Let’s talk about agency and intent for a minute, cause I’m so fucking pissed off right now I could tear the heads off “well meaning” fauxgressives and bathe in their blood.

Agency. We feminists use that term a lot. Agency is the idea that people get to choose their own lives, without restraint or coercion. For straight up white middle class feminism, that means freedom to choose when and with who to have sex or not have sex, and whether or not to get pregnant, stay pregnant, be a mother, not be a mother. Those are all important things to decide for yourself, but they aren’t the end all be all of agency.

Agency means different things to different people (and we ain’t even gotten into intersectionality) but at it’s core it means having the access to tools and resources to choose your own life. For a person with disabilities those tools might be cars with wheel chair lifts or internet access and video conferencing for those who are bedridden.

For a poor mom, it might be access to enough resources so that they can plan their family’s meals with nutrition and tastiness, not cost, as the deciding factors.

That’s it, that’s all agency means, It means getting to choose for yourself. Period.

Now let’s talk about intent. There are lots of well meaning people in the world who just fuck up grandly when it comes to us poor oppressed types. People who talk down to people in wheel chairs may think they are just being friendly and their intent is good, but by treating a PWD as less than they are removing the PWD’s agency.

And when people talk about helping the poor by placing MORE restrictions on poor people, by say limiting what kinds of food poor people (or fat people) are allowed to buy, they are removing that poor person’s agency.

Even though their intent is to help.

And I get pissed, really, blood bloodcurdling, pissed off when one more person with good intentions talks about the poor like we’re misbehaving housepets who need to be kept from eating the garbage.

Cause they’re talking about me. They are treating me, a real live intelligent person, like I have no more sense than a 4 year old with a bag of Halloween candy.

To be a sexist, racist, ableist, homophobic, transphobic, classist oppressor does not require intent to be any of those things. It simply requires the removal of someone elses’ agency, even if you think it’s in their best interest.

Anglachel, bless her awesomeness, has gotten some shit from the virtuous foodies who who don’t like my take or her spin off on why poor people eat what they can afford.

Since we’ve already covered the math, let’s work on basic reading comprehension and vocabulary.

It’s called poverty people. It’s not called “inability to budget”, or “spends unwisely cause they’re too ignorant to know better” or “they just wouldn’t be in this situation in they handled money more wisely”.

Now I hate to be the pretentious blogger who pulls out definitions of words so brutally common as poverty in order to prove a point, but since it’s either that or I start carrying around a large wooden mallet to beat sense into virtuous foodies and other asswipes d’jour, you’re going to have to suck it while I get pretentious.

Poverty, via wikipedia, “is the condition of lacking basic human needs such as nutrition, clean water, health care, clothing, and shelter because of the inability to afford them“. Bolds mine.

See that- it’s part of the definition that poverty is defined by the inability to get proper nutrition because of lack of money. It’s kinda central to the whole idea of poverty actually.

So next time some dickweed wants to explain how he lives above the poverty line with a grocery budget that is more than adequate and doesn’t understand why these poor people can’t live just like he does, you can smack him over the head with a dictionary until he learns some vocab. And while he is lying on the floor reeling from a concussion you should totally raid the condescending prick’s fridge. It’s cheaper than paying full price at the farmer’s market or whole paycheck foods.

This post almost, almost manages to get past classism and fat hate, but you know us poor people gotta have our ice cream to soothe the pain of poverty.

Big idea assholes- do some math.

Let’s take a family of 4 at the top of the poverty threshold with an annual income of $22,000 or about $1833 per month gross income. Let’s say they live in a 2 bedroom apartment with a rent below national average at $800 per month plus utilities. They have 2 kids who share a bedroom. One kid is in daycare and the other goes to an after school program while both parents are working. The kids are covered under SCHIP, but the parents either don’t get or can’t afford healthcare for themselves offered through work. They get paid twice a month on the 1st & 15th. They pay $113 per month in payroll taxes, which leaves them $1720 net or $860 per paycheck.

The first of the month rolls around. They pay all but $60 of their paychecks to cover rent and have to manage that $60 for groceries for the next 2 weeks. That’s $1.07 per day per person for food. The kids eat 2 meals a day during the week at school, but dinners and weekends are tough. The USDA calculates that a thrifty grocery budget for a family of 4 for a week to be somewhere between $130 and $160. They have less than half of that to spend for twice as long. They eat whatever cheap, high calorie foods they can find, but will still need to rely on a food pantry. This is a famine period and their metabolisms will slow down because they simply cannot get enough calories for their metabolisms to function normally.

The 15th rolls – hurray!But first they have to pay for all the things they didn’t pay for on the first. There’s daycare for 2 kids, with a lowball estimate $600 a month (I paid $1000 per month for the Kid in Seattle, and $400 a month in Atlanta with a scholarship 10 years ago), plus utilities, transportation, clothes (kids grow). All that plus groceries has to come out of the remaining $260. This is when poor people start doing the bill paying shuffle, pay a little, promise more later (all while knowing you don’t have more to give them later) and fend off utter ruin as long as possible.

