I don’t know how many they are in that family but $1,000 per month for food doesn’t seem very low. I spend more but it’s my own money I spend, not somebody else’s. I don’t buy any of this crap, though. I don’t even recognize half of it. Of course, if there are many children, that’s not enough but who feeds children with this kind of crap?
21 responses to “Feeding a Family”
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I’ve been averaging (checks accounts notebook) a little under $800/mo to feed six people, for the last three months. Two of us are on an obligatory low-carb diet.
This tweet… my instinct is to research the “women in power” acct and see if it looks psyop-ish, but I ditched my twitter acct ages ago over stuff like this. I did reverse image-search on the photo just to see if it maybe came up under something like “americans eat too much junk food” or “why are americans so fat”. It just seems like sh*t stirring and not real.
That said, three of those six people are smallish kids and don’t eat a whole lot. I can see where $275/wk would be a stretch if (as will happen in the future) those three were all teenagers. The post does not say how many people they have to feed, or their ages. Missing all the important info.
So… again. Smells like professional trolling because it leaves a giant space for everybody to interpret it however they want to fit their political and personal biases. $275/wk is hard, if you’re two adults and four teenagers. It’s very generous if you’re talking two adults and three little kids. Could go either way, and that’s exactly the sort of thing you post if you want maximum comments, shares, traffic, controversy, excited feelz, etc. to boost your social media engagement numbers. Everybody gets hot under the collar and yells at each other. Nobody gets pertinent details that would solve the equation. And of course the photo is garbage food, so anybody who wants to defend these people and talk about the inadequacy of SNAP (and there’s plenty to talk about there), has to turn a blind eye to the photo. That’s a psychological double-bind:
https://exploringyourmind.com/gregory-batesons-double-bind-theory/
Which is a form of malign magic, for neutralizing an un-self-aware opponent and placing them in a malleable, exploitable, state of mind: create intolerable internal discomfort, then offer a solution: attack that guy! Buy this thing! Vote for Pedro! Anything to make that discomfort go away!
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I completely agree that this is trolling for all the reasons you outline. Plus, I do sometimes buy random junk food so I have a good sense of how much it costs and there is no way the food shown adds up to anywhere close to $274 (and I live in a nigh cost of living city on the West Coast). And where’s the milk to go with the cereal? It definitely doesn’t add up.
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“higher caloric needs” feels like it was thrown in there to invite nasty comments about fat people.
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…and yeah, I’ve seen enough of how social media metrics work that I am now instantly hackles-up at anything that seems to be asking for everybody to just spew bile. It’s an emotional vomitorium. Stay well away. They’re exploiting you for clicks: at best, it gets them ad revenue. At worst, they’re paid political actors out there patrolling the cultural fault lines and making sure anybody trying to build a bridge gets instantly torched.
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Totally agree.
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Our weekly grocery budget is about 200$/week for two adults and two school kids. We pack all our lunches, and eat out at most once a week. We eat very well — organic meat, lots of fruits, vegetables and salad — much better than many of our friends who eat out much more frequently. We live in one of the most expensive places in the country. I can’t imagine how $275/week is not enough for groceries — unless we are talking about a much bigger family.
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I would love to pick your brain about your cooking/grocery strategies! We’ve got two adults, two school-age kids, one four year old who doesn’t eat much (and one temporary kid who does, but that’s temporary), and we only get to eat out like twice a year, and the only thing I can afford to buy organic is oats (get the most bang for my organic buck that way, as it’s generally the most contaminated food out there, but cheap per pound even organic). I feel like I could learn from you! Any recipes, strategies, or tips you’re willing to share?
(and just in case that sounded in any way sarcastic or incredulous, I’m totally serious– always looking for ways to get better quality food into kids, for less money)
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I’m just shaking my head, this is alien to me. There’s so much junk food in that pic, there’s no normal food here and of course name brand food costs more than generic. In our family, we just buy the basics of meat, bread, pasta, dairy, fruits and vegetables and cook a pot of stuff to last for days.
Today we made a big pot of sausage and meatballs and each day we just boil some pasta, warm up some of the meat and serve. Sometimes we’ll make a pot of stew and each day we’ll cook some rice and serve it, we something to last for several days since my mother and I both work full time and we won’t need to cook every day. It looks as though the grownups in that pic don’t cook, it’s cheaper in the long run to learn how to cook
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Yeah, we had WIC after our eldest was born, and it was annoying paper vouchers dated by week, for stuff like $9 worth of vegetables, fresh, canned, or frozen, 3 gallons of whole milk, one pound of cheese, 2 pounds of whole-grain whatevers (there was a list you could choose from, we always got the corn tortillas), one pound of dried beans… It was tedious to work with, but we worked around it. I learned to make farmer’s cheese out of the obscene quantities of milk, and then we’d use that to make a batch of lasagna with the (subsidized) crushed tomatoes and frozen spinach. I’d use the dried beans to make refritos, then put those together with the tortillas and cheese and make a huge batch of taquitos and freeze them, so we had heat-and-eat stuff we could prepare quickly later.
