Recently I learnt about something I never knew existed – Thin Privilege. I know this makes me sound extremely ignorant – and I guess it shows that I ‘have’ thin privilege since I wasn’t aware of it – but it isn’t exactly something they taught in school when I was in school. Being thin has never been a ‘privilege’ for me that I’ve been aware of – so at first, the very concept made me furious. I have been through a lot of pretty horrible stuff, with being too thin a result of that. And I’ve been abused by people for being ‘too thin’. I’ve gone through much of my more recent years expecting to be looked down on, not taken seriously, discriminated against etc, because people take one look at me and think ‘Ugh, how awful…’. I can’t even describe the gravity of the not-privilege I have experienced being thin with an eating disorder without it sounding pathetically like I’m trying to justify myself and ignore thin privilege. But it exists. I have had to come to see that, and acknowledge it, and the many ways my life is easier and has been easier, and has more opportunities than life is for someone who is fat. Just because of their size. (Which I hate. Because we are all PEOPLE.)
I do have to say here – I think a lot of people get too feral about it. There are a lot of people writing about fatness who are ANGRY and RUDE and abusive. And they go on as if nobody has a RIGHT to expect them to have some basic manners because of thin privilege. Um no. Sorry. Just no.
I love the Fat Nutritionist and have only just started to READ her blog rather than bookmark it for later. She is an amazing writer and her insights on food, nutrition, and how it all affects us are so clear, so true.
Last night, I read this post from 2010 – and it’s still relevant today. It’s about how poor people eat, why they eat that way, and why it’s not as simple as them making better decisions. It really changed how I thought about poor people and food. I know in America there are big issues with food deserts where many people can’t access good food in their area or surrounding areas. We don’t seem to have that much of a food desert problem in Australia, but we have plenty of poor people, and plenty of unhealthy people who eat crappy food all the time.
Growing up pretty poor, my family did okay. Our diet consisted mostly of plain foods – fruit, veggies, plain carbs like brown rice, pasta, potatoes, bread, cheap meat cuts like mutton and lamb chops and tongue and stuff like that (offal and cheap cuts were not ‘trendy’ like they are now so weren’t as dear!) tinned fish (mackeral was very cheap then), tinned baked beans and spaghetti, as well as legumes like split peas used with barley and other beans in soups. It was fairly easy to eat healthily because it WAS cheaper than fast food – you just had to put in the effort to cook it and to get it too. We were also pretty creative with leftovers. People used to bake a lot more too, flour goes a long way, much further for your money than cakes and bought bread. We used to use things like the dripping from meat as a condiment, and we didn’t trim off the fat on our meat, as generations before us also did.
We were lucky to have a car – our shops were HUGE as we also had to buy a LOT of food for the horde of ducks, geese, dogs, cats, birds, fish, guinea pigs etc that we accumulated – but many people don’t have a car, and might not even have access to public transport, or if they do, be physically able to get out, buy food, and carry it back home.
I’m lucky to have had an education, and to know what healthy food IS and what healthy food is not. I can read the labels, and I either have a basic knowledge of how it’s made or where it has come from, or I can read about it online or on the label.
We also rarely ate junk food. Once or twice a year we MIGHT go to a restaurant, usually a sizzler. Just as rarely we might get fish and chips or burgers from Hungry Jacks. These were HUGE treats for us. We didn’t drink soft drinks (or sodas, as they are called in the USA) or cordial and when we had fruit juice – another rare occurence – we watered it down. If I was hungry after school and Mum said yes, I would have a peanut butter sandwich on wholemeal bread (we didn’t even think of white bread). I would always ask for honey but usually not be allowed – if I was, it was a teaspoon of honey. Or I would have an orange or an apple. Plenty of my school friends had junky food in their lunchboxes which I viewed enviously but I was pretty happy with the food mum bought and aware of what a privilege it was to have such good food, even over the junk food kids (who tended to be from better-off families!) (I’m not going to talk about the abusive relationship with food that we had in this post, as this isn’t about that.)