At this point our little family has been hungry for 2 weeks, so they probably splurge and have a few days of real meals. And then it’s back to hungry, because even if they spent all of that $260 on food they would still be at the bottom of the USDA guidelines for a poverty food budget.

But those couple of days are going to be grand. Fatty meats, desserts,fruit just because, starchy mashed potatoes. Their metabolisms are already in slow mode, so any extra calories they consume at this point will be stored by their bodies as fat, because by the 20th they are going to be back on a starvation diet. It’s the poor person version of bulemia. But there isn’t enough money anywhere in their budget to pay for housing and food and the cost of working (childcare and transportation).

So most of the month lunch is a candy bar and a coke (or 800 or so calories in fat and sugar for under 2 bucks) and dinner is hamburger helper and a can of green beans( a little more than 5 bucks to feed 4 people and about 400 calories per person).

That is why poverty and obesity go together. It’s not because twinkies are the prozac of the lower classes, but because our Darwin approved bodies recognize starvation and fight to hold onto every possible calorie. It’s the thrifty fucking gene in action, and a wee bit of math would have shown that out.

Anglachel has been writing again. She thinks about food a lot. Us poor folks, and those who grew up poor, think about food a lot.

It can become almost an obsessive thought. When we are broke, like we have been this summer, I think about fruit. I’ve had exactly one nectarine, my favorite fruit, all summer. When money is tight, fruit is the first thing to go from the shopping list. It’s a snack, it doesn’t have enough calories to count as a meal. We should be eating5 fruits a day. We can’t afford to eat 5 fruits a week.

I think about the virtuous foodies, people with the luxury of buying all organic, or who have the money to live on a raw food diet and still get enough calories that they don’t spend all day in the hunger fog.I think about the Kid’s wheat allergies, and I feel mountains of guilt because I can’t afford to be as careful about gluten free products as I should be. Frozen pizzas are cheap, sandwiches are cheap. Make them gluten free however, and a 2 dollar pizza is now 8 bucks and half the size. I think how nice it would be to load up a pantry full of rice noodles and gluten free bread and all manner of fresh fruit so that the bottomless pit of teenage hunger known as the Kid doesn’t have to feel bad about what he’s putting in his mouth. I know that for him, every bite of whole wheat bread will shorten his life as surely as if I handed him a pack of smokes and told him to light up.But I have to feed him something now.

I think about how food stamps don’t actually help us be healthy, just less hungry. The allotment is supposed to be for an emergency diet, just enough to get you through. All us poor people live on food stamp rations, like people in WWII, with the best and healthiest food going to those more virtuous than us, those with money. I think about how those virtuous foodies look down on those of us who can’t afford organic milk for our kids, like we are some kind of child abusers because quieting rumbling bellies is a more urgent need than tracking the provenance of our produce.

I dream about out of reach foods, bloody red rib eyes, giant salads with fancy cheese, the perfect black berries, grape tomatoes so ripe you can eat them like candy. I wish that the Kid didn’t worry so much about food. He has the poor kid habit of scarfing as much as he can of whatever he can in secret, like being hungry is a shameful flaw instead of a biological fact.

But I even if I tell him to slow down, not to worry so much, that it will be okay, I know that he know the truth. Having enough to eat is not a given, not even in this country of overabundance. A full fridge is as much of a fantasy to me as owning a private jet.

Ah the moralizing middles, what would us poor people do if they weren’t around to preach to us about the goodness of fresh, organic fruits and veggies and lean meats and unprocessed foods. I mean here I’ve been subsisting on a diet of macdonald’s and frozen pizzas when all along I could be feeding my family nutritious salads and whole grains!

Seriously, virtuous foodies are just one more aspect of the middle class values that don’t solve poverty. The whole spiel about eating healthy means jack shit if you don’t give people the money and the access to actually eat healthy. It’s just another way to make poor moms (and it is specifically moms) feel like shit because organic apples are 4 bucks a pound and that’s out of the budget.

We poor moms,we know about nutrition. We’ve had it pounded into our brains the same way you have that more produce, less processed is good. Some of us (ahemmmm) are even foodies ourselves.I’ve been cooking since I was way younger than the kid, and the Kid has his mom’s foodie tendencies. He reads cookbooks like he reads comics. And there are very few women in America who don’t know what the calorie per gram amount is for sugars, fats, proteins and alcohol- even poor women. We get it.

What we don’t get is the money to make that standard of living possible. We have to pack as much caloric punch into a dollar as possible. And I’ll tell you, when all you’ve got is a buck and you’re starving, a snickers goes a whole lot further than a bucks worth of organic celery and carrots.

So unless the virtuous foodies are gonna go screaming to congress about food stamp allotments that allow for organics and farmers markets that take ebt cards and tax incentives to get grocery stores into food deserts, then suck it.

I don’t need another lecture.