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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9 comments:
WELL SAID!
When I was young, my social worker mom got sick of her kid's sense of entitilement and took us to visit one of her poor families. They had odd sores, and dull eyes, and a refrigerator. It was painted blue with laytex paint, it didn't work well, and there were flies in there feasting on the brown meat. But yes, it was a refrigerator.
Saw the clip. Made me see red too. Fucking class warfare, bunch of bullshit. I kept thinking how dare they say that??? And yet they dare and more. Jon Stewart is awesome enraged. Wish his platform spread wider. Wish we all understood what you and I seem to just get.
Oh, I get so angry when I hear this kind of thing. Like having a fridge is a luxury.
Y'know what would be a help? Investing in training programs that would pull people out of their situations and allow them to not be poor, to not need food stamps or welfare. Train them for a year or two, in something that they can earn a living wage at, and then hey, fewer people on the welfare rolls.
But no. Let's just belittle them and mock them and refuse to build grocery stores in inner cities and oh good grief, don't get me started.....
As electronic appliances like fridge is more important in today's life. It can preserve the fruits and vegetables for a long to give us there freshness.
Ya it is a luxury. Having fridge can be said as luxury for some poor persons. As they has not enough money to purchase it. They can use a pot of soil. which can give cool water free.
Many peoples live without a fridge.They made there bodies so strong that they not need for live on some electronic equipments.
Golly, Suebob, I wonder which two words you are speaking of?
;)
Great post!
I laughed when I watched the clip. Not because I am cold hearted, but because I thought it was funny that we thing of a fridge as "luxury" now days.
I do think that it is ridiculous that those receiving "hand-outs" often times have fancy cell phones, shoes, clothes, etc..... I do think that we need to cut back or rethink the way we give hand outs.
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