A 10 oz ham sandwich will probably cost you more than 2 dollars even if you buy everything at the supermarket. I don't know why people are so reluctant to admit that 12 dollars a day is not much for groceries.
There is no getting around the fact that $12/day buys a lot of good groceries even in expensive cities. Cooking is trivially learned, especially these days with the Internet. The people claiming that eating on $12/day is challenging are really saying that they can't support their affluent lifestyle on $12/day. Which is true! But it reeks of learned helplessness.
As someone who lived decades of their life in real poverty, I find most of the discourse around a "living wage" to be deeply unserious. Things that are completely normal and healthy in low-income communities across the US are presented as unachievable despite millions of examples to the contrary. Living well as a low-income person is a skill. It is obvious that many people with strong opinions on the matter don't have any expertise at it.
The only reason I still regularly eat the same kind of food as when I was poor is that it is objectively delicious and healthy, cost doesn't factor into it. I can afford to eat whatever I desire.
>The people claiming that eating on $12/day is challenging are really saying that they can't support their affluent lifestyle on $12/day. Which is true! But it reeks of learned helplessness.
I guess I was affluent and didn't know it.
Honestly, the worst part by far was transportation. Everything else kind of worked.
I don’t consider daily or even weekly restaurants part of a necessity for life.
Not everybody is like you.
Restaurants have never been a necessity for life, but I guess that for a lot of people you should be upper class to eat out once a week.
6-8 servings of fruits and vegetables a day, fairly liberal amounts of dairy and lean protein, lesser amounts of red meat. Grains like breads/rice for additional carbohydrates.
Admittedly, avoiding eating out regularly is the #1 way I keep food costs down, though.
Behold, "averages" are not perfect.
But we stick to the essentials, utilize different stores for the lowest prices we can get, and don't purchase nonsense.
Ie “averages” with large variances are not often very informative
The average wealth between me and Elon is several hundred billion dollars. That gives you very little information about me. Which is why people can hang too much inference on a simple average. Like Nate Silver said in The Signal and The Noise, the real discussion for the data literate is about uncertainty in models, not just drawing conclusions from “averages”