But we have to make do with twinkies, pork rinds and soda pop instead (not even brand-name soda pop, in fact). We get by on frequent forays to the local MickyDs (keeps the kids happy, too, if we've got any - and often, we don't, as even spawning is getting too expensive for us).

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We buy white bread as soft as cotton candy, in bulk. We stock up on snack-cakes and chips. We binge-eat our way to obesity on meagre salaries, to stave off the dreadful knowledge that we are not able to afford to be food snobs and that, in fact, we are poor, eat crap food and can't even afford television (remember when it used to be free)???

We get excessively fat and all the liberal food-snobs hate us (as do all you judgemental conservatives).

Oh well. Pass the damn twinkies and quite yer whining, already.

When I've traveled to other countries, I always see what the poorer people eat and it's nearly always 100% better than what you'll find in your local megamart. They don't eat processed food (because it's a lot more expensive) - they eat local grains and legumes. The chicken that they had for dinner was rasied by their own hands from a chick. They'll take organ meats that we won't look twice at and with careful cooking and seasoning, turn it into something that actually tastes good. You'll find grandma making tortillas fresh every day, and grandmere using yesterday's bread and an egg or two to make pain perdu. Nothing gets wasted, and they appreciate every bite becasue they have to work so hard for each and every single one.

I think that it's nothing short of a crime that in many inner city neighborhoods, that the options are so meager. That there are no places to buy fruits and vegetables, and that it costs less to buy your kids a Happy Meal than to actually cook something for them. Make no mistake that we need to wean ourselves off the high-fructous corn syrup tit because it is killing us.

I agree, but have you priced a Happy Meal lately? It's less expensive for our family of five to eat a good meal at home than it is to eat at McDonald's.

It's very possible to eat well without spending lots of $$$. If you want to find-out how, get a cookbook on Cajun cooking or Southern-style cooking. Great food, and none of those recipies require imported Iberian ham, etc. It's all age-old recipies, created by folks who never had the kind of cash to be food snobs. But you have to be willing to spend some time in your own kitchen. I get the impression that the original poster on this thread is too lazy for that.

...because people pay good money in restaurants now for the "poor people food" I grew up on. And I do mean poor. We NEVER and I do mean never ate out. Period. No fast food, no nothing. We cooked everything, all from scratch. There were no pre-prepared foods in the house, no soda and no "mixes" for anything.

We had gardens, we killed our own meat or bought the cheap stuff, we pickled, canned, baked and froze almost all of the food we ate. As kids, we also complained about it and thought it was boring, too.

Then The Boy and I went to a new restaurant a couple of weeks ago, and I had a pork belly (Is that a poor man's cut or what?) appetiser that cost about twelve bucks. It transported me right back to my mother's kitchen and made me nostalgic for all of that wonderful stuff we had to eat when we were too poor to buy socks.

I guarantee that I could, right now, feed a family for a lot less money than the OP does, and they would be healthier for it, and learn what good food should be like.

Messy,

That's because you were brought up with the skills one would NEED to cook/prepare food that's cheaper than "MickeyDs". I was brought up in an Italian house, learned to cook while sitting in the kitchen with my mom and grandmother. I know what to look for in raw, dried beans to separate the good from the bad, I know the difference between braising, broiling, roasting and rendering, and I know how to judge good vegetables and fruits from the bad. I'm fairly certain that you do too. However, many people don't know how to do these things or have an understanding of even basic cooking instructions. Thus, telling them to hit up Barnes and Noble or Borders for a cookbook is pointless.

There are a bazillion cookbooks out there, each one proclaiming its specialty or that its "the last cookbook you'll EVER need" without giving a hint as to the proper skills necessary. Someone lamented in another Fray about Rachel Ray's 30 minute recipes taking a lot longer than 30 minutes. Well, yeah, they do if you don't have proper knife skills, or even know which knives to use for which food. I've watched someone try to use a bread knife to cut meat, trust me, its not pretty.

What people need, especially the poor who don't have a lot of urban food choices, are books explaining technique, free continuing education or community courses in basic cooking techniques. For those new to cooking and are on a budget, stocking up the kitchen pantry with the basics can be a daunting task financially.

First, what makes for a well stocked pantry? What are your food staples? How do you prepare things, like Mac n' Cheese, without the blue or yellow box and the little packet of cheesy stuff? What are the seasons for the various vegetables and fruits? How do you know they're ripe when they're not already pre-cut and in their plastic baggies? How long is that stuff good for anyways? I don't want to buy fruits and vegetables only to have them go all brown and fuzzy in that box in the fridge I used to put my Mike's Hard Lemonade in.

