10-11-2022, 04:53 PM
(10-11-2022, 03:18 PM)SueDonim Wrote: As well as being less food value because of the extra processing, they are too expensive. If you are poor and wanted to eat noodles, you would buy straight pasta. Eg spaghetti or spirals @$1.19 for 500gm. 2-minute noodles are about 5 times that price. If you were really poor you would eat brown rice over pasta because it is better food and is even cheaper than straight pasta.
People are poor in many ways. We rarely teach home economics these days beyond intermediate school, and if you dropped out before that your chances of being able to stretch a dollar into feeding a family are really bad. Way easier to give the kids takeaways. Chips. Or to buy a big pack of noodle packets so you have a few in the cupboard, quick, easy, fast. And kids like them.
Budgeting is a skill, learned, just as cooking is. Impoverished families aren't necessarily skilled in those areas, certainly not to the extent of calculating the best value for the dollar any more than they can calculated nutritional value. Those are middle class skills, educated skills. If you can do that chances are you aren't actually poor.
Which is why I said I was lucky, when my income was low I had skills to survive and the support when I needed it. Many many families these days simply aren't that fortunate.