I'll search it up but I don't know if the amount is different from NY to TX.

Dodger you're right: it IS easy. But this is what culture is: it's a mindset, it's a paradigm people are locked in (or out of).


I have been very close to a few families over time that had a child I got very close to, kind of an adopted big-sister kind of relationship, that expanded to their family and sometimes a small neighborhood area. It is absolutely a trip how the paradigms of "what is familiar" shape what we believe about ourselves, what we believe is possible, what we are even "willing to let ourselves dream about."

I've been around neighborhoods were merely having a car makes you a "rich" alien, where merely having a job that isn't minimum wage makes you amazing and where nobody there believes they can ever have those things. Yes, I mean just "a car" and "a full time decent non-minimum job." To them that was impossibly unlikely. I have known entire neighborhoods of people for whom those things were so unfamiliar, almost nobody they knew had this, that they just could not imagine it for themselves. They just couldn't.

It wasn't that it was hard. How freaking hard is it to flip burgers? (Actually it IS a hard job. I've had easier jobs the more money I've made in my life, go figure.) But I mean, none of that was beyond them. But it was unfamiliar to them and hence, they had no faith in it and they didn't even have dreams of it. It was the "other."

I saw it in myself, too, though. I've had friends who were very wealthy, celebrities or people who grew up wealthy, and all the things they took for granted (when we'd go visit some 'cottage' of theirs that is more amazing than any house I've ever had, in a locale more expensive than I could afford to rent a closet in) seemed impossible to me. They seemed to think coming into the money like that was totally do-able because of course, they were surrounded by people who were doing exactly that, often they'd grown up where everyone has money, and for some people it really is from just 'a job' or 'painting pictures' or whatever -- but they met the people "it worked" for, in the areas they lived, so to them, of course that's possible, of course it's even probable, just do it. For me it was like come on, that's about as likely as winning the lottery, and I felt I needed a "real" job to survive. But that was my limitation, my paradigm.

*

Human psychology has boundaries, just like if you put a tiger in a cage it learns those boundaries, freaks out if they disappear, and may try to recreate those boundaries if moved elsewhere. People will DO what they are familiar with, and they will expect and plan for and dream of what they are familiar with.

When you grow up like many of us here did where we didn't learn to cook anything until well into middle age, when 'cooking' training ranged from zero to junkfood, and -- this is the big thing I think someone mentioned above -- when an entire lifetime of indoctrination from every angle tells you it doesn't MATTER -- it just doesn't come that easy, even though it IS easy.

I don't mean we're victims (god I hate that mentality) I mean one cannot fix a problem if one cannot recognize it, and it is a genuine problem with a critical element is missing from a needed formula -- and the element is "familiarity which breeds belief." A growing % of our culture does not have that familiarity with 'real food' period let alone cooking it themselves.


I believed that "Subway" was actually better than anything I could make at home because it's fresh whole grain bread and 3 kinds of meat but not too much and fresh vegetables and it's not like most people have all of that stuff right there available for a sandwich (most of my 'real food' rotted in the fridge if I bought it) and I felt downright healthy about eating there (despite that the drinks are sodas, the condiments are probably transfat deadly, all the ingredients are probably GMO stuff horribly soaked with three kinds of chemicals (fertilizers, bug killers, then preservatives) and so on).

I thought Arby's was probably healthier than Taco Bell because it had meat sandwiches and less fats. Everybody knew that McDonald's wasn't healthy food although it was so much better once they replaced Lard with vegetable oils right? OMG.

This is the world I grew up in and every message from every direction enforced this so completely that I never questioned it. I never said, "Is Arby's healthy?" I said, "Is Arby's better than Pizza Hut?" That's what marketing wants the question to be. I never wondered if steak or scrambled eggs were healthier for breakfast than a bowl of cereal. Cereal was grains, utterly critical, tasted great, very fast, and low-fat milk brought calories down but still tasted ok and that had a little protein and vitamin D and calcium, 'good for you.' Why would you even bother making eggs, anyway? More than 1 a week is really too much cholesterol anyway.