Believe it or not, these are the obstacles that many people face in trying to convert from poor nutrition, mass produced diets to healthier, cheaper, sustainable food. A basic meal for a family of 4 or 5 should take about 30-45 minutes on average, which incidentally is about the same time it takes for a pizza to be delivered. However, without the knowledge and skills necessary to cook a good, healthy meal one can expect that time to increase to about an hour and a half to even 2 hours (with prep and having to constantly recheck everything for instructions.)

I, personally, have my favorite cookbooks, I have my pantry stocked with staples, I know what it means to poach, be it an egg or a pear. The sad truth is that many people in our country don't. Blaming them for not knowing is pointless, but I'd love to see a show geared towards helping them out.

...that tell you these things. Trust me, I've seen them. Actually, you can even get them for a buck or two from a secondhand book dealer. I'm a collector of "how to" books, and there are many out there that give you chapter and verse on everything from how to set up a spice rack to how to make your own ketchup.

The trick is getting people to get up of their butts and DO IT. Cutting up an onion is not rocket science. Neither is putting it in a pan with some oil. To not try that is simply to be lazy. To refuse to even look at a book or magazine is even more lazy. Cook's Illustrated has the clearest, most twit-proof recipes I've ever seen, and I've also seen most of their publications second hand.

The Boy and I have been cooking with a decidedly French bias in the past few years - and we've been learning one thing at a time, mostly from recipes and practise. This has been a learning process for both of us.

Twenty-odd years ago, when we were in school, we had no money at all. We bought pans and equipment from outdoor junk and "antique" dealers, along with old cookbooks. One of the best deals I ever got was to spend seven dollars on an apple box full of kitchen stuff. There were a couple of frying pans on top, but we weren't allowed to look deeper. When we got home, we discovered that it was full of Pyrex casseroles, measures, pans and bowls. Best deal ever, and we still use most of that stuff.

Our small appliances were second-hand. We screwed up some stuff, learned a lot, and were able to survive on a tiny amount of money for as long as we had to. Laziness is at the base of this ignorance about food. Eating garbage for no other reason than doing anything else would take effort is nonsense.

Poor people in other countries probably Do eat better than poor Americans, but other countries also have nice, long vacations and other cool stuff. You can't just focus on the food in isolation to the other stuff for any real meaning.

Plus, when those people from other countries come here, they soon start eating crap, just like us.

Poor people are also too depressed and overwhelmed to cook. Anyway, cooking is really like a hobby for the well-off, these days. These snotty comments about "proper" knives bear this out (even though it Does help to have the "proper" knife...and the bucks to pay for it).

When I say proper knives, I don't mean name brand. My knives were bought from either Target or Wal-Mart, honestly. What I mean is using vegetable knives for vegetables, meat cleavers for meat, bread knives for bread, that sort of thing. Something that caught me off guard was a friend of mine buying one of those knife blocks that come with the knives in their individual slots already for about $20. She honestly didn't know what they were all for, she mainly bought them for the steak knives.

I was poor enough at one time to have to decide what days of the week I wouldn't eat. I got "dog bones" at the butcher and discard veggies (for my guinea pig, of course) at the grocery store for free and made soups and stews with those. It would never have crossed my mind to go for the junk, I simply couldn't afford it.

Literally having no money did teach me never to take anything for granted, and a bunch of ways to survive on no money. I don't want to go back there, but I could if I had to.

Now cooking isn't so much a hobby as still a necessity. We LOVE good food, and we need it. The only way we can get it is to cook. The restaurants that serve the things we like now are just too bloody expensive to go to on a regular basis.

we live in savannah and cook local seafood and vegetables and dont go broke

Correct me if I am wrong, kraker and MessyONE, but it sounds to me like you were/are living in a somewhat rural environment. The poor places that I have seen in Chicago and New York are virtually barren of fresh vegetable to pickle or freeze, much less local seafood to cook. And yet there's a MickeyD's, Popeye's or Fish Fry joint on every corner. Grocery stores are few and far between in poorer areas and often require (public) transportation treks to get there. Of course poor people like good food, unfortunately it seems to me that there is an innate barrier for the urban poor to get to it.

I was traveling with my banker friend one day, lamenting the so-called "food deserts" of Chicago and I asked him if he thought it would be a good investment to bring stores to places that so clearly needed them. He responded with a definite "No" citing the increased cost of shoplifting, vandalism and security to prevent these things as a major obstacle for grocery stores in poor neighborhoods. To this day, I can't understand how MickeyD's can protect their stash but a Jewel can't.

Jewel market has all their food where its customers can grab it, whereas McDonald's has all their food safely behind a counter - and sometimes behind bullet-proof glass. Pretty easy to see why Jewel has a huge shoplifting problem and McD's doesn't, although both can and do get robbed.