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Forums - General - US Congress rules that pizza is a vegetable

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mrstickball on 20 November 2011
Jexy said:
mrstickball said:
 

1) Even if you do spend money on a decent cookware set, the expense is greatly offset by the savings of making your own food vs. purchasing pre-made garbage. One of your arguments were about Healthy Choice meals. In general, you are going to spend $3 on those types of meals, when you could easily make the same thing for under $2. That is a net savings of $1 per meal. Over the course of a year, you would save a significant amount of money - more than enough to buy a brand new cookware set.

2) When I moved out, I knew almost nothing about cooking. Yet I make 99% of meals for my wife and I. All I did was go to AllRecipes.com or borrow cookbooks from the library. Cooking is very easy to do. It just takes the desire to apply yourself to reading and repeating the instructions. If people cannot cook, then they are to blame. There are too many resources out there to prevent anyone from making homemade, nutritious meals and saving huge on monies.

3) Generally, the junk food is significantly more expensive. Yesterday, I splurged on a bag of salt & vinegar chips and a mountain dew. The cost? $4. If I made the chips at home and instead made a Mt. Dew substitute like kool-aid, my actual cost on the entire endeavour would of been $1 plus my time. Given fact that I could of made a large batch of kool aid, I could of easily saved myself $10/hr by preparing the food myself. Quick? Not entirely. But we live in a society that no one wants to bother learning to do anything for themselves. That is what is killing us. No one can survive by themselves, and would rather export doing something to someone else. Let me tell you: It feels awesome when you can cook, repair your car, fix a leak, or any of those things by yourself. You also invariably save a lot of money doing it yourself, too.

Yes, well if only those things were taught in school.  Art and music get cut first along with shop class and all that fun stuff.  I know I never had a cooking class (that would be sexist teaching women how to cook, despite men being in the class), and we weren't allowed to work on cars and stuff because of "safety" ... All it takes is one kid getting hurt and lawyers prevent all of that from happening ever again.

Also keep in mind that 5 bucks here and there seems a lot cheaper than $100 all at once.  When you live check to check, you can't afford to go too into debt, and people can't see anything thats not right in front of their face, like the future prospect of saving money down the road.  And like I said before, time is a big issue.  Most people don't have the patience to cook for a long time after working all day and probably being pissed off because their job sucks.  People can't learn if they don't know where to go to be taught.  Keep in mind, the less money people have, it probably means the less educated they are, and the less internet savvy they are.  It's just how it goes. 


Nothing is preventing you from learning about cooking outside of school. If you are expecting your school to teach you everything you need to know in life, then you will be sorely dissapointed.

You live check to check because you don't invest in the right things at the right time, and instead pay that $5 out each day vs. investing in something $100. Your in debt because you bought something that you couldn't buy in cash. By the time I was 21, I saved up enough money to buy a house and an apartment complex to rent out to tenants. I did this, because I chose not to buy a car, or other things I didn't feel were critical. They've come back to help me significantly. People are too stupid to know where to be taught because they are undisciplined. People would rather spend time on Facebook posting banal status updates than go to Khan Academy, learn to cook, or learn something from Wikipedia. Its all in your choices. People are free to choose stupid things and get stupid prizes. I chose not to. Everyone has that choice.



Back from the dead, I'm afraid.

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mrstickball on 20 November 2011
Farmageddon said:

I don't know, I'm from a different country and all that, but to me te idea that poor people wouldn't have a stove and some pans or know how to cook is ludicrous. Either you're very out of touch (and I don't mean that as an offense) or our definitions of poor are far too different. Be that as it may, getting cookeware and learning to cook is not that big obstacle you make it out to be. Fact is that eating is kind of really important and as people get poorer it's importance is made all the more obvious. So poor parents teach their kids these kinds of things, who in turn help them out.

I realise what you're referring to as poor are probably not people at any risk of actually going hungry. But just as the miserable cook, so could them. It's their option not to.

