Being Poor and Eating Healthy: It might not be as easy as it seems

[kifaru]

Anybody here ever been poor? I mean really poor. I mean you got to figure out how to make $2 feed you for 7 days poor. Well even if you haven't been that poor, if you shop and are less than well to do you may have noticed something. Vegetables and fruit are expensive. Here's something else you may have noticed. Cheap food is relatively high in fat, simple carbohydrates, sodium, and high fructose corn syrup but low in vitamins. The thing is what do you do when faced with this food dilemna? Do you only eat beans, potatoes, and hot dogs to fill your belly or do you starve and get that bell pepper, spinach, and broccoli.?

Copyright K.L. Jones.

[kifaru]

Stamps for fast food?!!? Fast food lobbyists had to advocate for this.

jahluv said:

Just got a bit harder...

-props to the LA Eastside blog for the info...

Jack takes food stamps now... WTF!? When I was a kid and my mom had to use 'em for about a year or so, the cashiers at Boys market would act as impromptu nutritionist - yanking every unhealthful item on the belt 'cause it couldn't be paid for with food stamps. Now you can get your grease on?!

[GodsavetheQueer]

If I didn't have food stamps I don't know what i'd do.

Can I just say how pissed I'd be (or am, since it's apparently in practice) if fast food places allowed food stamps??
Payless takes EBT too. Some gas stations do too, which I coulda used a few months ago when I was bummin gas money to get to work.

[PurpleZoe]

Groceries used to be ridiculous investments before I started eating a vegan menu. If you're not buying all the meat substitutes it's far from pricey, contrary to popular opinion. After I got used to cooking from scratch (which was totally foreign to me), I found myself amazed at how cheap it is. In this day and age though, growing ones own food is the move. The aerogarden might be a worthy investment. Organicaseed.com sells a variety of non-genetically modified (a.k.a poison) seeds.

As far as food pricing goes beans are highly recommended and crazy cheap (soap them in bulk in huge soup pots, blend them for fryable black bean burger batters and freeze them, etc). You can do just about anything with them: blackbean burgers (flour, water to desired consistency, beans, garlic, onion) , chikpea burgers (see previous), chikpea tuna (add kelp and vegenaise), blackbean brownies (add chocolate powder), Boston baked black beans (add ketchup, mustard, and maple syrup... it's bomb despite the odd ingredients), Blackbeans over regular pasta (bomb). Bean flours (technically you can dehydrate them and grind them to powder at home) can be used for anything regular flours can be used for, like flat breads and etc. They're much easier to make than they seem and you don't have all the extra nonsense added in.

You can do alot with rice as well, including making your own rice milk by blending 1 part rice to 3 parts water, and straining the rice out. Add a bit of salt and syrup to taste and you can achieve a homemade version of Rice Dream.

I think the more we get back to making things from scratch the better off we'll be where food prices are concerned. It's definitely healthier.

Unintentional but relevant plug: Issue 6 of purplemag has a mini green Soulfood cookbook in it that can help with utilizing inexpensive staples. Also useful is the Dirty South cookbook.

[Mlle d. Sade]

PurpleZoe said:

Unintentional but relevant plug: Issue 6 of purplemag has a mini green Soulfood cookbook in it that can help with utilizing inexpensive staples. Also useful is the Dirty South cookbook.

I sure could go for some spring rolls or some salmon croquettes (not vegan but another southern invention of poverty that is relatively healthy).

It helps to read stuff like Paula Dean's magazine and some kinda fair thing I read for easy, simple recipes for hearty food.
The hardest thing about eating healthy is some people's insistence on "bird food".

[Sekou]

I live on 99 cent bean burritos, tortilla chips, salsa, avocados, soyrizo, etc.

but I also have stock staples...rice, canned black beans, large cloves of garlic, green tea, ginger roots


so, you can be poor and eat healthy....most people dont really think of food diversity, they just say "fuck it...Im broke...lemme get a cheap Taco Bell taco and call it a day"...but why?

[LesYpersound]

soyrizo?!
i want.

[kifaru]

I hear ya but on the real most premade burritos or full of fat and sodium. Likewise yeah you can can eat a mostly bean diet but other vegetables are expensive. I live in greensbor and small haas avocados can cost as much a $2. The prices of veggies go up in the winter too. I'm with you, I'm just saying it ain't easy.

BTW
Where you been?

Sekou said:

I live on 99 cent bean burritos, tortilla chips, salsa, avocados, soyrizo, etc.

but I also have stock staples...rice, canned black beans, large cloves of garlic, green tea, ginger roots


so, you can be poor and eat healthy....most people dont really think of food diversity, they just say "fuck it...Im broke...lemme get a cheap Taco Bell taco and call it a day"...but why?

[Rosenda]

From personal taste......find brands that make the paste consistency type.
The flavoring is excellent, and they don't have that grainy texture that some of the other brands do.

Find someplace like Whole Foods Market or one of those small neighborhood health markets like Nature Mart out here.
Chorizo is all about the blend of a few good flavors, and if you got that, it's perfect.

Learning how to cook for yourself is essential to eat well and eat cheaply. That's my opinion.

LesYpersound said:

soyrizo?!
i want.

