You Don't Batch Cook When You're Suicidal (2020)

That&#x27;s one big paradox.<p>Coming from poverty, I work with plenty of talented people, but nowhere as talented as the people I&#x27;ve studied in shitty schools.<p>Now most of those people from my poverty times continue to be poor, because of many problems poverty brought to them. I can clearly see that, and that I was the lucky one to find a way up many times.<p>Yet, my new social circle believe that I&#x27;m talented because of my DNA and efforts, and blame others for their poverty.<p>But I know that those people making &quot;poor&quot; decisions in the view of riches are actually just trying to survive. With themselves, with the baggage they carry, and to the fact that they weren&#x27;t as lucky as me.<p>Talent, intelligence is literally everywhere. People that are awesome and ambitious is abundant.<p>Nobody is really much better than others, but America post-ww2 managed to sell this idea to everyone, including many really smart and talented folks, that think they are gifted.<p>To sum up, nobody chooses to be poor and humanity could progress faster if we focused instead in eliminating poverty, creating more possibilities for everyone...<p>Than believing almost trillionaries will guide us to where we need it.

Incredible writing.<p>Reading this, I kept feeling a sense that something was missing. It wasn&#x27;t until later in the blog that I hit me.<p>&quot;Where is her community?&quot;<p>To a 3rd world immigrant, the idea of being this isolated in your the country you were born in, feels unfathomable.<p>Back home, It&#x27;s common for kids to live with their parents until the kids are ready, often until age 25-30. Alternatively, people will stuff themselves like sardines in a large house, to save money; but even more importantly, to find an accidental community among your fellow poor.<p>Among poor people, a rotating-rep would buy in bulk for the whole community and then distribute among themselves. Saving money and time. The father sounds like a deadbeat too, given his curious omission from the whole blog.<p>Jack really did suffer alone. As someone who has moved from a 3rd world nation to the US, this part of the west scares me. The lack of assistance from your local and blood community is one of the west&#x27;s greatest short comings. I for one, hope never to give that part of my 3rd world self up.<p>Individuality and Independance, should not mean distancing yourself from your support system. Or so I hope.

“Sometimes I just want to run back home and live with my parents, at the age of 32, and beg them to take care of me. I’ll be very quiet. I can cook, and I promise not to say f*ck in front of the children, Mum.”<p>This seems spoken as a cry of desperation, but outside of the anglosphere it would be quite normal. If I were living as desperately as this person seems to be, and with a child to take care of, my (elderly, immigrant) parents would be begging me to come home so they could help me get back on my feet. Not because they are wealthy, but because in most of the world family is the most important thing.

This keeps happening to me. I read a feelgood story, visit the wiki page and then realize how muddy the water is:<p>&gt;&gt; Monroe has been described as an &quot;austerity celebrity&quot;. In a January 2023 interview with Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian, Monroe acknowledged that she had recklessly spent money given by backers; she claimed &quot;I&#x27;d go online absolutely shitfaced and buy nice furniture.&quot;<p>Granted most poor people do stupid stuff after getting monies, but the charm of the tale is diminished.<p>Edit: I meant touching not feelgood.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Jack_Monroe" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Jack_Monroe</a>

Good heavens, this is some writing. Deeply relatable as someone who has also lived in not so nice circumstances in the UK for much of my life. I like to think i&#x27;m on the way to escaping it but we&#x27;ll see.

This is a great article. How it ended up on HN I don&#x27;t know, but can somebody please start submitting more like this, and fewer techno-babble thinkpieces by junior javascript contractors who host their own mail?

