eThousands of other inmates in the Texas prison system have been eating fewer meals since April after officials stopped serving lunch on the weekends in some prisons as a way to cut food-service costs. About 23,000 inmates in 36 prisons are eating two meals a day on Saturdays and Sundays instead of three. A meal the system calls brunch is usually served between 5 and 7 a.m., followed by dinner between 4 and 6:30 p.m.
The organized right justifies its draconian policies toward the poor with moral arguments. Right-wing think tanks and blogs, for instance, ponder the damaging effect on disabled poor children of becoming “dependent” on government assistance, or they scrutinize government nutritional assistance for poor pregnant women and children in an effort to explain away positive outcomes for infants.
The willful ignorance and cruelty of it all can leave you gasping—and gasp was all we did for decades. This is why we so desperately needed a movement for a new kind of moral economy. Occupy Wall Street, which has already changed the national conversation, may well be its beginning.
It is common, among the nonpoor, to think of poverty as a sustainable condition - austere, perhaps, but they get by somehow, don’t they? They are ‘always with us.’ What is harder for the nonpoor to see is poverty as acute distress: The lunch that consists of Doritos or hot dog rolls, leading to a faintness before the end of the shift. The ‘home’ that is also a car or a van. The illness or injury that must be ‘worked through,’ with gritted teeth, because there’s no sick day or health insurance and the loss of one day’s pay will mean no groceries for the next. These experiences are not part of a sustainable lifestyle, even a lifestyle of chronic deprivation and relentless low-level punishment. They are, by almost any standard of subsistence, emergency situations. And that is how we should see the poverty of so many millions of low-wage Americans - as a state of emergency.
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Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America (via mykicks)
It’s frustrating to reblog this. It seems like people should get it already. Most of the folks I follow, and those who follow me, probably do. I hope. But so many people… just don’t care.
(via heavyaura)
I am not the biggest fan of this author, but I think this statement is a necessary one.
(via classragespeaks)
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absurdlakefront:
As I thought more about global dietary practices, it occurred to me that the U.S. has perhaps one of the more gender-segregated eating cultures in the world. (Can you imagine a French woman saying she stays away from red meat or a French man saying that chocolate is chick food?)
So while it seems possible that some food preferences could be put down to gender, it’s obvious that American culture has a way of exacerbating them.
Brian Wansink is the director of Cornell University’s Food and Brand Lab, the author of Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, and all-around food psychology genius. People, he said, are more likely to eat a food when they associate with it qualities they’d like to see in themselves. So a man who wants to be strong and masculine is more likely to eat a food described as strong and masculine — hence the prevalence in American culture of meat as a manly food. Besides, he said, America has some of the most psychographically segmented advertising in the world — all messages that the food we eat is subconsciously saying something about us. “The reason we can view food as a commercial product is because we’ve never had a major starvation or a food shortage. We’ve always had an abundance of food,” he said. In India, it occurred to me, food was sacred, an elemental life force that provided sustenance, a resource we rarely took for granted. In the U.S., instead, it was an extension of one’s identity, a phenomenon made possible by the United States’ unique history of unrivaled luxury.
DISCOVERY
absurdlakefront:
zomgblog:
Hey.
HEY.
If you jerkfaces haven’t ever made yourself a sweet omelet, holy shit, do so today or tomorrow. This is important shit.
2 eggs, beaten like an ugly stepchild
3tb sugar, white/brown/muscovado, whatever. Add that shit.
2tb flour, white AP/corn. Add that shit.
2tsp vanilla extract. Add that shit.
MIX LIKE OAKENFOLD.
Put in pan on med heat. Cover. Come back in like 2 min. Check up on it. When the top starts getting a little solid, get this - and here is the Nintendo ProTip: ADD A SLICE OF COOKED BACON along the diameter of that shit. FOLD. Now you’ve got this gorgeous wrap thing going on. Cover for another minute so the egg tightens up.
SERVE THIS TO PEOPLE YOU LIKE WITH CUT STRAWBERRIES OR SOMETHING ELSE PRETTY AWESOME.
You should write a cook book. This is the most entertaining recipe I’ve ever read, haha.
I know what I want for breakfast every morning for my summer of creeping Matt out with love.
Other industries that are exploitative
amandaw:
bonesarecoralmade:
tiaramerchgirl:
Retail - underpaid & overpaid workers, items created by sweatshop workers working at near-slavery conditions
Consumer Technology - see Foxconn suicide factory, also demand for cellphones and computer chips fuel civil wars, also how many women are involved in engineering & management?
Fashion - models encouraged to risk health for ideal body shape, often overworked with little rest or disproportionate compensation
Entertainment - long hours, dodgy contracts, disproportionate pay (if you’re not part of the elite 1%)
Restaurants - staff often overworked and underpaid, conditions of food unclear (not always free-range/ethical/etc)
Medicine/Science - unethical trials, medications being pushed by Big Pharma rather than actually seeing what’s appropriate, overpricing meds and putting restrictive patents on discoveries so that poorer countries can’t get access
Media - claims of “no bias” unfounded, pushing particular views & representations over others, staff working long hours for not always enough pay
Every industry in the world has elements of exploitation - environmental, societal, misogyny, homophobia, animal abuse, unfair economics, you name it, it’s there. Yet it’s only with sex work - porn, stripping, erotic performance, etc - that people say “GET RID OF THE INDUSTRY!” instead of “Let’s fight the exploitation and work on protecting the workers!” For some reason the workers also get classed as agents of exploitation, and get pushed away, instead of being key people that deserve respect and attention and have valid things to say.
Fight the exploitation; don’t use the workers as scapegoats.
But I don’t doubt that in those situations where men make some effort to share domestic responsibilities, they often do so by taking over the one chore that offers a chance for creative expression, which is cooking. When you’re a man, you can use privilege that way. You’re a hero for “helping”, so you get to do it however you like. But even though it’s still not completely fair, a situation where a man relieves a woman of even this one time-consuming duty (if only to free her up to do more housework and child care) is still better than the alternative, where she has to do it all, and thus stuff like cooking falls by the wayside.
When you’re poor and you’re faced with a thing you know is bad for you vs. a healthy thing that costs $1 more, you choose the unhealthy thing every time. You need that dollar.
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Declan McManus, International Art Thief, in the comments at pandagon
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