Quarantine preparation has made me realize that a days worth of food is actually really cheap, doesn’t require that much time to cook, and can be made fairly tasty for not much more, i.e. a day’s worth of easy-to-cook, relatively tasty food is about $5.
This requires some amount of amortized costs for the easy-to-cook and relatively tasty part, but not immensely large upfront costs (instantpot, spices, etc.).
This reference says that 40 million people dealt with hunger is the US. I am… super confused? I find it extremely difficult to believe that people literally couldn’t afford to buy food, so the explanation is probably something like “hunger is worth it to get dietary variety/convenience/etc.” or “trapped by local incentive gradients” or “have incentives to not save money, go hungry when hit by proverbial ‘rainy days’” or “people don’t realize how cheap food actually is”
I’m still confused though. I feel like there might be some room for someone to write some infographic that has information like “here’s a rotating course of 10 meals that are cheap and tasty, with lists of exactly what to buy on what day, how to cook everything with various types of kitchen equipment, substitutes in case the store doesn’t have various ingredients, possible variants in case you get bored”. Crucially, the infographic would have to be really good. A possible explanation is that people who potential might have to deal with hunger don’t have the slack to plan their meals so they don’t and none of the existing meal plans are understandable enough or something.
I notice I’m still confused.
Also mildly confused by why soup kitchens make complicated foods instead of simple foods, but that confusion is nearly entirely resolved by various signaling considerations.
Maybe people who struggle with hunger don’t plan a rotating course of 10 meals because they are signaling that they aren’t so poor to have to plan their meals so meticulously. Maybe planning a rotating course of 10 meals is much harder than I think it is. Maybe I’m far below where I think I am in terms of “ability to endure eating the same food over and over again” and most people just can’t eat a rotating course of meals.
I notice I’m still confused.
I feel like I might be missing something really clear. Like something along the lines of “most people who go hungry don’t have kitchens/space to store ingredients/stable living situations/any slack at all whatsoever/something”.
It seems to me that during the quarantine I eat less than usual; either I am deluding myself, or it is a combination of having less physical activity (such as walking to/from job/lunch/shops/playground), being able to eat whenever I want (so there is no pressure to “eat a lot now, because the next opportunity will be 7 hours later”), making less superstimulating food (using less sugar and salt), and having other ways to get some hedons (e.g. taking a nap). Sometimes I cook a soup, and that’s most of my daily food.
And soups are really cheap. You take $1-2 worth of ingredients, cook them in water, add little salt and spices; optionally eat with bread. Bread is cheap, salt is cheap, most spices are cheap (per portion), potatoes, broccoli, carrot, onion, and beans are cheap. Most of these things are like $1 per 1kg.
Okay, soups are not super healthy; cooking destroys vitamins. You should also get some fresh fruits and vegetables. Apples, tomatoes, cucumbers are $1-2 per 1 kg. You should definitely be able to eat healthy food for less than $5 a day.
What is expensive? Chocolate and other sweets, cheese, berries, nuts; I probably forgot something. You shouldn’t eat sweets; and you can afford the other things now and then even under $5 a day on average. (It is not an optimal diet; some people recommend eating berries and nuts every day. But still healthier than many people eat, including those who spend more money on food.)
.
On the other hand, we usually spend more than $5 per person per day, even during the quarantine. We spend a lot on sweets and cheese. The tastier ones are even more expensive than the basic ones, which are already more expensive than the actually useful food. Instant gratification—it’s addictive! The more stress I have during the day, the more I need something that will improve my mood instantly, even if it’s only for a moment.
Poor people probably have more stress, and thus less willpower to resists things full of sugar and salt. (Also alcohol and tobacco. Okay, the last one is technically not food, but still comes from the same budget.)
Very poor people, e.g. the homeless, don’t have the place to cook. So many cheapest things are ironically out of their reach. Not having a fridge is also a problem.
Then, I assume many poor people don’t have the good skills and habits. Some of them don’t have the necessary IQ, some have mental problems, some had shitty upbringing.
1) The claim that 40 million Americans “deal with hunger” is, um, questionable. Their citation leads to feedingamerica.org, which cites USDA’s Household Food Security in the United States report (https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/94849/err-270.pdf?v=963.1). The methodology used is an 11-question survey (18 for households with children), where answering 3 questions in the affirmative marks you as low food security. The questions asked are (naturally) subjective. Even better, the first question is this: “We worried whether our food would run out before we got money to buy more.” Was that often, sometimes, or never true for you in the last 12 months? That’s an a real concern to have, but it is not what people are talking about when they say “dealing with hunger”. You can be running on a shoestring budget and often worry about whether you’ll have enough money for food without ever actually not having enough money for food.
