Cheap supermarkets are a sign of wealth
A couple days ago, I bought 4 litres of milk, 1 litre of half-and-half (great for coffee and tea), a pound of green string beans, four red peppers, a pound of broccoli, four bananas and a 5 pound bag of ruby red grapefruit. The total bill was $13.34, or about one hour and 40 minutes of minimum wage labour.
This amount of food is sufficient to keep me alive for more than one day. If I shopped around a little more judiciously, I could have probably bought more calories for the same amount of money, but I would have likely sacrificed nutritional value. It takes a higher budget to eat healthy foods than to eat for sustenance purposes.
I recently completed The $100 Diet. $100, 1 month. I gained weight for the month, and ate more vegetables than I did the previous month. I did it to start eating more healthily, and just to see if I could do it.
We live in a society where there is actually no such thing as “poverty.” Consider that: Public libraries contain the informational wealth of the ages, often including free Internet access (so people can even read DoubleBlind!). There are many “poor” people who are clinically obese. “Poor” people tend to have more children. Health care is “free” for the most part. Schooling is “free” from kindergarten to grade 12.
“Poverty” now means poverty of self-discipline, poverty of focus, poverty of money-management skills, poverty of a good information “diet,” usw. These things will not be remedied by more money being given to those who are experiencing this poverty.
Ssshh, what you’re saying is politically incorrect. Poverty is clearly created by rich businessmen like you keeping the rest of the population down. I think you’re absolutely right – it’s really a poverty of self-discipline and no legislation can enact this.
Getting back to reality, a $100/month food diet forces one to think about allocation. Dining out would be a no-no. Pasta would be your friend as its cheap and in high quantity. You’d need to balance that with nutrition from the fruits and vegetables, but you’d have to prepare them in a way that wouldn’t kill their food value (use a steamer). Finally a limited quantity of meat (like boned chicken or ground beef) would have to be in there for protein.
You’re absolutely right about being forced to think. Every trip to the grocery store was an exercise in strategy. The first 2 weeks were the most difficult, as various food addictions kicked in. After that, it became almost fun, because you’re forced to innovate.
You hit the nail on the head with pasta. I even was able to splurge and buy whole wheat pasta about 1/2 the time (typically twice as expensive). One of the biggest costs was sauce, but I bought it already prepared which added to the cost. Only a little bit of meat and fish, as it is expensive (a little can go a long way with, say, a sweet and sour dish with lots of cheap vegetables). Using inexpensive but full protein-complement alternatives makes it easier. If you eat 3 meals a day, each one on average needs to be <= $1.11.
Yes, we businessmen really dislike it when other people have money to buy our products!! :)
Even the choice of grocery store could screw up your plans – typically I find Superstore to be the low cost provider for most commodity items, although you have to be discriminating on product quality (some of their no-name brand stuff is indistinguishable from the named stuff, while some of the no-named stuff is not so good – ice cream and jello are good examples!).
Pasta – learn to make your own sauces, either tomato-based or white sauce. Or learn to make good curries, it’s not expensive, and a can of coconut milk (which blends everything together) is 70 cents. Either case requires little skill, it just requires a decent pan you can stick on the stove.
For low cost protein, lean ground beef I would think is the best route. Recommend spicing it up a bit when you fry it.
I think the other trick is knowing what the range of prices for various fruits and vegetables are – grocery stores swing the prices quite frequently (more so than gas stations) as they attempt to clear out stock. So if you look at bell peppers, mushrooms, onions, etc., one should have a pretty good idea of what the low price range is.
As you might expect, I’m going to object to the claim that there’s no absolute poverty.
First, food is cheap and isn’t the main expense for people living in poverty. Second, your discussion seems to be based on a single, healthy person. I’ll concede that for single, healthy people, there is not much absolute poverty.
Rent is the main expense for people living in poverty, as it is for most people in general.
If you’ve got 2 children, then using the expenses you gave it would take 5 hours a day, or 35 hours a week, almost all of the salary of a full time job, just to cover the cost of food. Even taking Tony’s $100 diet (which isn’t far off the figures the Toronto food bank uses of ~$28/month for a man, and ~$21/month for a woman, if I remember correctly. Kids are more, I think.), at $8 an hour for 40 hours a week, a person with 2 kids has $20 a month left over after food to pay for clothes, transportation, and rent. Even with two wage-earners, I’m having trouble imaging how a monthly budget could possibly work out. If you look at the statistics about who lives in poverty, you’ll see that there are for more people with children than in the rest of the population.