[Rosenda]

Croquettes. We grew up having those made with canned mackerel and they were delicious. My mom made those and they were great. Something else along those lines are "tortas de camaron". They are these patties that are made with dried ground shrimp in that same type of batter. Although when you look online for a recipe, they always have it using fresh shrimp. Well you know what when we were growing up, our folks could not afford to always buy that, and where my grandmother was from Sinaloa Mexico, they always made it with the ground up dried shrimp that is cheap from the market. And they DELICIOUS these fluffy fried patties, and you serve them usually with homemade chili gravy. Moms would also make nopales on the side too sometimes.

I literally went a good 20 years without having those and one day I was with a Chicana friend I used to work with and we went to a local Mexican eatery in the garment district and it just happened to be the week before Easter, which is traditionally when tortas de camaron are made and served at home. I saw those in the restaurant counter AND I WAS SO HAPPY!! My mom just made them whenever because we are not Catholic but they were always a treat.

Got me jonesing for those shrimp patties now. But speaking of the vegan thing.............on the Foodie group on here on AP, I actually made those tofu fritters that one chick posted on here and they were DELICIOUS.

Mlle d. Sade said:

PurpleZoe said:

Unintentional but relevant plug: Issue 6 of purplemag has a mini green Soulfood cookbook in it that can help with utilizing inexpensive staples. Also useful is the Dirty South cookbook.

I sure could go for some spring rolls or some salmon croquettes (not vegan but another southern invention of poverty that is relatively healthy).

It helps to read stuff like Paula Dean's magazine and some kinda fair thing I read for easy, simple recipes for hearty food.
The hardest thing about eating healthy is some people's insistence on "bird food".

I gotta try that Dirty South cookbook. Another good thing about cooking for yourself most of the time is you end up changing up the recipes to your own taste and needs and ingredients anyway so that alone will save you money and make you eat better.

Also........frankly, when I cook most of the time, when I DO go out to eat, I REALLY enjoy it a lot more than I did before. Because it's some major treat.

[LesYpersound]

I'm curious what these ppl have to say at Berea College...

http://www.berea.edu/
http://mrn.placestories.com/story?id=5400060&p=5400012

Anyway, food security has been on my mind since I did a research project on how food-insecure most places, especially cities can be... and I hadn't thought about canning what you grow out in the garden as a possibility to hold folk over when/if power goes out or there's a prolonged oil crisis.
So, yeah, i'm really curious what folk who've been poor or had to make due for generations are up to when it comes to feeding themselves. Home gardens for sustenance ...very cool. Also, y'all heard about that coalition of black farmers successfully suing the government for discrimination? As much as I identify with living in the city w/ cramped backyards or no yards in general, I wouldn't mind living in a community that eats what it grows.

[kifaru]

Well canning food will not work in a prolonged oil crisis or any short term food instability instatbility in the short termn because hungry people will raid your garden inf you live in the city so you will have nothing to can. In a rural situation this is not feasable because most farmers do not farm from saved seed due to patent restrictions and the type of cultivars available. Like wise there would be no way to harvest the vast majority of food if there were no fuel so the rural farmes would have to leave a large amount of their crops to rot in the fields.

If you want to see how people in multigenerational poverty deal with food instatblilityyou can interview people in the projects and find some insight. You could contrast that to the way people in multi-fenerational poverty live in rural areas. I would suggest Appalachia especially eastern Kentucky, Norhtern Georgia, the delta region of Mississippi, border area of North Carolina and Virginia and the western part of West Virginia. These are areas that I have studied that have pockets of severe multigenerational poverty.

LesYpersound said:

I'm curious what these ppl have to say at Berea College...

http://www.berea.edu/
http://mrn.placestories.com/story?id=5400060&p=5400012

Anyway, food security has been on my mind since I did a research project on how food-insecure most places, especially cities can be... and I hadn't thought about canning what you grow out in the garden as a possibility to hold folk over when/if power goes out or there's a prolonged oil crisis.
So, yeah, i'm really curious what folk who've been poor or had to make due for generations are up to when it comes to feeding themselves. Home gardens for sustenance ...very cool. Also, y'all heard about that coalition of black farmers successfully suing the government for discrimination? As much as I identify with living in the city w/ cramped backyards or no yards in general, I wouldn't mind living in a community that eats what it grows.

[LesYpersound]

LOL... I'm curious if you even clicked on the links. The link was a part of a school project done by students at Berea College--an institution set up specifically for the study and uplifting of Appalachia folk and their "folkways".

Hmm, anyway re: your reservations--who will know you have garden? I doubt people will hop each and every fence for blocks on end looking for a home garden that may or may not have edible foods that are ripe for cooking. The problem w/ urban gardens is that you can't grow enough to sustain yourself or your family, BUT if you're in a smaller town with a lot of room or in a rural situation where you're gardening as opposed to farming--you definitely can have enough to feed your family--this is how folk did it not even 200 years ago and then they'd make preserves with the fruit and vegetables and smoke or salt the meats.

I'm just thinking about different things I can learn to do when it comes to food preparation and food storage.

And I mentioned black farmers because I have a feeling 100+ years ago black people in the United States lived in rural settings where they had to grow, preserve, rear, or catch their own food.