'Tis the season for New Year's Resolutions. Roughly four thousand percent of them seem to involve food. The world is spamming my social media with ads telling me I could eat cheap, healthy, easy, tasty, organic, artisanal, yadda yadda yadda. Superfoods! Antioxidants! Environmentally and socially conscious! I'll look like a model and develop enough super powers to keep me alive for all eternity!
I'll level with you all. I don't have much to say about the appearance-based propaganda. My entire opinion on the matter is that it is wrong to use anyone's physical appearance as an excuse to treat them as lesser humans, and if you do that you're being an asshole. It's just not something I wrestle with. I won't get into numbers or details, but I have looked more or less the same since I was fourteen, I am now forty, I am still paid money to show up to places and let various people stare at me. I'm not claiming to be perfect, just noting that the things I struggle with are not visible to strangers on the street, and that I feel this changes the experience significantly.
What I do have a lot of opinions about is the moralizing I see attached to the financial and functional aspects of food. I see a lot of infographics about the ease, and therefore implied obligation, of eating "healthy", whatever the poster thinks that is. The details vary, but it's almost always a condemnation of some combination of high-calorie, highly-processed, convenient, or other "bad" food. The claim is that eating "healthy" is no more resource-intensive than eating "unhealthy", so if you don't, you're wrong.
These people do not live in my world.
Take rice. There's nothing wrong with rice. It's definitely food. There's not really a lot else to say about it. It seems popular among people who like to tell you how to feed yourself. We will leave aside for the moment the fact that "just rice" isn't really a meal by itself, and pretend that's all that's required for dinner.
In order to have rice for dinner, you first must remember to buy rice. You also have to be functional enough to actually go do that, after you've remembered it needs to be done. To get the rock-bottom per-serving price that the infographics people quote, you need to buy the rice in very large bags. It's usually between $10-20, depending on what kind of rice and where you are. If you have never been in a position where $10-20 is enough of your grocery budget that spending that up front for another bag of rice, even if it'll last you a long time, means you won't be able to afford much other food that week, then you are not qualified to tell poor people how to feed themselves. Buying a 20 lb bag of rice also means figuring out how to get 20 lbs of rice home, with or without access to a car, or spending double that so that someone else will bring it to you.
In order to cook rice, you need a clean vessel. (We are going to assume here that you already own a pot or a rice cooker, and have access to the water/electricity/gas you need in order to make dried rice into something you can actually eat. There are people that don't, but I've never been quite that badly off, so I'm not going to speak to how you fix that.) That means that you need to have washed the pot after the last time you made rice in it -- you need to have the executive function to recall that washing up has to happen, and to translate that into a plan that will result in a clean pot, and you need the energy to actually stand up and convert that mental plan into actions. And if you didn't wash the pot after you used it last, then you need to do that now, after you have done other energy-draining things that day, and are hungry and trying to arrange for dinner.
The counterargument to that is that one can make rice in advance. One can do all of their food prep on their day off, in fact, and not worry about anything but microwaving dinner when the moment comes! Yes, one can certainly do that. But then when is my day off? People who say this use "day off" to mean "day in which one is not required to work their commercial job". That is a day off work. When I say "day off", particularly when I say, "I need days off or I cease to function," I mean "day in which I am not really required to get out of bed, like I shuffle about enough to use the bathroom but don't bother to shower because that is too much standing up and doing stuff". If I need to take care of basic survival tasks like food prep, that is not a day off. I imagine single parents feel the same about childcare. It explained a lot when I realized that 'normal' people do not actually need at least one day a week where they sleep for sixteen hours and don't have to arrange their thoughts into sentences, because life is not that perniciously exhausting for them, and they recharge much faster.
Making rice in advance, or indeed at all, also requires one to have the same level of function as doing your dishes before you need them. It is a task on the list of tasks. You don't know how much energy it takes to keep track of this shit until you don't have it. How useful were you the last time you stayed up for two days running? That happens a lot to me, even when I sleep well. I drop a lot of weight when I am pushing myself too hard, because I come home so tired I'm literally dragging my feet -- as in, my ankles flop, and I have to consciously think about walking if I want to lift my legs high enough that my toes don't scrape the ground with every step -- and don't eat dinner, because I can't decide on what it should be, or make it, or eat it, or clean up after it.
