If anything a rural area should have much better access to fresh produce, because it is a rural area.Yeah, that makes perfect sense if you have no idea at all about how food distribution works.
The basis of their diet, therefore, is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea, and potatoes--an appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letterReplace tea with store-brand cola and convert to modern currency, and you get us.
to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less
money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let's have three pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the kettle on and we'll all have a nice cup of tea! That is how your mind works when you are at the P.A.C. level. White bread-and-marg and sugared tea don't nourish you
to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than brown bread-and-dripping and cold water. Unemployment is an endless misery that has got to be constantly palliated, and especially with tea, the English-man's opium. A cup of tea or even an aspirin is much better as a temporary stimulant than a crust of brown bread.
Put every boy and girl through home economics every year, starting in kindergarten.I think that's a fabulous idea. But I also think that public schools should be adequately funded and should be able to teach things that don't appear on high stakes standardized tests, but I know that's not how things work right now.
And for exercise, step kids through a daily routine (20 reps of this, 20 reps of that, run in place or around the block, etc., with no expensive equipment required) they can keep up for the rest of their lives. Not basketball or baseball or football, where the kids who need the exercise most will spend most of their time sitting or standing while a few athletes do everything else. Sit-ups. Push-ups. Running. Stretching. Dumbbells. For everyone.That, on the other hand, seems like a good way to teach kids that exercise is miserable drudgery and to convince them that they will stop exercising the moment they no longer have a drill instructor barking orders at them.
In fact, I am really sorry to have waded into the discussion with a canard that is so strongly associated with these noxious ideas about race and poverty. It was stupid and I can understand why it's perceived as trollish. I didn't intend it as such.Hmm. I'm going to take your word for it, but I'm having trouble coming up with a non-trollish way that you expected that to contribute to the discussion. I mean, I think it's a really interesting question why poorer people have more kids than richer people, but it's hard for me to read this in this particular context as anything but blaming poor people for having too many kids and therefore not being able to afford decent food.
Or, in the exact same time (it takes 20 minutes to cook either way), I could buy the minimalist cheese-and-sauce pizza (Which actually costs substantially less) and prepare fresh spinach, artichokes, some feta, and a (fake) meat or two to top it with in its last five minutes of cooking, for something vaguely healthy.Right, because if the peasants have no bread, let them eat spinach, artichokes and feta. Seriously, dude. You're like a caricature of yourself.
Your version will undoubtedly be more expensive than a DiGiorno's (2 for $11).Oh, gosh. More like $1.99 for two french bread pizzas at Aldi.
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That's insufficiently high to change behavior.
posted by darth_tedious at 3:17 PM on July 15, 2011