, a lot of non recent immigrant people have super
negative stereotypes about these types of places.

------
Kagerjay
Offtopic but the thumbnail was really misleading to me, because there is such
a thing as a prison burrito and the process you make it is actually similar to
the thumbnail (pouring something into junk food bag, and using it as a mixing
container).

Example:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSKpDwDhq24](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSKpDwDhq24)

I wonder if the inspiration for these menu items came from similar recipes in
low income areas? E.g. the prison burrito might have derived from "hot
cheetos". Mostly, recipes born out of a desire for fancier food with limited
ingredient choices / availability in food banks / nonperishables

------
sharadov
That was powerful, made me tear up.

------
_mrniceguy_
This food is disgusting. Cheese whiz in a cheetos bag? Processed crap like
this is the invention of greedy opportunists and their factories built to feed
people drivel. To long for such things is to long for suicide.

