On Not Having A Fridge

I know this is ostensibly a food blog, but bear with me as I veer off into food politics a bit. I was watching The Daily Show and found this clip from their continuing series on Class Warfare. The quote about the poor beginning about 4:30 in floored me:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
World of Class Warfare - The Poor's Free Ride Is Over
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So now people aren't considered poor if they have a refrigerator. A REFRIGERATOR!

It started me thinking about the last time I had to live without a fridge. I moved into a house with no fridge and had to buy a new one. I'm obviously not poor, or I would have gotten a 30-year-old used one that sucks up $300 in electricity every year like I used to have.

I bought one at Sears and they said it wasn't in stock and would take a week to deliver. No problem, I thought. I can survive a week without a fridge. I can eat non-perishable food and eat out and what-have-you, because I can afford that stuff.

But if you don't have a fridge and you do want some perishable food, say something nutritious like milk, cheese or eggs, you need ice.

I didn't have an ice chest, because I was only missing a fridge for a week, so I just put the ice and milk in a dish pan and covered it with a baking pan with newspapers on top for extra insulation. Still, I had to buy ice every day. It was messy and inconvenient and expensive, but for me, with my income, it was a short-term problem and I could easily survive.

If you're poor, you don't have the same luxury of eating out and wasting money on small quantities of food and having the comfort of knowing a brand new fridge will be delivered at the end of the week.

Ice is expensive. And heavy. So if you don't have a car - which I'm assuming you don't, if you're too poor to be able to afford a $50 yard-sale fridge - you have to schlep ice. Heavy, cold ice.

Hope you're not old or disabled or live more than a few blocks from a grocery store! And I hope you don't need any other groceries, because once you have a couple sacks of ice, it's pretty hard to carry anything else.

I also hope you have the spare $3 a day you'll need to buy 2 bags of ice. You could make ice almost for free but HEY, THAT'S RIGHT, you don't have a fridge. Sucka. So that's $3 a day - or about $1000 a year you'll need to support your non-fridge habit. And since the federal poverty level is $22,000 a year for a family of FOUR, I'm sure you'll probably miss that $1000 pretty badly.

You could have bought about 750-1000 pounds of dried beans with that same amount of money, but that would be ridiculous. You're poor. You don't deserve a fridge!

And if you do want to cook perishable food, you'll have to buy it in small quantities you can use right away. So instead of buying a pound of margarine on sale, you'll have to buy it by the cube at the corner convenience store, because the market doesn't sell it in tiny quantities. It will cost you about as much as a whole pound, maybe more, but that's the way it goes, right?

You'll probably waste a lot of food, too, from spoilage or getting soaked by water from melting ice, food you can ill afford to lose. But waste is part of the American way! Learn to embrace it.

As you can see, I'm being sarcastic. I'm just hiding the fact that I'm so furious at the numbskulls who think poverty is easy, that it doesn't take cleverness and flexibility and constant scrambling to just get by. They sit up in their studios and have lattes brought to them by production assistants and talk about how poor people have refrigerators and that they are surprised by that. I have two words for them, and they aren't "Bon appetit."

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Some kind of depressing musings on life and burritos

I came home after the gym and Farmer's Market on Saturday and tossed all of my vegetables on the kitchen table and my wet gym bag on the floor.

They were all still there this morning. Monday morning. The vegetables were faded and limp and the swimsuit had that murky, not-so-fresh smell.

As soon as I had gotten home, I had thought "I'm so tired," and I laid down on the couch. Then I got up and went to bed. After about half an hour, I tried to convince myself to get up, but I couldn't move.

One of the great blessings of getting older is a certain amount of perspective. If I had been 20, I would have spent a great deal of time berating myself about what a lazy jerk I was, sleeping a beautiful Saturday - and it was a glorious, warm, sunny day - away.

But being Of A Certain Age, I realized "There must be something seriously wrong with me," and you know, Being of A Certain Age, I was right.

The fever and chills hit about 2 p.m. The cookie-tossing commenced shortly thereafter and lasted for the next 10 hours or so.

Thank God for twitter on my phone, because it was the only thing I could do to pass the long hours - I don't have a TV and reading a book made me even more nauseous. Sleeping led to weird hallucinatory dreams populated by the - I am not making this up - People of Wal-Mart. Standing up, other than to dash to the bathroom, was beyond my capabilities.

I usually love living alone. I don't get lonely. I seem perfectly suited to a solitary lifestyle, a room of my own, a house of my own, a life all my own.

I have to admit, though, as I lay there pinned down by the after-effects of an ill-conceived food stand burrito, that I questioned the wisdom of my decision. Being alone and healthy and happy isn't the same as being alone and sick and incapacitated, is it?

Flat on back, unable to move, helpless. Those were some long and lonely hours, despite my little glowing twitter connection. My tiny little house suddenly felt way too big for just one person.

But despite all of my fantasies of Brad Pitt carrying a cool cloth for my forehead, we never know what life may bring. We may get sick and get a Peter Mayhew, or we may have to be the hero when our loved one gets sick, the hero in ways that are tough and awful and scary.

Or, as happens all too frequently, we may walk out or get walked out upon in our hour of darkest need (no links here - I guess nobody ever blogs about that).

That's the crazy part about life. You just never know. But one thing is for certain: eating a bad burrito will give you a lot of time to think about it.