But none of this really matters when discussing meals on schools. Getting cooking equipment wouldn't be that expensive, specially not if the mid term is seen, provided they can cook cheaper than they can buy frozen pizza, let alone the long term with all the possible health ramifications.

So the only question really is wether they could. Now, maybe you guys have amazingly cheap frozen pizza around, but in most poor places in the world it seems like it's pretty obvious to people that the more local and less processed your food, the cheaper. So if the cheapest of the cheapest people do it, it sounds kind of non-sensical that it's too expensive to be done, while fast food kind of stuff is not.

Then again, I don't really know what is actually served or any of that, but as a principle it should hold.

Oh, nothing really much to do with this, but a few days ago we were buying things for a barbecue and this girl wanted to buy some Ruffles. The price of that shit is scary. I calculated it, and it was as expensive as twice it's weight of bacon. A couple days earlier I had bought sardines by the pound (well, kilogram actually) and they were just shy of nine times cheaper, pound by pound, than that "economic" bag Ruffles. Wtf, who buys this shit :P

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).



Back from the dead, I'm afraid.

Kasz216 on 20 November 2011
badgenome said:
That's almost as bad as the EU's ruling that water is not wet.

Holy shit, your serious.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/8897662/EU-bans-claim-that-water-can-prevent-dehydration.html



usrevenge on 20 November 2011

the most unhealthy part of the pizza is the crust -.-



oldschoolfool on 20 November 2011

I eat my vegtables all the time. lol



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Ssenkahdavic on 20 November 2011

I am almost embarrassed to be an American right now.

If it must be a "food group" at least call it a fruit.



 

  

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Jexy on 20 November 2011
mrstickball said:


Nothing is preventing you from learning about cooking outside of school. If you are expecting your school to teach you everything you need to know in life, then you will be sorely dissapointed.

You live check to check because you don't invest in the right things at the right time, and instead pay that $5 out each day vs. investing in something $100. Your in debt because you bought something that you couldn't buy in cash. By the time I was 21, I saved up enough money to buy a house and an apartment complex to rent out to tenants. I did this, because I chose not to buy a car, or other things I didn't feel were critical. They've come back to help me significantly. People are too stupid to know where to be taught because they are undisciplined. People would rather spend time on Facebook posting banal status updates than go to Khan Academy, learn to cook, or learn something from Wikipedia. Its all in your choices. People are free to choose stupid things and get stupid prizes. I chose not to. Everyone has that choice.

You do realize I'm speaking for others, not myself, right?

And how do people learn to invest?  You realize most inner city schools don't even know what the word means?  You talk like this is common sense, but you learned it from somewhere, whether your parents taught it to you just by being responsible people, or they gave you access to the internet early on, or you had the free time to think of these things and didn't have to take care of your siblings, etc... whatever it is, you learned it somewhere.

How's some kid going to even know to look for the Khan Academy?  How does he know to do something that he didn't know existed?  This stuff is common sense to us, but not to them.  It has to be taught somehow, but there are already enough screwed up generations to expect it to be taught by their parents.  You think they'll learn this stuff if all their parents have on TV are MTV and Jerry Springer?  Or would they have a better chance if it were fox business and the discovery channel?

Dumb people raise dumb kids and dumb people have more kids than smart people.  It's a bad cycle, and they clearly aren't educating themselves, since it's just getting worse... so instead of just calling them idiots, they need to be taught.



BOOM!  FACE KICK!

Farmageddon on 20 November 2011
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.



HappySqurriel on 20 November 2011

As much as I'm disturbed by this, I'm also disturbed by the demonstrated ignorance of the vast majority of people who don't seem to understand that obesity is caused by excessive intake of food not from eating nutritionally deficient foods. While it would be ideal to have nutritious food served to children in school, as long as the children are eating an appropriate number of calories and are active enough obesity should not be a problem.



sad.man.loves.vgc on 20 November 2011

Informative thread. I learned that Tomatoes are fruit and pizzas are vegetables.