I got my first crockpot at a thrift store for $8. Saved my ass sooo many times as a fulltime working car-less mum of a toddler…
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Yes. Exactly. I was fulltime employed as a single mum (and I’m Canadian, so knock off any health-related costs…), but I lived in Vancouver. Brutal. Rushing to get the boy to daycare and then to work on time, rushing from work to pick him up to avoid the $5/minute late fee. Just hoping the busses were on time… The crockpot saved me, for sure, but there were times when dinner was some fries at the restaurant on the way home because low bloodsugar in a three-year-old is a friend to no one.
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Mad props and respect for going through that. Until I was an adult I never appreciated the amount of effort my mom put in for us, or fully grasped how hard a routine was like that, every day.
IMHO we should be focusing on cheap, healthy fast food options for parents without any, instead of giving out the advice “Just cook at home or you are mistreating your kids!”
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Went looking for a replacement one quart pan at our local Sally Ann. One crockpot, one crockpot insert, lots of froufrou gadgets like an ice tea maker and a George Foreman grill, but no saucepans at all.
Working multiple jobs, you can often have food that’s fast, cheap or good; pick two.
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On that schedule even if she had the supplies to make a “cheap homemade meal” there still would not have been the time. Kudos to your mother. I’d hope that in this day and age she would not be admonished for doing what she had to do. I’d like to think that she would be respected for keeping her family fed. I believe those who would admonish single mothers for feeding their children fast food are those who have too much time on their hands in the first place.
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Totally. A few of us did loosely organize a batch cooking club of sorts - so i could trade a lot of the monster pot of chicken stew for various other things like chili or whathaveyou. But … time shortages mostly killed that, too. :-/
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This: Totally, this:
I’d like to think that she would be respected for keeping her family fed.
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My step before 1 - get over fear of exploding crockpots caused by college roommate. Never gonna use one.
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You know you and I agree, but $86 up front for the working poor is not feasible.
Also having a working credit card to have an amazon account, or a place to which amazon can safely deliver to. And again, even that list has hidden time costs, cuz you say don’t order veggies on amazon, so that a trip to grocery store and back, probably on transit, and that takes time, and then I have clean and chop stuff.
Again, I agree with you. I used to live on $50 a month for food (rice cooker ftw!) - but I will never be on board telling poor people if they just tried harder with non-existent time and resources they could eat better. Sorry not sorry?
@orenwolf - did we have the same Mom? My mom worked retail and went to night school (so as to eventually stop working retail) - we ate a lot of kraft dinner and spam, so much spam. But yeah man, looking back at the 70s/80s through our current day point of view, holy shit would people have not liked that I was a latchkey kid at 8, and cooking for myself at 10. And the spam, so much spam, that alone would be a call to social services!
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McDonald’s (or other chain fast food places) do not generally care about you or your kids getting nourishing, filling meals.
I know about budgets, single motherhood, shitty apartment kitchens, and time constraints. It was still more important for me to make sure we were fed well than conveniently. It meant spending much of my day off organizing meals for the following week. It meant teaching my kid how to cook meals from ingredients, so we could manage time better. It meant being creative with pasta and rice. It meant learning that frozen peas were the tastiest cheap vegetable year round. It meant learning how to wring flavor out of bones, and how to use the stuff others threw away. Head-to-tail cuisine? We were eating it long before it became popular.
Today, I use a white sauce instead of a can of cream of whatever, but knowing how to make a casserole that feeds 2 for 2 meals out of a handful of leftovers has saved us from being hungry many times.
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Seriously, THIS. Yes, my Mom went through the same progression, and looking back, I love the life skills I learned from having to cook/clean/etc for myself as I got older, and am frankly amazed by the work ethic my mom kept up for years just making sure we, as kids, never felt like we were wanting for anything, even if, in reality, we were just scraping by.
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re: spices -
I’m lucky to live in a city where we’ve got a guy who sells spices at some farmers markets for $1 a packet. You can try a lot of spices without investing too much.
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Step 0.5 have enough money so you don’t have to choose between electricity and rent and have power to plug a crock pot into.
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Even you have neither time nor money, cooking something decent is dirt easy. Just get a big can of beans, some veggies like bell peppers or frozen green beans, put it all in a bowl, season to taste, and you can eat for a week. Not that hard.