Humm, I have a feeling part of the story is missing here, even though i can relate as i was myself a minimum wage worker in the hospitality industry in Britain for a while (back in 1999, my annual wage was something like 8500 pounds). Long odd hours, not so pleasant interfacing with customers, 7 people sharing a flat in London, so broke at the end of the month that walking from Mayfair to Canada Water was reality because no money for public transport....<p>Yet, as a foreigner, I (We, as a matter of fact, since all my friends and colleagues were either german, italian, spanish, chinese...) had no real social safety net to rely on. We couldn&#x27;t go back to our family (500 miles away) with our tail between our legs in case we really fucked up.<p>Something isn&#x27;t clear in this writer&#x27;s account of the reason of her living in poverty, whether it is a story of mental illness, child abuse... things i witnessed years later when i bought a flat in Barking (poor white area of greater London) and this i feel would need to be clarified for me to be able to accept the conclusion that &quot;poverty is largely accidental&quot;, especially coming from someone quite so articulate.

The first portion of this had me thinking constantly “this person must have ADHD”. It was almost a relief when it was mentioned.<p>I feel like this is the dark side of the condition that isn’t talked about as much. If you have adhd, you are far more likely to wind up suicidal, in poverty, abusing drugs, etc. But these things occur on a spectrum. That is to say, far more of us still might not be in abject poverty, but the same tendencies and deficiencies hold us down and cause disproportionate suffering. It’s a constant struggle not to let it pull you even further down. You might not be in the suicide&#x2F;poverty&#x2F;drug abuse part of the statistic, but you might be working pretty hard not to be. It’s not a great way to exist, sometimes.<p>Although I own a nice home and have a good job now, I don’t think I’ll ever have a sense of security or safety, or even stop having the internal sense that I’m still living in poverty. It’s hard to shake that.

<i>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 letter 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. 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.</i><p>George Orwell - The Road to Wigan Pier

&gt;&gt; My brother was in the RAF last time we spoke<p>&gt;&gt; Sometimes I just want to run back home and live with my parents, at the age of 32, and beg them to take care of me.<p>Well this doesn&#x27;t sound like someone who is destitute and with no safety net whatsoever.<p>What&#x27;s so wrong living with your parents? For most of human history it was the normal thing to do. Parents will take care of kids and one of them will inherit the parent&#x27;s house and take care of the old parents. Have his own kids and have the grandparents helping with raising them.<p>Also I&#x27;m not so sure about UK but around here there&#x27;s quite a significant rural population. Not everyone can or wants to make it in the big city. Life in the countryside is a lot cheaper, everything&#x27;s cheaper. House prices are a joke compared to big cities and still villages get slow but steady depopulated.<p>On the other hand I do know people, excluding the homeless, who really have nothing. Father lost the apartment to gambling then disappeared, mother died, kid got evicted in the street in the middle of the winter, worked heavy construction jobs until got sick and had to file for disability and now all his income is a miserable pension that can&#x27;t even pay for food let alone a rent in the city. And he&#x27;s better off than the homeless or the gypsies who live off the city&#x27;s garbage dump.<p>So I&#x27;m not saying the author has it easy but rather than some of it is a deliberate choice.

A recent UK Channel 4 TV programme talked about the recent decline in quality of food too. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.channel4.com&#x2F;programmes&#x2F;the-truth-about-food-prices-dispatches" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.channel4.com&#x2F;programmes&#x2F;the-truth-about-food-pri...</a> (down right now)<p>It included a section about modified starches being used to save ingredient cost, as well as the more obvious reduction in meat content. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;hwallop&#x2F;status&#x2F;1734687477347254678" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;hwallop&#x2F;status&#x2F;1734687477347254678</a>

I dunno why people who clearly, viscerally project that they are from the “unfortunates” outgroup so insist that it is their “choices” that landed them there. Clearly they look down on them and don’t feel that their status is going to improve by haranguing them. It’s easier to understand the social proof chasers who easily adapt to the milieu of privilege-speak; then they fall over themselves to insist that they are from an even more disenfranchised background than the previous speaker—and certainly that they are humble too, oh so humble, because they might be in the top income bracket but right over there <i>gestures to old friends</i> for the Grace of God go I.