2) A significant percentage of the population has non-trivial issues with executive function. Also, most of the population isn’t familiar with “best practices” (in terms of effective life strategies, basic finances, etc). Most people simply don’t think about things like this systematically, which is how you get the phenomenon of ~50% of the population not being able to cover a $400 emergency (or whatever those numbers are, they’re pretty close). This would be less of an issue if those cultural norms were inherited, but you can’t teach something you don’t know, and apparently we don’t teach Home Economics anymore (not that it’d be sufficient, but it would be better than nothing). This is a subject that deserves a much more in-depth treatment, but I think as a high-level claim this is both close enough to true and sufficient as a cause for what we might observe here. Making an infographic with a rotating course of 10 cheap, easy-to-prepare, relatively healthy, and relatively tasty meals is a great idea, but it’ll only be useful to the sorts of people who already know what “meal prep” means. You might catch some stragglers on the margin, but not a lot.
3) The upfront costs are less trivial than they appear if you don’t inherit any of the larger items, and remember, 50% of the population can’t cover a mid-3-figure emergency. “Basic kitchen equipment” can be had for under $100, but “basic kitchen equipment” doesn’t necessarily set you up to prepare food in a “meal prep” kind of way.
2) is something that I sort of thought about but not with as much nuance. I agree that such an infographic would be only useful for people who were looking for an alternate meal preparation strategy or something.
3) if it’s true that people want to do meal preppy type things but don’t have enough to pay upfront costs, there might be gains from 0-interest microloans, maybe via some MLM-type I loan you money, then once you’ve saved some money and paid me back, you loan other people money too.
It seems like the bottom 20% of the US spends $2216 per year per income earner or ~$6 per day on food. Given that children themselves don’t have an income they might spend less then $5 per person for food per day.
People can drown in a river that’s on average 1m deep.
Epistemic status: rambles
Quarantine preparation has made me realize that a days worth of food is actually really cheap, doesn’t require that much time to cook, and can be made fairly tasty for not much more, i.e. a day’s worth of easy-to-cook, relatively tasty food is about $5.
This requires some amount of amortized costs for the easy-to-cook and relatively tasty part, but not immensely large upfront costs (instantpot, spices, etc.).
This reference says that 40 million people dealt with hunger is the US. I am… super confused? I find it extremely difficult to believe that people literally couldn’t afford to buy food, so the explanation is probably something like “hunger is worth it to get dietary variety/convenience/etc.” or “trapped by local incentive gradients” or “have incentives to not save money, go hungry when hit by proverbial ‘rainy days’” or “people don’t realize how cheap food actually is”
I’m still confused though. I feel like there might be some room for someone to write some infographic that has information like “here’s a rotating course of 10 meals that are cheap and tasty, with lists of exactly what to buy on what day, how to cook everything with various types of kitchen equipment, substitutes in case the store doesn’t have various ingredients, possible variants in case you get bored”. Crucially, the infographic would have to be really good. A possible explanation is that people who potential might have to deal with hunger don’t have the slack to plan their meals so they don’t and none of the existing meal plans are understandable enough or something.
I notice I’m still confused.
Also mildly confused by why soup kitchens make complicated foods instead of simple foods, but that confusion is nearly entirely resolved by various signaling considerations.
Maybe people who struggle with hunger don’t plan a rotating course of 10 meals because they are signaling that they aren’t so poor to have to plan their meals so meticulously. Maybe planning a rotating course of 10 meals is much harder than I think it is. Maybe I’m far below where I think I am in terms of “ability to endure eating the same food over and over again” and most people just can’t eat a rotating course of meals.
I notice I’m still confused.
I feel like I might be missing something really clear. Like something along the lines of “most people who go hungry don’t have kitchens/space to store ingredients/stable living situations/any slack at all whatsoever/something”.
It seems to me that during the quarantine I eat less than usual; either I am deluding myself, or it is a combination of having less physical activity (such as walking to/from job/lunch/shops/playground), being able to eat whenever I want (so there is no pressure to “eat a lot now, because the next opportunity will be 7 hours later”), making less superstimulating food (using less sugar and salt), and having other ways to get some hedons (e.g. taking a nap). Sometimes I cook a soup, and that’s most of my daily food.
