quiddities and agonies of the ruling class - a rolling new york times thread

well even going down that path it makes a lot more sense to judge him for smoking than for buying healthy food

yeah I don't know what cigarette taxes are like in san fran. I guess I'd need to know more before I really judge him - like maybe the WF is the closest supermarket to his apartment. so whatever premium he pays is offset by the time/money it takes to get to a cheaper supermarket. *shrug*

xp well it sure as hell ain't coming from pathmark or any of the other ethnographic slow death traps that sell food adjacent to the projects.
i spent five years trying to buy groceries at one of those joints and there are nine rows of canned foods drenched in salt and eight rows of frozen or dried or liquid processed salt/sugar/fat and two rows of shitty and tasteless factory farm veg and fruit and a row of subpar grocery meat/factory meat. "local" butchers/fishmongers in the area do not deal reasonable quality meat and co-ops are a good option but require a large investment and a car. farmers markets are more expensive than whole foods. I rely heavily on freshdirect, which is not totally unreasonably expensive but definitely out of the reach of anyone without a computer/internet connection. trust me when i tell you that my urban area, without a whole foods in walking distance, offers very few options for anyone to buy fresh produce / veg for them and their family without owning a car OR making around 60K.
i have lived in rural areas and am aware that this varies depending on location.
and cigarettes are addictive folks.

i ain't asking argentina to cry for me, but the megamart experience makes it easy for people to subsist and slowly get diabetes/obese/otherwise incapacitated unless you have a lot of time to devote to your menu. There is not a magical local grocer that is accessible for a lot of urban folks; big box food/retail killed A LOT of that shit dead or pushed the price into the stratosphere.

I picked out that angle on the story because I have a belief that people should live below their means no matter their class, fwiw
--dayo

if we all did this the American economy would collapse.

maybe I just have low standards but I've always found big box supermarkets to have adequately fresh produce and/or meat - that includes pathmark, shoprite, save-a-lot, aldi, various chinatown bodegas, wal-mart, acme...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MqIYJf13Hw

This guy was the best at taking apart the Old Gray Lady

heh well no shit! the american economy has been based on living beyond your means on credit for a while now. xp

as my longtime friends have entered their mid-20s i've noticed that some of them have nicer clothes+handbags and go drinking more and at better places than others -- they don't act Rich or anything they just act comfortable and look like the happy people on tv -- and at first i thought oh those are the people who are doing well! but no it turns out most of them are just the people who've started using multiple credit cards. that kinda freaked me out.

then i was like WELL THIS EXPLAINS A LOT

unless you have a lot of time to devote to your menu.

this raises an important point - many people, across all strata of society, don't have time to cook, and eateries in most places in america skew towards being extremely unhealthy and bad for you. for shame, american food culture!

well, there's another option there: you can get healthy and quality groceries prepared at about 75% of the cost of eating out. hence the success of whole foods/trader joe's/fresh direct.

"adequately fresh" to me equals "edible" and i think taking considerable pleasure in the food you eat is not something that should require a shit ton of additives/salt/sugar/fat or be a luxury only of the upper middle class

yeah I was just thinking about how trader joe's prepared foods represents a good middle ground between $10 salads and $2 hungry man dinners. I wish that kind of food culture would spread to more supermarkets.

there's a lot you can do with less-than-optimally fresh vegetables in chinese cooking. but maybe that falls into your adding a 'shit ton of additives.' soy sauce is a great thing, when used sparingly!

xp i don't see any reason why it shouldn't; i've long held that if our local pathmark turned into a trader joes it would make just as much cash. There are reasonable price options in there, just less deathfood. i think some of it has to do with their chosen market image. One of the "luxury" grocers is gonna diversify in the next few years to cover that market, possibly with federal assistance.

i hear ya dayo and my mom raised me by the wok but she was a stay-at-home mom and eventually ended up having to work so me and my sis could keep eating at all and that led to less cooked meals. if time and money are at a premium, convenience becomes prime and convenience in america means food that, over time, will absolutely kill you.

the problem with deathfood is that people keep on buying it, people often prefer deathfood to a more reasonable and healthy alternative at an equivalent price. sugar + salt + fat are powerful substances ;_;

agreed and that dictates the economics of fresh food. decent kale, which really shouldn't cost any more than iceberg lettuce becomes a luxury. and that IS nuts.

and it seems I always circle back to how american food culture is generally a food culture of DEATH *looks at taco bell's frito lays in a burrito for $1*

i'm pretty grateful that my parents always found a way to cook for us as kids cuz i feel like that's something that definitely gets passed down, at least based on the eating habits of friends my age.

xp well it's hard not to. the key reasons I live in/adjacent to NYC are that I don't need a car/great food/a job market that values my skillset/great art and culture/amazing diversity and depth of the citizens... but i spent 25 years living in a world where i ate fast food because it was the best and cheapest alternative and when i visit home, all my friends weigh more than i do.

my friend has a theory (gotten from some food writer, I think) that a lot of great food inventions came during times of hardship. stuff like cured meat and fish, pickled vegetables, brined anything, preserved sauces. those are ways to eat cheaply and tastily.

and yeah big props to my mom and dad for always cooking 7 days a week while at the same time holding down 9-5 jobs.

well most of human history was hardship compared to now xp

yeah but that doesn't make preserved foods less tastier!

a lot of staples of various cuisines more or less started out as poor people food

sure: soul food (from any culture) is basically discards or the cheapest options cooked and spiced well

I guess my point is that eating on a budget doesn't mean peanut butter and jelly every day. at least from what I like to eat, stocking a pantry with soy sauce/vinegar/cooking wine/spicy sauces/fermented beans/tofu/ginger/garlic doesn't cost a lot, and a bottle of soy sauce goes a long way, and costs like $2.