Of course, if you have a family, it gets a bit trickier - potatos and various legumes are your friend then. Still a lot cheaper than McD.
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That’s fine, but it’s not $86 up front, but $86 for an entire month’s worth of food. I specifically state don’t buy veggies faster than you can use them. Additional shopping trips are required… but I’ll get to that later. To be fair, it’s probably something like $50 up front, which isn’t much better. If that’s the case, one can almost certainly get away with weekly trips of under $25. Buying in bulk costs much more up front, but is cheaper over the long run.
Amazon is a suggestion, but there are other options out there. I have not tried any of the delivery options, ever, but I know they exist. I’m not sure how far I’d trust them, because there are always hidden costs, only beginning with delivery costs. Then, as you said, you’d need a credit card, and you’d also need to make sure nobody will nick your package while you’re gone.
Food deserts complicate things.* Sometimes there might not be a grocery store nearby, or it might be really out of the way even if it is. It’s even a big assumption to think there’s public transportation, because most places I’ve lived were small rural towns with no public transportation to speak of.
I’m not sure what to do about any of this stuff. The ways in which this situation can be shitty vary so much that I have no advice. It depends. When it was me, there was a lot of trudging over a mile through the snow in poorly fitting shoes to get groceries. It’s doable but not easy at all.
*Also, food desert can mean completely different things. There are no grocery stores, but are there international markets? These can be a good resource. Are there convenience stores? There might not be. There might not even be any restaurants either.
Am I doing that? I don’t mean to, sorry.
I don’t mean to say that they need to “try harder”, because that doesn’t mean anything. There’s a lot of variables to sort out. I just want to point out that theoretically, home cooking can be cheaper and even easier than fast food. It can be done, and I think it should be done if possible. I realize not everyone can do this, and I’m not judging anyone for not being able to, but I made this work even though it wasn’t easy.
For me, it was summer sausage and mayo on white bread.
Same here. People don’t believe that I used to come home from school and nobody would be there. No scheduled activities, no babysitters, no nannies, my siblings gone. That was life though. Things are so much different now.
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A lot of this sort of advice falls into “bootstraps” categories. Because, as you say, shit is complicated! Add in a second job, or two kids, or debt, or even minor health issues, and shit gets way more complicated fast! So while some of us who have lived through some shit might have some good and valuable advice, we need to take care in how/when we give it. I tend to trust adults to… well, adult. We know fast food is shite, I don’t think anyone is under any delusions that its good, and I’m not going to judge an adult who eats fast food out of necessity. It is what it is. My only point in all this, is its not always “easier” to cook at home for a lot of complicated reasons, and really, what we need is less helpful youtubes and more institutional and structural changes in social services and how we support people. 
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Sometimes it costs a lot of money just to be poor.
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That’s tough and I do totally feel ya on that.
Have you looked into getting pots and pans at a thrift store? Sometimes you can luck out and find an unopened set at goodwill or whatever. Also, places like Marshalls, TJ Maxx, or Kohls (discounted merchandise from department stores that often have a minor defect, but all new stuff) have much cheaper prices on such things (so you don’t have to save up as long). Maybe an online discount retailer might have better prices?
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This, @elUel is what you should save up for! A slow cooker is an amazing tool that saves tons of time and allows for a number of great, cheap, and healthy meals.
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I grew up in a fairly privileged life in Venezuela, we were comfortably middle class and in a nice suburban-like area. But my parents worked long hours at their respective jobs and we were somewhat latchkey kids, though probably not to the extent some here. But my parents always made sure that out of all things to prioritize the one thing they put near the top was good home cooked food.
Later when Chavez first went into power he laid off everyone that opposed him that worked in the oil industry and black listed them from getting jobs elsewhere. My parents were unemployed for over a year, had to borrow from friends, family and get assistance from local groups. Still they made sure the family never went hungry and ate well.
Their particular situation is unique and i’m not trying to compare to anyone or tell them they should make an effort to cook. But thinking back on it i’m deeply grateful for the sacrifices they made for me and my brothers and i can’t imagine how they did it. I guess my point is, whatever someone’s situation is as long as they are busting their ass to provide for their family no one has room to judge.
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