Doing it wrong: Food.

I usually avoid paying any attention to the news on television.  I often feel I'm better off being completely uninformed than being largely misinformed, and I know too much about how network television works to be able to take anything they say seriously.

But, I live in a house where the television is on at news time, and sometimes I hear things even if I'm not listening.

Some days ago someone on the news was talking about something (a budget?  A rate change?) that was going to make life harder for the people "doing it tough".  Someone said something about people having to chose between paying the bills or putting food on the table.  Someone else in the same story talked about people having to skip meals because they couldn't afford it...

This is incredibly callous of me, I know, but I couldn't help thinking "Well, they're clearly doing it wrong."

Yes, I know poverty is poverty, and it can be a real struggle to eat well... but we live in Australia, people - as long as you aren't actually homeless, you should be able to eat something.  You can buy a kilo of rice for less than $3 and a kilo of mixed vegetables for less than $2.  Curry powder, water and a tablespoon of flour makes it taste like something edible and you could feed four people with that.  It's not great, but it's food - and that wasn't even the best example.

As hundreds of generations of Asian peasant farmers will tell you, if you have rice, you have a meal.  I come from Northern European peasant farmer stock, and hundreds of generations of those will tell you that if you have a cabbage and a loaf of bread, you have a meal.

If you buy staples (especially if you buy them in bulk) when you have a bit of money, and you budget your food like you [should] budget your money, then you really shouldn't have to go a day without eating something.

Now, I say that as someone who has never had to raise six kids on a single income at minimum wage in rented accommodation, so I'm willing to admit that I could be very, very wrong.

And I'm also willing to admit that I'm prejudiced in this matter.  I abhor the kinds of people who spend their money on beer and cigarettes and giant TV sets and then complain about not having enough money for food.

There are people out there who are genuinely doing their best and still not making ends meet, and I wish the Giant-TV-Buying jerks weren't encouraging me to assume that everyone who can't afford food is going without basic necessities because they are morons.

However, I still have difficulty wrapping my head around the idea that people who are budgeting well can't afford a packet of rice.

Apart from making me wonder about their ability to budget, it makes me wonder if they are going without food because they don't know how to "approach" a packet of rice.

Jamie Oliver (so annoying, yet rather informative) drew my attention to the fact that "poor" people often eat badly because they don't know how to cook or can't see a meal as anything other than a hamburger or a pizza.

Do we have families going "without food on the table" because they don't know how to "eat poor"?  Have we forgotten how to eat like peasants?  Should we be teaching that in Home Economics in school?  Rather than teaching kids how to make quiche, should we be teaching them how to stretch a single chicken into four meals?  How to make a "decent" meal for a family out of 500g of mince, dried beans and rice?  How to use things like chili and curry to make the simplest meals tasty?

So much stuff is out there on austerity/ausperity at the moment, but who is it aimed at?  People who are genuinely poor and need to know this stuff, or middle-class hippies who have taken a pay cut and want to turn it into a project?

Mind you, I feel like I should put my money where my mouth is on this one.  I live like a laird - and, oddly enough, I always have.  In spite of the fact that I spent the first 15 years of my life living below the poverty line, I was raised by a genius who managed to give our family a Good Life even though we were living off a pension.

Apart from one year when I was living on a low-to-no income budget (and I've always wanted to take a second crack at that year, because I think I could have done it better), I've never had to be responsible for putting food on the table when money was particularly tight.

I feel like I should try living poor for a little while before I start waving my hands around saying "oh, but of course you can put food on the table for a pittance".  I think that would make me one of those middle class hippies treating "being poor" like a project, though, and that may also make me even more of a jerk than I already am.

Still, it probably is about time I started thinking about how much I waste on food (and how much food I waste) and whether I could be doing better with less.  I think I can safely say that, regardless of my budget, when it comes to food I'm still "doing it wrong".