Context on this post from 2020 on a now widely discredited person - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tattle.life&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;jack-monroe&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tattle.life&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;jack-monroe&#x2F;</a>

One if the worst parts of poverty is that it steals all of your time!<p>All your time is devoted to just surviving, so you can never really better you situation.<p>You want to improve your situation? Not happening, you gotta work 60 hours this week so you cant study for that AWS cert or medical coding cert.<p>Then the job you work is most likely dead end with no advancement or fake advancement.<p>So you live pay check to paycheck with no hope of escape.<p>Then if you dont have parents or luck... to help one catastrophe and youre doomed.<p>And luck is not a strategy.<p>You literally are trapped by capitalism.<p>Then even if youre able to scrape together some time every week to better yourself... so many artificial walls have been erected to prevent smart hardworking people from entering professions.<p>That includes jacking prices on universities and industries requiring university education for licenses instead of a test&#x2F;apprenticeship.<p>Things you used to be able to do without formal schooling: law, cpa, PE, teaching, hair dressing, and more.<p>Basically massive friction has been added to smart hard working people trying to skill up instead of supporting people skilling up to their potential.<p>Tech is one of the few actually meritocratic middle class industries left but is now getting watered down by the entire world entering the industry.<p>As a side note, think of all the wasted potential that could be bettering the human race who are trapped in the cycle of poverty.<p>There could be a Mozart out there whose parents can&#x27;t afford a fucking keyboard.

Before reading this essay, it may be useful to get some biographical background on the author, as she talks a lot about isolated snippets but otherwise provides no context for her life and how she got where she did: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Jack_Monroe" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Jack_Monroe</a>

Part of this frustrates me, gives me ill thoughts, about the many various dysfunctions. But I think it kind of won me over anyways, gave me some connection to long hard trauma that starts to explain trauma response. Amid a system with collapsed safety nets.<p>But speaking of connection, the humble beginnings story, of how she wrote her way towards something somewhat better makes me somewhat swell with pride, that people have these devices &amp; are connected &amp; can speak as we do:<p>&gt; <i>I wrote the majority of A Girl Called Jack by email on a Nokia E72. I still have it in my desk drawer, and every now and then I just stare at it, and its tiny awful buttons, and wonder how the f*ck I did it. Because I had no other choice but to. It was my one chance at escape, my yellow brick road, my shiny red slippers, and I took it.</i>

&gt; still don’t have contents insurance (a hangover from poverty, I just wasn’t in the habit of insuring things and now keep putting it off, because paperwork terrifies me)<p>The author seems to be from UK. Is contents insurance a thing in UK? How many renters really do buy contents insurance? Genuinely interested to know how many think that contents insurance is worth it?

The author suggests her work applies to &quot;obesity&quot;, but she is not obese. The obesity rate in the UK is 27%; the poverty rate is 17%, and I doubt the overlap is that strong (the link below supports me). Many of her examples in fact deal with people who can&#x27;t afford things that aren&#x27;t food, like a kitchen, or free time.<p>On the one hand, it&#x27;s certainly true that the support for the poor is insufficient, but <i>the price of food</i>, being perhaps the lowest it has been in thousands of years in real terms, is probably the wrong lever to pull. Consequently, &quot;food poverty&quot; is a misclassification, since, while spending £7 per week on food, she probably spent more on transportation, housing and possibly clothing (which can be essential to actually getting work), and it would make more of a difference to tackle that. (She recounts severe problems getting a home!)<p>If she had been able to spend <i>half</i> as much on food, would that meaningfully improve her life? An extra £3.5 per week isn&#x27;t yanking anyone out of poverty.<p>In fact, there is more evidence that obesity <i>causes poverty</i> than that poverty contributes to obesity! See:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC5781054&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC5781054&#x2F;</a><p>There are some suggestions that deficiencies in certain minerals, particularly zinc, which is most concentrated in relatively expensive foods like beef and oysters, are correlated with obesity and disordered eating. A bottle of zinc gluconate makes potatoes look like matsutake (at least at wholesale prices), but the safe and effective use of the supplements (avoiding overuse) is not well established or normally recommended.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;link.springer.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;10.1007&#x2F;s12011-020-02060-8" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;link.springer.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;10.1007&#x2F;s12011-020-02060-8</a><p>The point I guess I want to make is that we should have compassion for the author, but that compassion should ignite the best faculties of our minds — the desire to really understand the problem, because that is where solutions come from.

