Rage From the Edge

On Being Poor

In my life, I have been rich, semi-rich, poor, and dirt poor. Being rich is easy; don’t let them tell you that it isn’t. Don’t let them actually smile and tell you that with money you just have bigger problems. It’s a bunch of bullshit that rich people tell middle class yokels so that they can either “fit in” with them or commiserate with them at the company picnic. Anybody who can keep a straight face and tell you that having money is trouble is either a liar or insane. Money is good to have no matter what they tell you; with it, you can play act as if you are dirt poor if you want, but if you don’t have cash, it’s no game.

The two middle categories: semi-rich and poor equate to being middle class. Either you are so close to striking it rich that you can taste it or you are living beyond your means and you are gonna hit the poorhouse as soon as your creditors catch up with you. I can’t really tell you much about these middle categories; I wasn’t part of them long enough to gain a proper opinion. I sure as hell can tell you about being rich or being poor though, I’ve spent literally years studying the phenomena…

Since this article is entitled “On Being Poor,” I think you can figure out what category about which I am going to be speaking. Dirt poor sucks ass, but to look back on it is quite fun; as most of these articles try to be. Looking back, the armchair quarterback, hindsight is 20-20, etc …fun.

When you are dirt poor, you learn to do several things that you wouldn’t think of doing when you are rich. Being dirt poor is almost like exercising your mind; you have to think a lot more about what you do, how you live, and who else is around you making you the way you are. Take, for example, the way a poor person feeds him or herself. They tend to buy bulk items that are cheap, sweet, and fattening. It was a saying between managers when I worked in the hood: “if it’s cheap, sweet or fat, it belongs on an end-display.” Chances are, if it fit those criteria and was on that end-display, you would sell out of the item.

For most of my career in the ghetto stores, I was a dairy manager. In the dairy departments of most stores, they have large sections of the “healthy” products and smaller sections of less healthy items. A prime example of this was the milk. Whole milk (sometimes erroneously called “vitamin D milk”) usually has around 4% fat. In a normal store in a normal neighborhood, I would have a setting with two facings (16 jugs of milk on the shelf) of that kind of milk. I wasn’t going to run out because health-conscious shoppers weren’t going to buy that particular kind…it had too much fat in it. In a store in the ghetto, where I was serving dirt-poor customers, I had a setting of whole milk that had 40 facings (over three hundred jugs of milk on the shelf—and I had to constantly keep an eye on it). I was going to sell that much!

You think that was bad? Just think of the yogurt section…even the kid’s flavors practically rotted on the shelf. Meanwhile, over in the more affluent portions of town, you can’t keep yogurt on the shelf. If a major brand goes on sale, it gets even crazier. I have seen customers step on each other to get a cup of Yoplait off the shelf. Yogurt is seen and has been proven to be a healthy treat, so the yuppies are going to buy it. A dirt-poor slob looks at it as an expensive tiny-portioned item. If you are going to buy a little cup of yogurt for a dollar, you might as well spend a couple extra bucks and get a gallon-sized tub of cheap ice cream.

But I am not going to sit here comparing what people think about items based on their annual income. What I want to do is try to jot down some of the more fun and entertaining ways I made dollars stretch when I was one of those dirt-poor slobs I was talking about earlier.

I have always been able to look into a kitchen cabinet or icebox and find things to make a meal that is reasonably tasty and quick. It doesn’t matter what's in the cupboard, I usually can whip something up that is tasty…even if the only ingredients I have are ketchup, taco seasoning, canned tuna, and a bag of rice, people seem to think my cooking is okay given what I have on hand. One of my favorite things to do when I need lots of food that tastes good, but I don’t have a lot of money, is to make BBQ pork sandwiches. A good-sized pork roast like a Boston butt or a pork picnic roast is around six bucks. You roast that thing in the oven or a pressure cooker for a few hours and then you dump some BBQ sauce on it and you wind up with a tasty meal. The whole thing costs around ten bucks (including the buns for the sandwiches) and you can feed about six people with the resulting mess. Or, if you are like me, you can feed off the stuff for three days if you keep it in the refrigerator.

