Food and poorness

I really like this article about poor people and food a lot. I didn't like it at first, in January when I first read it. It's kind of embarrassing to think people look at you and go "Oh, you're poor? So you grew up only having four feet of kitchen counter space? So you only had one frying pan and one pot? So you had roaches in your kitchen cabinets?" But it's true.

There's a lot of about my mom and nana I remember, but there's a lot that I don't. I have no idea how many frying pans my mom had. She just always had enough. I'm pretty sure she had a few pots because I can see in my mind a stock pot of soup, a pot of gravy and a third pot all cooking on the oven making the house smell good. But I can't really remember and who knows what happened to all our kitchen stuff?

Aunt Elaine didn't own any cookbooks. It took until eighth grade to convince her to get internet; before that I would copy down recipes from cookbooks in the library or at the bookstore. To be honest, I lost them a lot. Okay and I threw them out a lot too. Or Aunt Elaine would, if I left them in the kitchen where I wasn't supposed to keep things.

Both the oven and refrigerator were smaller than normal. I couldn't really cook more than one thing in the oven at once, and even that didn't work out well sometimes. Aunt Elaine has a microwave oven but it shorts out a lot. To use it you have to turn it on and watch how long it's cooked something for so you know how much more time it needs to cook when it shorts out.

There were roaches in the kitchen cabinets and the rule my sisters and I agreed on was that we'd throw something out if roaches were crawling directly on the food, but not if they just crawled on the packaging. Lighting in the kitchen was not great. I didn't realize this for a long time, but it wasn't. It is so much easier now to see when meat is finished cooking on the stove than it was living with Aunt Elaine.

We always lived (not in Brooklyn, but with Aunt Elaine) near a few fast food restaurants. Closer than that were corner stores that sell a lot of Nissan Cup O Noodles, bags of chips, soda, cookies, beer, and candy. Sometimes they'd sell a few apples or a bunch of bananas. Everything is marked up about 30% more than what it costs in the supermarket. So in a supermarket I could buy a loaf of 12 grain bread on sale, with a coupon, for about $2.50 but in a corner store bread is never on sale, it's independently owned so they don't have to accept coupons if they don't want to, and you can easily pay close to $5 for a loaf of white bread.

There were always supermarkets close enough to walk to, but the challenge was walking home carrying bags of food without getting mugged. Especially in the winter when you're walking on icy, broken-up sidewalks you want to keep at least one hand free. We'd take the bus to get to Trader Joe's and that was always kind of bittersweet. It's less expensive than Whole Foods but so VERY crowded. Plus, we always had the urge to stock up on stuff and would wind up putting a lot back because we'd realize there was no cabinet space. In the last apartment we lived in with Aunt Elaine there were four cabinets above the sink. Two were used for dishes and glasses.

So yeah. Being poor does affect how you eat. The assumption that poor people eat badly because of course poor people are uneducated is really, really offensive. The whole "beggars can't be choosers" thing is really offensive also. You're poor, so let us feed you the shitty food we wouldn't eat ourselves, so you can help us by getting diabetes and other poor people illnesses and ultimately die earlier.

It was really hurtful to have to listen to Josh talk about there being nothing to eat sometimes. Now he says, "I can't find anything I'm in the mood for" and doesn't suffer dirty looks from three girls anymore.

TMI Warning:
We have more money now. I earn a lot more than when I was just working at the diner and maybe I'm not saving as much as I should but we three eat much, much better. I am totally convinced it's why I've gotten my period every month since October and why Dani finally got hers this past fall.