I mean we're talking about a level of ignorance that is inculcated in people from birth basically. You can't even walk up to a person like that and go, "Everything you believe is crap and a lie and you're gonna die if you eat Subway's allegedly healthy sandwiches all the time." You would just seem like some kind of lunatic, like some missionary babbling to a native about something to-them bizarre.

Not until I was nearly 40 and a friend, captain of a fire dept., told me about his LC experience, and then another man described a super simple overview of how/why it worked, and then I spent a LONG time reading this and other LC forums, did I know about LC. And just like I didn't know anything about LC, I didn't know anything about cooking either. Kinda related, but indirectly.

*

I work for a global textbook publishing company (that is primarily interactive digital in my area). I love my company. But the pedagogy on nutrition is heinous because of course, it is the party line of our government and "pop science" (as opposed to real science) to varying degrees. This is what people who will become doctors, nurses, and nutritionists, are required to study, and pass tests on. These are the people who will be the experts in 5 years+, mind you. The EXPERTS. Not even counting what we have now, who were forcefed the same stuff. I have seen the competitors' books... they are the same. Read them and weep.

Supplements merely make expensive urine, energy drinks are not so bad actually, candy-soda-junk intake should be kept 'in moderation', saturated fat and cholesterol will kill you, low-carb diets are dangerous fads, whole grains and fiber are utterly necessary to existence, yada yada yada. Even stuff that makes you journal your food, grades you on it and counsels you for not eating "properly." I mean stuff that was wrong and KNOWN wrong by real science decades ago is still the reality taught 10 years ago and now and it's still going to be what the alleged "experts" advise ten years from now, if education has its way. My kid in public school had this same crap stuffed into her literally from FIRST GRADE ON.

*

When you really believe that whole grains are the answer, that soy is good for you, that junk food is merely an 'in moderation' issue, why would a McD hamburger seem worse than one you had to take all the PITA trouble to plan ahead and shop for and make and clean up after? Why would your bread seem better than their bun? Why would Subway not be health food?

If you get people to believe just a FEW things -- fat and cholesterol is bad, grains and veg/fruit and soy are good, sugar/junk/transfats are not ideal but not a big deal, and low-fat anything is better -- at that point compared to the retail options, nobody feels they NEED to cook.

Nobody had to get me to believe that GMO proteins, three kinds of chemicals, and soy-based transfat mayo were good for me, to get me to halfway live on Subway sandwiches and diet coke. They merely had to get me to believe, through a whole lifetime of conditioning, that grains-veg-fruit-lowfat was good, crap was only bad "if not in moderation," and animalfats were generally unhealthy. At that point, everything you can buy at a window is just as good as anything you could make, in terms of health.

Everybody else I knew ate via drive-through windows and restaurants and a few frozen/boxed/instant sort of "home cooking." It didn't even seem bad.

And tons of people who ate vastly worse than me were skinny. So it didn't seem like THAT was making people fat since many people were eating it and NOT fat.

That often seemed the criteria. I was unhealthy solely because I was fat and other people were healthier solely because they were skinnier.

And 'Even the healthiest people in the world like olympic athletes hawk sodas and fast food. How bad can it really be.'

P.S. A couple months ago I drove through McD and got my 18 year old a "parfait" at her pleading request. Ugh, those are not my thing. The woman (maybe 60 or so) at the window was friendly and talkative. I ended up laughing, "I know -- who would eat a sweet yogurt fruit parfait at 6 in the morning but a teenager?!" and she said, "Well at least it's really healthy!"

Seriously. She totally believed that.

Yes ma'am, you work at the drive-thru window of McDonald's and this is health food. I didn't say a word.

*

People have to get familiar with it to believe. I made chicken stew without a spice mix recently, couple times, and it turned out great. I was astounded.