This is one of the things that makes me just generally angry about politics. It&#x27;s very clear that Jack is right, being in poverty isn&#x27;t about pick Y ingredient instead of X, it&#x27;s a complex interaction of a thousand ways in which your life is difficult - not the least of which is living in a society of people who want to blame you for the things you are the victim of.<p>It&#x27;s obviously true what Jack says, and the people who espouse the right wing view of poverty being the fault of the poor often fall into this trap - make a stupid suggestion that indicates they know nothing about the issue. What&#x27;s frustrating though is that the people making these stupid suggestions never actually engage with the clear and obvious shortcomings in their philosophy. They have taken a stupid position, it results in them making dumb comments, and when it&#x27;s pointed out that what they&#x27;re saying is dumb... they either just ignore or double down. It makes you wonder what on earth this person is doing in politics given their quite clear lack of interest in the real lived experience of the people she would wish to rule over.

It takes great amount of skill to be mostly right and still come out as extremely entitled and unsympathetic. She passes with flying colors.<p>But reading her wikipedia controversy section - exactly what I expect from professional activist turned grifter<p>&gt;In a January 2023 interview with Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian, Monroe acknowledged that she had recklessly spent money given by backers; she claimed &quot;I&#x27;d go online absolutely shitfaced and buy nice furniture.&quot;[56] Hattenstone wrote &quot;The guru of thriftiness was chucking away tens of thousands of pounds, given to her by the public to support her work, on items she didn&#x27;t even want, let alone need&quot;, noting that she didn&#x27;t deny she&#x27;d &quot;abused the goodwill of well-meaning backers&quot;.[13]<p>&gt;Writing for Pink News in September 2022, Lily Wakefield noted that Monroe has &quot;faced accusations of inventing experiences of living in poverty&quot;,[57] while in October 2022 Killian Fox noted in The Guardian that &quot;critics claim that she makes herself out to be poorer than she actually is&quot;.[58][57] In January 2023, Kathleen Stock (writing for UnHerd) stated that Monroe was &quot;wedded to a narrative of personal struggle and sudden dramatic changes of fortune, for better or worse&quot; with an &quot;inability to keep a story straight about whether she&#x27;s really a downtrodden victim of a cruel system or rather #winningatlife&quot;, which had given rise to &quot;an army of determined internet sleuths&quot; and &quot;a multi-headed hydra of critics on Twitter&quot;

It&#x27;s worth listening to this episode of Blocked and Reported on Jack Monroe: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.blockedandreported.org&#x2F;p&#x2F;premium-the-literally-unbelievable" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.blockedandreported.org&#x2F;p&#x2F;premium-the-literally-u...</a><p>tl;dr: She&#x27;s not exactly honest about being poor.

Never ate preserved potatoes, are they any good? It&#x27;s so easy to cook potatoes today with the instant pots, why buy preserves? Or is that the peeling work that is beyond the dignity of the &#x27;poor&#x27; person?

What the heck is going on with this page, it gets struck in some kind of high speed reload loop on my phone (iOS Safari)

Good article

&quot;And my main point is that poverty and privilege are largely accidental. You don’t choose to be born into an income bracket, a country pile, a housing estate, a double barrelled name or a damp tenement bedsit. But ignorance is a choice. And choosing to use your privileges to patronise people whose lives are entirely beyond your experience and comprehension, is a choice.&quot;

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Hero

I can&#x27;t read this, it makes me too sad for what my country has become.

Reeks of self-pity.<p>At what point does Monroe own her choices and their consequences? She did have a child while she was economically precarious, and chose to. No one forced her.