Another way to stretch a meal is to add rice or noodles to it. Yeah, that’s and easy one, but it’s also a tip that many people forget. Buying processed foods like canned chili, canned soups, and frozen sauces is cost efficient, but by adding rice or noodles, you can stretch that efficiency a lot further. One of my favorites is to take a can of Dinty Moore beef stew (the big can—I think off the top of my head it is 46 ounces) and heat it up. Most people don’t like this crap, but for some reason, I am partial to it. Being poor means you don’t especially have to give a crap about being healthy, and this meal is definitely not healthy, but it will get you through a few days until you can buy some healthier stuff to eat. Anyways, you heat up that can of beef stew and you make a few cups of rice. Mix them together and you have a meal that will feed at least four people for under six dollars.

Somebody in the peanut gallery mentioned that I should talk about making healthy food for cheap. Well, there aren’t many choices here; healthy food (for the most part) is expensive. Fresh vegetables, lower fat foods and diet items are all marketed towards rich people or the children of rich people, but I can think of a few ways to make some healthy food for cheap. The first thing that comes to mind is a plain veggie tray. That’s right, just cut up some carrots, celery, and green peppers. If you are feeling particularly outlandish or have a few extra bucks, you can add cauliflower or broccoli. If you buy all these things in bulk (bulk carrots are about 300% cheaper than those bags of baby carrots) then cut up and store them when you first get home from the store, you can make snacks that will last a week in the fridge if you take care of them. To take care of them, put them in Tupperware bowls (you’ve been saving those lunchmeat bowls and old margarine tubs haven’t you? Yes, you have, you are poor) cover them with a wet paper towel. The towel doesn’t need to be dripping wet, just damp. Cover the whole thing with the Cool Whip lid and put in the fridge. By doing this, your snacks will last much longer.

While I was typing this, another cheap way to stretch your dollar and still manage to get good nutrition is to buy cauliflower and use it as an ingredient. Sure, a head of cauliflower is expensive, but you just don’t realize how much food is there. Pick up a head of the stuff the next time you are in a store…I bet it weighs at least five pounds. Even stripped of the leaves and the stalk, there is an incredible amount food packed in there. Boil it, add it too soups, deep-fry it, stir-fry it, roast it with garlic, put it in a salad, or just eat it raw right off of the head…

This goes for broccoli too, and don’t get rid of the long stem that comes with broccoli…it is edible as well, and it tastes just fine.

Also, buying frozen vegetables in the little blocks is a good way to get vitamins in your diet on the cheap. Don’t mess with those bags of frozen veggie mixes like “Schezuan stir fry” or “California style vegetables” what you want is the plain old square blocks. Most of them sell for about 89 cents and are about the most efficient food item in the store. A pack of broccoli spears will help feed three people by adding a side dish and if you cook it on the stove rather than in the microwave, it tastes pretty good too. A brief note on veggies: avoid using the microwave on them, if you have a stove, use that. They turn out less rubbery and they taste a heck of a lot better.

When making a salad, don’t buy the bagged lettuces. They are way over priced and they give you about (realistically) two servings per bag. The best way to make a salad on the cheap is to buy a head of iceberg lettuce and then toss in some of your favorite greens (also purchased bulk rather than in the bag). A head of iceberg, even in rough economic times, is never more than a buck—at least I have never seen it get that high. Even if you do run into an expensive price on lettuce, there usually is somewhere where they put the “day old” lettuce that they have trimmed back to get rid of the brown spots, and this stuff is around fifty cents. If you do run into wilted lettuce, a good way to “snap it back” to crisp is to soak it in a bath of ice water over night in the fridge.

Finally, where all this cheap food has been leading us to is the king of all cheap foods: the casserole. With a good casserole, you can feed ten people for under ten bucks or you can feed yourself for a week. Most of them are pretty good as well; all they are is a bunch of cheese, noodles, ground beef, and some sort of sauce. Here is my all time favorite: roast a pack of chicken parts. I usually use the “Pick-of-the-Chick” pack, it has a whole chicken cut up with the skin and bones. I roast that with a bit of pepper and salt, then I shred the whole thing up just like I was making BBQ. Next, you take a few cups of rice and boil them. Mix the rice and the chicken; cover the whole mess with a cup of salsa and some cheese. To stretch your dollar, buy the blocks of cheese rather than the bags of shredded. If you shred cheese yourself, you save a lot of money because the bags are much more expensive. Once you have all your ingredients mixed, add the cheese to the top and bake in an oven for one hour at 350 degrees. This mess will serve at least six people and shouldn’t cost more than twenty bucks.

I suppose I should put together a list of my recipes. I think I may do just that, see that’s the beauty of writing, you can do stuff later when you think about it.