I don’t have time to rant about people who are ill (and can’t work and must pay for some medical expenses), can only find 30 hours of work/ week, or are unemployed. There’s a fair amount of turn over in employment, so that people who currently have a full-time job, may find themselves without a job for a month or two. Again, if you look at the poverty statisitcs, you’ll find that there is a small core of the long-term impoversihed, but the majority fall into poverty for several months, as a result of unexpected unemployment or illness. It might be temporary, but it is still absolute poverty. Canada is not like India, where there’s a large class of permanently impoversihed people, but there are really people living in poverty.
Nothing like a little staged scene to draw the Trostkyites out into the open :P
Seriously … I’m unable to figure your conclusions.
Let’s make the food numbers a little more easily obtainable, and double them to $200 / mth, per person.
If you are working full time receiving $8 / hr, then that’s approx. 173 hrs / mth = $1386 / mth.
1 parent, 2 children = $600 / mth for food. $1386 – $600 = $786 left over.
How does this leave “$20 a month left over”?
Furthermore, low-income people with children receive the Canada Child Tax Benefit (a tax-free monthly payment). I used the online calculator http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/ebci/icbc/simnet/SimnController?lnkAccept=lnkAccept&lang=en to come up with $557.07 / mth extra, tax-free, for a hypothetical 2-child family. Assuming that number is somewhere near correct for our hypothetical family,
$1386 + $557 = $1943, $1943 – $600 = $1343 left over after doubling the allocation for food x 3.
This does not include GST rebates, possible monthly supplements for housing, and so on.
Tell me where I’m wrong here?
Tony’s right that I completely goofed on calculating the amount of money left over after food.
When I get some time, I’ll try to work through these calculations and check the data more carefully. Tony’s calculations look right. I maintain that there is absolute poverty. I’d be very happy to find that I’m wrong. I’d even be happy to find that there was no poverty among those who are healthy and have full-time employment.
Well, we agree that there’s absolute poverty in Canada – but I call it ‘grad school’. :P
I’m going to concede that someone with a full time job, even with a family, will not be in absolute poverty. I’m glad to know this.
There’s a new report from the US census (and the situation there is not vastly different -although the currency fluctuations do make things a bit weird)
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/income06.html
(First link)
The official US poverty rate for a single parent with two children is $16,242. (Stats Can refuses to define poverty. The low income cut off -at about $32,000- is not relevant to this discussion.) Assuming $8 a week (BC minimum wage) for 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year (there must be about 10 stat. holidays a year, right?), wages $16,000. With the CCTB, that’s about $22,600, that’s well above the poverty line.
From table 4, 9.2% of children are in families earning less than half of the poverty rate. Assuming figures are similar in Canada, even with the CCTB, that’s not reaching above the official poverty line. I’ll admit that that’s a relative, not absolute, poverty line, but this suggests to me that there really are people in poverty.
Grad school? A decent grad student should be making more than $12,000/year at UofT, above the ten thousand something poverty line for a single person.
Sorry, Sacha, for hijacking your comments section for arguments with Tony.
For the record, I am not sorry for hijacking Sacha’s comments thread. :P
1. Be careful comparing the US and Canada. The relevant demographics are different. From http://www.census.gov/prod/2007pubs/p60-233.pdf , Table 3 of “below poverty” numbers:
White, non-Hispanic: 8.2%
Asian: 10.3%
Hispanic: 20.6%
Black: 24.3%
In Canada, the number of Hispanics and Blacks is much smaller relative to the entire population.
2. My argument was about our society, i.e., Canada, and I go on to list “free” health care as one of the benefits. Clearly, I’m not thinking about the US in that section. I don’t know enough about the States to comment – for example, I don’t know if there is a per-child rebate (as mentioned above), which is significant for any discussion of children and poverty.
3. Having said that, I am sure that some non-trivial number of children in Canada are living at 0.5 the “poverty line” in terms of parental income. I could make some general notes about poverty statistics, noting various ways in which they can be misleading, but that would be beside the point. The thrust of the argument made above, as far as it relates to people living in genuine poverty, is that this is typically caused by problems of financial stewardship, self-discipline, and so on – given the resources that are available to almost anyone in our society. I am of course not denying that some people have incomes below some important “poverty line” – although compared historically, this “poverty line” would probably involve more riches than the typical person would have in a significantly past society. Starvation, for example, now only occurs to models and like-minded individuals.
4. “A decent grad student should be making more than $12,000/year at UofT” Unfortunately, I cannot respond adequately to this. Fine! I’m willing to concede that there is poverty in Canada!!! :P
Thanks for linking to that report, Pieter, it’s quite interesting. It really brings out the stark ethnic differences in certain social data in the US.
Pieter – as long as it’s not spam, the volume of the comments on this weblog is at such a low level that I genuinely appreciate all the discussion. Thanks.