My parents used some kind of state food assistance back in the 70s when my siblings were little, and that was, IMO, a much better system: it was essentially an ag subsidy program, where the government purchased overproductions of staple foods such as grains and dairy at a guaranteed price from farmers, which acted as insurance against price fluctuations: if the price of corn crashed one year, it didn’t put all the growers out of business, they could still sell to the govt at a fixed price. The govt would then warehouse that stuff and through some sort of magic get it processed into usable forms like cornmeal and the famous “government cheese”. What my parents got was a periodic box of commodity foods they picked up at a central distribution point, had stuff like dried beans, flour, cornmeal, molasses, and 5-pound blocks of cheese. My parents would then swap with other people at the pickup, until people generally ended up with the things they were most likely to use. They said even then, a lot of people didn’t know what to do with molasses, so they’d trade less-useful things for it. It’s calorically and nutritionally dense. Was what we ate with our oatmeal as kids.
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Here’s a pretty great account of the surplus food program my parents benefitted from back in the day:
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They were vegetarians, so I’m betting it was the canned meats they were swapping for molasses 😉
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They weren’t using that program by the time I came along, but I heard a lot about the government cheese! My mother, a schoolteacher, had a classroom filing system based on the long, narrow boxes the g-cheese came in: they were handy for filing the odd craft supplies like buttons, pipe cleaners, beads, rubber bands, clothespins…
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“They said even then, a lot of people didn’t know what to do with molasses …”
Shoo-fly pie, of course, especially if they were fond of doling out (pun intended) huge blocks of butter.
But it’s rare to see in the South, even Florida.
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Eventually saw the picture … fascinating.
Once upon a time, a certain “rugged terrain” soft drink was made with orange juice that had been clarified by means of a form of vegetable oil.
As originally intended as a mixer for whisky, nobody back then gave serious consideration to the bromine in BVO, also known as brominated vegetable oil.
As a sugar-based drink that also was somewhat thirst relieving, it limited consumption.
Then it was reformulated with high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), after which it was only a matter of time until patients presented at hospitals with serious cases of soft drink-induced bromine poisoning from being addicted to it.
While bromine hasn’t been in that particular soft drink since the late 2010s, the HFCS nastiness is still there.
If that won’t kill you, non-nixtamalised corn chips are clearly next in line along with the potato crisps cooked in nasty cheap fats.
One tin of beans, one packet each of lunch meat, cheese, and chicken in a nasty foam tray … and that’s nearly all of the food.
It’s not even all that unique, as I have seen several “kitchens” even worse off than this.
Sometimes it’s comfortable for people to leverage incompetence on someone else’s fraud.
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At least 7 packets of chips! In 2 and a half days? It doesn’t matter how many people are being fed, the mix of products is way-off if its meant to actually feed anyone. No ‘main meal’ food and all just processed snacks and junk.
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Maybe they have other food but it just isn’t visible in that photo? Just a hypothesis.
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4 cases of soda. Nuts. If this was Food Stamps, we should not allow purchase of soda.
I’m wondering if they don’t have cooking facilities or a decent sized fridge, because that best explains the less awful of the choices they made.
I just spent $200 for a man, a teen boy and me, as follows:
Family pack of chicken breast, 1.5 lb sirloin steak, 2 lbs of ground pork, 1 lb organic grass fed beef, organic mixed salad, organic Broccoli, 6 lbs of onions, four packs of frozen veggies, a loaf of sourdough bread, dozen organic eggs, two half gallons organic milk. Two large containers of mixed unsalted nuts, organic half and half (to avoid the added chemicals that were in the regular), cheese, ham, bag of mandarins, a watermelon, grapes, bag of apples, 5 lbs of bananas, half gallon of lemonade (the treat for the men). a pack of Gatorade for the teen after sport (not my usual choice), and a pack of water for church event. And, stainless steel straws and a garden waste container.
This was at ALDIs, elsewhere all this would have cost about 20-25% more. So $240-250
Amanda
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I think these people deliberately post pictures of absolute junk food as clickbait meant to farm engagement. Seen too many of these.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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