Reply #61: As Someone Who Has Worked

[RobinA]

with the poor and neither considers them noble nor reviles them, I have a few observation about this. And I am not saying that there aren't ways around some of this stuff, I'm saying this is the reality of what goes on where the rubber meets the road. People on food stamps and other nickels and dimes we call cash assistance rarely have much money at one time. Frozen chicken breasts and other cooked meals often require other ingredients which cost additional money. A bottle of cooking oil lasts awhile, but you have to have the money to buy it and the chicken breasts and the lentils before you have a meal. You also have to have a working oven. Maybe you do, maybe you don't. That's assuming you can get frozen chicken breasts. Very few Americans, poor or otherwise, live within walking distance of a supermarket. People who don't tend to use the corner store, which aren't generally known for their produce departments.

Many people on the bottom of the ecomonic ladder (not everyone) are living in quite a chaotic environment. They grew up in a chaotic environment. They feed their kids hot dogs (which you can get at the corner store) because their mother or Dad fed them hot dogs. They don't know how to cook lentils or much of anything else. Most of us do not realize how much about cooking we learn from growing up in a household where Mom (or Dad) cooked. We take it for granted. I have found two sets of people (in general) who can't cook. People whose mothers (or Dads) didn't cook meals and people who grew up with housekeepers where cooking food was something dome by somebody else and it appeared on the table.

Bottom line - when you have two bucks in your pocket, do you buy a bag of lentils or a bag of potato chips? I buy chips and so do poor people. I normally have more than two dollars in my pocket and gas in my car to go to the grocery store to buy lentils. The poorer person always has two dollars in his pocket and no car.