I could have done it at 10. But I didn't believe I could. Not until I did it at 48, a couple times, and now I actually feel pretty confident that I can throw half the odds & ends in my fridge into a huge pot with some spices and misc. and it'll be edible. I wouldn't have believed it even 5 years ago. I would have found it a big PITA and had to follow a recipe that would have been time consuming and exhausting for me. Instead of, "Feed all the not yet rotting produce in the fridge to the food processor, dump it in the pot with the chicken I just baked (3 minutes prep time total investment), add spices and walk away."

NOW I know it's easy. Now I know I can do it. Now I'm likely to do it more often. But if I hadn't had the experience, and more than once, I wouldn't have.

For some people, ANY cooking that isn't Top Ramen is like that.

PJ

PJ is spot on.

Sure, anybody could cook from the age of 10. But I'm betting that 10 year old got lots of practice. I was a so-so cook when I got married. My mother even though she stayed home, wasn't all that interested in passing cooking skills down to me and my sis. I could make grilled cheese and soup, spaghetti, chicken parm, and heat up frozen dinners. So it took practice, work, and failures to get to the point a year later where I could could cook just about anything. Hubs, more often than not, cooks right beside me. (He learned as a teen when his mom got a fulltime job and told him, "Mondays you are cooking supper" and he had to sink or swim.) My kids will learn. Even the boys. Not everyone has that background.

As PJ said, there are new adults whose parents couldn't cook either. Disgusting though the ignorance seems, they really think that their upbringing is the normal way to do things. And the majority is still stuck endoctrinated by a faulty food philospophy that low-fat, high carb is the best and healthiest way to eat. That diet gives us obesity, heart conditions, strokes, and diabetes. But all the experts still subscribe to it.

Excellent post!

Oh such a good post, PJ. All the above was my experience until very late middle age. Okay, I'll admit it....old age. I'll just add that when I arrived in NYC, I heard a TV personality say that the city's 20,000 restaurants stay in business because they can make food taste better than you can at home. Well sure, for anyone that never learned to cook that's absolutely true and unfortunately I just accepted "that's the way it is" for the next 20 years!

I sent you a PM, regarding rounding up that info about food stamps and diet.

Good for you. I love hearing stories like this.

Am I the only one in the US that happily ate beans and rice before I went LC? Billions of people across the world eat it and don't get fat but if you suggest to an American that a dinner of beans and rice (and maybe some smoked sausage or ham bits) is a perfectly fine meal, especially for poor people, it's like your some kind of horrible person. I would feed my whole family for the cost of a happy meal.

My mother really hated to cook. She could do a bang-up job on holiday meals, but the everyday stuff bored her to tears. Which, I think, is why she went back to teaching when my sisters & I were old enough. We often joked that we learned how to cook out of self-preservation - it was that or starve - but we didn't learn to be good cooks until we were older.

Even now, I'm sitting here wondering what to do with the stew meat I've got thawing. I don't do my old pre-lc stew with potatoes or rice, carrots, onions, thickened with cornstarch any more. But the stew meat was there - and it's from a friend's pastured cow!

Any suggestions?

Beans and rice are probably a good thing to eat.

Where I'm from the poor that are mexico immigrants often kind of live on black or pinto beans, rice and corn tortillas. I think that would be fine food -- now.

Not in the past.

I never really ate rice (except buried in a burrito or something) until I was about 28 and moved in with an asian woman who made it nightly. She also taught me to like broccoli, at least if it's wok stir-fried in peanut oil. If I hadn't eaten rice and broccoli for six months, except on occasion I'd have starved. When I moved out she bought me a rice cooker and a 25# bag of rice.

The only beans I'd had by age 40 or so was the really sweet brown sugar ones, and refried pinto for mexican, and I did have some pinto pork & beans a few times, eh, they were ok. I think I had black beans once with some 'real' mexican food down in Santa Monica.