And soups are really cheap. You take $1-2 worth of ingredients, cook them in water, add little salt and spices; optionally eat with bread. Bread is cheap, salt is cheap, most spices are cheap (per portion), potatoes, broccoli, carrot, onion, and beans are cheap. Most of these things are like $1 per 1kg.
Okay, soups are not super healthy; cooking destroys vitamins. You should also get some fresh fruits and vegetables. Apples, tomatoes, cucumbers are $1-2 per 1 kg. You should definitely be able to eat healthy food for less than $5 a day.
What is expensive? Chocolate and other sweets, cheese, berries, nuts; I probably forgot something. You shouldn’t eat sweets; and you can afford the other things now and then even under $5 a day on average. (It is not an optimal diet; some people recommend eating berries and nuts every day. But still healthier than many people eat, including those who spend more money on food.)
.
On the other hand, we usually spend more than $5 per person per day, even during the quarantine. We spend a lot on sweets and cheese. The tastier ones are even more expensive than the basic ones, which are already more expensive than the actually useful food. Instant gratification—it’s addictive! The more stress I have during the day, the more I need something that will improve my mood instantly, even if it’s only for a moment.
Poor people probably have more stress, and thus less willpower to resists things full of sugar and salt. (Also alcohol and tobacco. Okay, the last one is technically not food, but still comes from the same budget.)
Very poor people, e.g. the homeless, don’t have the place to cook. So many cheapest things are ironically out of their reach. Not having a fridge is also a problem.
Then, I assume many poor people don’t have the good skills and habits. Some of them don’t have the necessary IQ, some have mental problems, some had shitty upbringing.
There are a few things to keep in mind:
1) The claim that 40 million Americans “deal with hunger” is, um, questionable. Their citation leads to feedingamerica.org, which cites USDA’s Household Food Security in the United States report (https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/94849/err-270.pdf?v=963.1). The methodology used is an 11-question survey (18 for households with children), where answering 3 questions in the affirmative marks you as low food security. The questions asked are (naturally) subjective. Even better, the first question is this:
“We worried whether our food would run out before we got money to buy more.” Was that often, sometimes, or never true for you in the last 12 months?That’s an a real concern to have, but it is not what people are talking about when they say “dealing with hunger”. You can be running on a shoestring budget and often worry about whether you’ll have enough money for food without ever actually not having enough money for food.2) A significant percentage of the population has non-trivial issues with executive function. Also, most of the population isn’t familiar with “best practices” (in terms of effective life strategies, basic finances, etc). Most people simply don’t think about things like this systematically, which is how you get the phenomenon of ~50% of the population not being able to cover a $400 emergency (or whatever those numbers are, they’re pretty close). This would be less of an issue if those cultural norms were inherited, but you can’t teach something you don’t know, and apparently we don’t teach Home Economics anymore (not that it’d be sufficient, but it would be better than nothing). This is a subject that deserves a much more in-depth treatment, but I think as a high-level claim this is both close enough to true and sufficient as a cause for what we might observe here. Making an infographic with a rotating course of 10 cheap, easy-to-prepare, relatively healthy, and relatively tasty meals is a great idea, but it’ll only be useful to the sorts of people who already know what “meal prep” means. You might catch some stragglers on the margin, but not a lot.
3) The upfront costs are less trivial than they appear if you don’t inherit any of the larger items, and remember, 50% of the population can’t cover a mid-3-figure emergency. “Basic kitchen equipment” can be had for under $100, but “basic kitchen equipment” doesn’t necessarily set you up to prepare food in a “meal prep” kind of way.
2) is something that I sort of thought about but not with as much nuance. I agree that such an infographic would be only useful for people who were looking for an alternate meal preparation strategy or something.
3) if it’s true that people want to do meal preppy type things but don’t have enough to pay upfront costs, there might be gains from 0-interest microloans, maybe via some MLM-type I loan you money, then once you’ve saved some money and paid me back, you loan other people money too.
It seems like the bottom 20% of the US spends $2216 per year per income earner or ~$6 per day on food. Given that children themselves don’t have an income they might spend less then $5 per person for food per day.
People can drown in a river that’s on average 1m deep.