‘Some things never leave you’: Poverty’s indelible marks
That was a long read, but very much worth reading.<p>This part really stuck out to me:<p>&gt; <i>A few years ago, a friend of mine, in a well-meaning attempt to understand the impoverished diets of poor people, ate a Food Stamp diet for a week. On the last day of the diet, he talked about what he had learned and spoke philosophically about his renewed appreciation of healthy food as he prepared to end his restricted diet with his first good meal of the week: homemade vegetable pizza. He thought about what he had learned as he kneaded the pizza dough. He had already sliced the vegetables, and they sat piled high on the cutting board. While he had the best of intentions, what he said made me sad. He had misunderstood.</i><p>&gt; <i>In his week of eating like poor people, he had missed two crucial ingredients: fear and shame. While he was looking forward to breaking his fast that night, poor people don’t get to do that. They don’t get to look forward to the end of impoverishment, to a good meal. My friend would eat a healthy meal that night, and he had known throughout the week that he could stop whenever he wanted, that all he had to do if he missed healthy food was open his refrigerator. Poor people never know when their next good meal will come. They look in the refrigerator on the 25th and maybe they only have enough food for a couple more meals but they don’t get paid for a week. And vegetables are expensive. Most poor people can’t afford them. All of this causes great shame. Shame that they don’t make enough money, shame that they can’t give their kids decent food, shame that they must rely on government assistance, shame that they can’t afford the restaurant their friends want to go to on Saturday night. That shame never goes away. It is not my friend’s fault that he does not know this. He doesn’t know it because society does not talk about such things, does not want them talked about. The result is that my friend would never understand how poor people feel—never understand me—and I felt sad and alone.</i><p>It&#x27;s a doublet of suffering: not just the material burden of living in poverty and being unable to provide for yourself and family, but the ideological burden of being shamed into believing it was caused by your own personal failure.