It's not the amount of physical work I do; whether I'm jumping around or sitting at a desk has surprisingly little effect on how I feel. It's that I'm tired, and everything hurts whenever I'm awake. The amount of time I have to spend existing in the world, paying attention to the environment and speaking coherent sentences and organizing thoughts in such a way as to allow me to accomplish literally anything is brutally exhausting. And because we are a capitalist society, I can't do enough hours of stuff translates to I don't have enough money to live, much less make my life easier. All of these logistics that 'normal' people don't think about are things that I would absolutely pay someone else to do for me if I could, and it would probably improve both of our lives, one way or another.
When you start thinking about food as weight or volume unit per dollar, it can be surprisingly difficult to get enough nutrition, or even enough calories. I'm sure you could get 1700 calories of rice for, I don't know, like four cents? But 1700 calories of rice is ten cups of rice. I don't think I could find the time to eat that much, even if I wanted to. The counterpoint is that junk food is expensive, and yes some of it is. But some of the cheapest food in terms of calories per dollar is also some of the worst. You can get about 300-500 calories per dollar where I am, if you really try, but you end up living entirely on instant noodles and cookies.
The calculations for both nutrition and calories per dollar are different and more thorny when you're talking about things that aren't prepared. Boxed mac 'n' cheese can be very cheap, but you need things that aren't in the box to make it -- how expensive are butter and milk where you are? Not how expensive per serving, how expensive to buy the amount that's in the actual container the grocery store will sell you? And is that amount of it useful? Butter lasts forever, but how much does milk cost, and will you use the entire carton? That's a lot of thinking, and maybe a lot more dishes if you need measuring utensils, and probably a lot more money to buy some available unit amount of an ingredient that's way more than you need this week and might be way more than you'll ever use. Infographics like to forget about that part. It's great that you know how to make a thousand sandwiches for five cents each, but it's not very useful to someone who doesn't have $50 to front, or a place to put the 999 sandwiches they don't immediately eat before 990+ of them rot.
Seventeen hundred calories of virtuously cheap rice is also not enough for me to maintain weight. You might think I'm an outlier, because I do so much dancing, but consider that the list of jobs that tend to leave you living in poverty include things like waiting tables, or working in the hellscape that is an Amazon warehouse. I am not a large human, and if I ignore the fact that I walk everywhere and stay conservative with what counts as a 'workout', my total daily energy expenditure comes in around 1800 calories with all of the commonly-used formulae. I know a lot of people agonize over feeling like they should be eating fewer calories, and maybe they should? That's really your call, I don't know your life. But especially a lot of the green/organic/vegan superfood diets people push could not be done both cheaply and calorie-dense enough to sustain someone who works 40 hours a week constantly running around. Nuts and avocados are fuckin' expensive, y'all.
My point is, you can optimize for time/energy/executive function, for economic resources, or for some specific combination of nutrients or macros. But the people passing around infographics about food, going 'well, you could just...' are using a plan that assumes you're willing and able to optimize for all of them at once, and you can't. And especially when it's aimed at people who are disabled and don't work a lot of hours, it ignores the hard fact that the reason those people aren't putting all those hours into a job is that they can't. If they had that much function they'd be working and ordering pre-selected, pre-sorted, pre-sliced vegetables from HelloFresh just like the rest of you fuckers.
I will also point out that I am writing as a person whose luxury foods are things like salad. I don't get a lot of fresh veggies because I don't function reliably enough to be sure I can eat them before they become a bag of greenish ooze. I had ramen for my first meal of the day today, at 3 pm, because that was when I could scrape myself up and stand for ten minutes to make it. And I ate it out of a paper bowl with disposable chopsticks, because those ten minutes sucked and I knew for a fact that if I used a real plate, I would not stand up long enough to wash it. My pets eat better than I do. When I feed them oatmeal and frozen vegetables, they don't care if I cook any of it first.
My personal solution for not dying of scurvy is to take a multivitamin. I don't get much shit for this because I don't look like the stereotype of someone who eats a lot of ramen out of paper bowls, but people make a lot of assumptions based on appearances. I get cranky about this. You wanna tell me how I "should" eat? Then you buy it, make it, serve it, and then clean up afterwards.
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