| mrstickball said: You are fully correct. There is no significantly difference between access to foods and services among the poor in your country... Heck, its probably much better in America than Brazil, because I have litterally never met a single person that did not have access to a stove. Additionally, your last statement about the cost of potato chips is entirely accurate in America. A bag of Ruffles costs about $3 USD here for 10 or 12oz of chips (about 1/4th of a KG). Comparatively, I can get 3KG of potatoes for less than $3 USD. Think about the caloric differnce between 3KG of potatoes and 1/4th a KG of chips.... Much food is like that. A Lean Cuisine meal of pastas, vegetables and chicken costs $1 for about 1/5th a KG (about 7oz) of food. Comparatively, I could buy about 1.5KG of each individual ingredient and make it myself for about $3 - ten times the meals for only three times the cost. When you go to the store, you can observe people on food stamps. In the US, its essentially a credit card that people may purchase whatever they want at the store to use for food, because they are supposedly too poor to buy it on their own. 90% of the time, I can identify the people on these cards, because they buy soda pop, premade ready-to-microwave meals or meals that can be thrown on the stove and heated up, or bread and lots of lunchmeats (which are essentially 2X the price of any other cut of meat). |
Well, besides homeless people - who obviously wouldn't have a regular stove around - and people living way out of urban areas - who might not have stoves but sure as hell don't trive on frozen pizza either. Something about humans conquering fire a little while ago - I've never met anyone withouth a stove or cookware either. They're basic survival tools really, as important as a roof, if not more.
About the voucher people, I see things like that around here too, there are no vouchers (well, the poorest do get something a bit like that from the government, but it's for some key items, called the "basic basket", which are mostly actual foods), but there are plenty of people who'll complain all the time how they've got no money and it's so danm expensive to eat and yet you open their fridge and they've got lots of cold cuts, frozen pre-prepared food, only the most expensive cuts of meat (which they don't know to prepare anyway so it's really a wate) and go trough five litres of coke a day. I know I myself eat a lot better, tastier food (I'm not getting into a health argument though) for a fraction of the cost.
But my point saying this is that these people are not poor, they're middle to middle-low class. Since poverity is (at least as far as I know) much less accentuated in the USA, it's to be expected that people's very definition of poor will be different, and while there's nothing wrong with one definition or the other, I think for discussions regarding access to food it's not very productive to have your lower income strata ("poor") encompassing people who actually are nowhere near any kind of risky of going hungry.
