This myth needs to die. There is much cheaper, much healthier food out there. It's just that nobody will eat it any more.
Oh, no argument there. When I was living solo back in college and barely scraping by paycheck to paycheck I was buying bags of rice, beans, and the "use it today or freeze it" pounds of ground beef or chicken quarters at the store, along with the spices to make dirty rice or red beans and rice. I survived on that stuff for years. It was monotonous as hell, but I knew it was nutritious and it'd keep me alive.
But I had a few advantages over a lot of people on government assistance:
I had half a clue about nutritional value.
I had half a clue about the value of a dollar (since it was coming out of my pocket and not from Uncle Sam).
My mom actually taught me how to cook when I was a kid, and drilled it into my head that it wasn't going to be my wife or girlfriend's responsibility to feed me.
Most of the people you see out there on government assistance that are buying up convenience food are either too uneducated to know about food values, too uneducated to know how to cook, and/or too lazy to learn or care about either. They'd rather just grab their bag of chips and 2-liter, and throw a TV dinner in the microwave than take the time to cook a meal.
Oh, no argument there. When I was living solo back in college and barely scraping by paycheck to paycheck I was buying bags of rice, beans, and the "use it today or freeze it" pounds of ground beef or chicken quarters at the store, along with the spices to make dirty rice or red beans and rice. I survived on that stuff for years. It was monotonous as hell, but I knew it was nutritious and it'd keep me alive.
But I had a few advantages over a lot of people on government assistance:
I had half a clue about nutritional value.
I had half a clue about the value of a dollar (since it was coming out of my pocket and not from Uncle Sam).
My mom actually taught me how to cook when I was a kid, and drilled it into my head that it wasn't going to be my wife or girlfriend's responsibility to feed me.
Most of the people you see out there on government assistance that are buying up convenience food are either too uneducated to know about food values, too uneducated to know how to cook, and/or too lazy to learn or care about either. They'd rather just grab their bag of chips and 2-liter, and throw a TV dinner in the microwave than take the time to cook a meal.