When we were poor, we'd buy a giant tub of country crock 'spread' (transfats, not butter, alas), and then buy a whole bunch of the cheapest possible day-old marked down totally plain (generic-wrapper) bread. And then we'd live on "buttered toast." Sometimes if there was already jelly or sugar/cinnamon in the house that could be added to it. Otherwise we would just eat buttered toast until we were momentarily full.

Really it's amazing I even lived to tell.

PJ

PS Actually I just remembered I did eat rice in first grade regularly, with margarine and sugar poured on it in great quantity. That's the only way I knew to eat it. But I never really had it again that I recall, unless it was mexican food, until adulthood.

I'm in the UK and I used to work in a "foodstore" in a "poor" end of our town. Most of the shoppers, who were on the welfare system spent their benefit money buying food in our shop. They tended to stay away from "healthy foods" (fruit and veg), because they would say their children wouldnt eat it - so they bought huge quantities of sweets, chocolate, cakes, biscuits, crisps, sugary drinks. Some ready meals, bread, low fat spreads.... oh and a for the parents (I hope) lots of beer, wine and cigarettes.

I'm possibly generalising, but the ability to pay for "healthy" food was there, however, the intent, the knowledge or even the ability to say NO to their kids wasnt

Jo xxx

I hate to be pessimistic but I doubt it can be done. And yet if possible I think it's worth going for the best-quality food you can find and IF-ing if that works for you.

I've had some fluctuations with work and delays in being paid the past few months that have put a strain on my budget. I mostly relied on eggs and ground turkey and a little butter. Things are getting better now but I won't be able to look at an egg for a long time, I got so sick of them.

I should have stopped being ashamed and gone to a food bank to get a better variety of food. The scarcity phase screwed me up and I'm still getting over it. It's just so hard to avoid processed food if you're on a budget and yet an overdose of additives or things you're allergic to can really put you out of commission at a time when you need your strength.

I lived in NYC for a few years when I was going to school there and I never, not even once, cooked a meal for myself! And yet for years before then I always shopped carefully and developed good cooking skills. It was partly how busy I was, but also the magic ingredient: "free delivery." I used to get a coffee and bagel delivered to my little studio on 10th Ave., which was hardly an upscale area then, but being able to have food delivered or eat at a decent coffee shop at 1 or 2 a.m. was irresistible. I also remember how crummy the meat and produce was at the grocery stores in the neighborhood, even the tiny farmers market had mediocre stuff but I did sometimes shop there when funds were low.

I really enjoy cooking now and more importantly it's become a habit that I rely on. But I don't judge people who don't like to cook or feel it takes up too much of their time, if you have a really busy schedule it can be nurturing to yourself to eat in a restaurant, get take-out food, or have it delivered. The problem now is the poor quality of so much restaurant food that's often carby or processed, so you have to be careful of what you're getting -- which is why it comes down to cooking for ourselves for many of us.

I agree, a little bit of butter, salt and pepper and you have a decent tasting protein and vegetable with barely any effort at all. I tend to lean toward the side of simpler meals, but I can understand how some folks with large families might be pressed to come up with more variety. I read through some of the responses to my post and the one that stood out the most was the 40 year old single mother who didn't know how to cook and was suddenly thrust into a situation where she had to.

I'm not bashing you in any way whatsoever, but I do have to wonder about the circumstances leading up to being in that situation. Our systems are clearly failing us if we haven't even given women the tools they need to raise their families. Basic cooking skills are something that every human being should possess - period. Since the time we discovered fire and invented ways to harness it, we have benefitted from the enhanced flavor and safety provided by cooking the foods we hunted and gathered.

There is no easy answer, but I stand by my comment that if something is important, you make the time, and I can't think of anything more important than ensuring proper nutrition for one's family. Hopefully our governments will come around and help us out a bit.

I couldn't agree more. My health suffered too just when I needed all the strength I could get. I'm glad things are getting better for you now. Hang in.

I think you're right about the impossibility of eating paleo on $5 a day. I tried the last couple of days and couldn't get anywhere near it.