I think that's kind of where we went wrong with food: Stuff like fried chicken was at one point a treat, then we reconfigured the system so that the supply is able to give us fried chicken daily, and then we put foods like that in mass-market pre-prepared overly-preserved and salted versions for fast food and tv dinners. So now we have a sometimes-food that is even worse for you than the original version, that you can eat daily.

I buy soy sauce by the giant jug

xp and which doesn't depend on the absolute freshness of the food. (which, during january in new york or the northern united states, means what exactly? produce that's delivered to your door the moment it comes off the ship where it spent 5 weeks on its way up from south america? or after spending 6 weeks on a train from mexico?)

when I go home, and my parents cook meat, it's usually from meat that's been frozen for a few months, bought at the last time that ground pork was on sale at the local shoprite. still tastes great!

yeah... well you're right, dayo, but a lot of what you're talking about boils down, more or less, to education. to understand how to season and cook things... that really takes effort to educate yourself and a lot of ppl, even ppl my age w/o kids or much responsibility after finishing work, aren't interested in that. it sucks because it's a great way to live in many respects, but it's just not something that tons of families get into. idk, i got lucky, my dad went to culinary school, but i don't know many ppl my age that understand, like, how to cook on a nightly basis or even want to. let alone actual families.

still missing the point d. the bigger point is 'people should be able to spend their meager incomes however they like, even if it's fried chicken or drugs.'

'I know how to eat well for less money' or 'people *should* be buying this instead of that' is just sorta self-congratulatory

I think that's kind of where we went wrong with food: Stuff like fried chicken was at one point a treat, then we reconfigured the system so that the supply is able to give us fried chicken daily, and then we put foods like that in mass-market pre-prepared overly-preserved and salted versions for fast food and tv dinners. So now we have a sometimes-food that is even worse for you than the original version, that you can eat daily.

― mh, Sunday, January 29, 2012 11:15 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah... something related to this is that big box supermarkets almost all have premade things that you can pick up and take home but it's like... fried chicken and macaroni and cheese and shit like that. i don't think many places are making take-home shit that's anywhere near healthy.

true, that c-p

I mean, x-p to iatee

yeah I agree j0rd, which is why I find american food culture to be very problematic!

iatee, I don't know if I can fully get behind that - some kinds of behavior are pretty self-destructive and I wish people would stop doing them. but I do agree that people should be free to spend their money however they like, but that doesn't mean I can't tsk tsk at them.

I was just trying to point out that eating healthily and tastily on a budget doesn't mean always going to whole foods and buying organic produce. but if you want to strawman me as being paternalistic saying that people should eat less fried and fatty food, I'm okay with that, because I believe that! nobody - people with meager, adequate, good, or obscene income levels - should eat fried food all the time!

self-destructive is in the eye of the beholder. I'm sure you can find some responsible fried chicken eaters or drug users on ilx. I think it's pointless and sorta in bad taste to judge people for not being more like you (exception: not owning car). instead it makes sense to talk about what the best policies would be to achieve the best outcomes (vegetables should be subsidized, etc.) xp

i don't have any way to prove this, but i do get a sense that companies have figured out ways to make frozen dinners easier and better... like you can make a generally good and healhy-ish meal if you go went to the frozen food section at any big store, grabbed a bag of frozen meat and veggies, and went home and cooked a quick pot of rice or noodles or something

I think it's pointless and sorta in bad taste to judge people for not being more like you (exception: not owning car).

iatee very much in character

is blowing up every mcdonalds and burger king considered "policy"

trader joe's has definitely figured out how to make good frozen food that's not pumped full of fat - well, it's still salty... but you look at the list of ingredients on an average TJ prepared food box and it's actually pretty reasonable!

I think if someone wants to live their life eating crappy foods and understands the health consequences I can't see why they shouldn't be allowed to. no different from legalizing drugs or w/e

I think it's pointless and sorta in bad taste to judge people for not being more like you (exception: buying tons of records)

self-destructive is in the eye of the beholder. I'm sure you can find some responsible fried chicken eaters or drug users on ilx. I think it's pointless and sorta in bad taste to judge people for not being more like you (exception: not owning car). instead it makes sense to talk about what the best policies would be to achieve the best outcomes (vegetables should be subsidized, etc.) xp

― iatee, Sunday, January 29, 2012 11:34 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah - I agree with the larger push, but unfortunately it's easy ammo to point out ways in which benefactors of government assistance don't use that assistance in acceptable ways. and going back to my original point, if the goal is to write a piece that tries to strip away the stigma of government assistance, you shouldn't leave landmines in your article for the other side to point out. or at least do more to defuse them (maybe, as you suggested, by pointing out that access to fresh and/or organic produce should not be a luxury good.)

I think if someone wants to live their life eating crappy foods and understands the health consequences I can't see why they shouldn't be allowed to. no different from legalizing drugs or w/e

― iatee, Sunday, January 29, 2012 11:39 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

this is where I diverge - I'm paternalistic, prescriptivist, and probably fascist in this sense!

the big problem in this sentence is the 'understands the health consequences' part - which means changing the culture. which is a hard thing to do! I don't think people fully understand the harm associated with going to 7-11 every day. (hi markers!)

this is like, Asia vs America, man

I find this interesting but Jennifer is getting mad at me cause she wants to leave the house so I gtg

my overall point is that people should be allowed to do whatever they want to do within their given constraints. a good way to argue w/ this is by pointing out that 'whatever they want to do' is partially an illusion and people are easily influenced etc etc

I can't imagine how huge the supporting-old-ppl problem would get in 30 years (not that it isn't going to hasten the End, anyhoo) if so many of u fuckers weren't still killing yourselves with smoking. Flame on!