I actually think that how we ate was more ‘normal’ back when I was a kid, than it is today. People generally didn’t eat out all the time and there weren’t as many processed foods around as today either.
Part of what was brought up in this article is that the poor have to generally choose between HAVING ENOUGH FOOD before they can choose to eat healthily. If they have $2 they can buy a pumpkin or a lettuce or a couple of tomatoes, or they can buy a cheeseburger. Today I actually bought a pumpkin for about $2. I could have bought a cheeseburger, but I hate McDonalds and their cheeseburgers do not appeal. Also I was able to catch a bus home, where I had a stove and pots to cook my pumpkin when I was ready to eat it. I didn’t need to eat something right away, and I wasn’t that far from home anyway.
But if you are poor, chances are you are going to buy the cheeseburger because 1. it gives you energy and lettuce or pumpkin or tomato doesn’t give you so much 2. it is tasty, and lettuce or pumpkin or tomato probably can be pretty bland by itself 3. it’s hot, and the veggies are not until you cook them 4. protein etc. I’m sure you could come up with some reasons too.
So basically many poor people have to choose ’unhealthy’ and fattening foods first, because the costs of eating healthily mean that to purchase the healthy things they MIGHT be able to actually buy and have there to buy – would mean they WOULD starve because it wouldn’t meet their calorie needs. Money means we can eat lettuce, we can eat tomatoes, fish, skim milk, tuna, chicken breasts, wholegrain rice or something even better like quinoa, good grainy breads, a range of fruit and veggies etc etc etc. Many poor people don’t have enough money up front to buy all the things they need at once, because it’s a stretch to buy just what they need to eat in the period before the next pay, let alone things like spices, bulk foods etc.
It might be cheaper to buy things in bulk – but not possible, not just because of the problems of getting home or storing the food, but because you don’t have that much at the one time. I liked the shoe analogy in the comments. The poor man can only afford to buy say, a $20 pair of shoes, which lasts him 2 months. The rich man buys a $100 pair of shoes and that lasts him a whole year or more. Over a year, the poor man (saying he can buy more shoes) ends up spending $100 on shoes just like the rich man. The difference is the poor man’s feet still get wet. So we can afford to stock our shelves with the basics that add up to ingredients to eat better. Poor people really only have enough money at their disposal at one time to buy FOOD with, for the imminent future.
You can’t buy a 20kg bag of rice if you have no way of getting it home. Even on the bus, that’s a struggle. And that assumes that there is a bus near your food store and near your home, or a train. It also assumes you have somewhere safe to store it. You don’t have mice or cockroaches or moths to get in it, and you don’t have neighbours or housemates who will eat it or steal it. It assumes that you have a stove to cook on, or a microwave, or an oven, or something. It assumes that you have enough to pay for the electricity or the gas to run your cooking appliance, and the pots to use. It also assumes that you have access to fresh clean safe water (and scarily enough there are communities that don’t, despite our governments saying we all do.) It also assumes you are happy eating rice for breakfast lunch dinner and again and again for a few months ad nauseum. That you don’t mind plain, boring rice over and over. Well many people like rice all the time, but they have things to make it interesting. Sauces. Fried eggs or lots of different veggies. Meat. Fish. Curry. And so on. Even milk and sugar to turn the rice into a sweet dish – even milk and sugar can be hard to come by for some. How do you keep food that you have cooked, or milk, if you don’t have a fridge and have no electricity? And so on.
So the way I think has changed a lot, especially from this article. I’m one of those people who struggled to understand why people couldn’t ‘just’ buy the healthier stuff if they had access to it, I didn’t consider it more deeply than that. I also am learning to suspend my judgement about what people eat – it really is none of our business what other people eat, or their state of health and we do not know their situation. We might be standing there thinking “You are buying a freaking cheeseburger, and you wonder why you aren’t healthy?” when actually they are doing what they need to just SURVIVE and what WE think is the ‘right’ choice would actually NOT accomplish that.
Enjoy the article – and the comments if you have a spare hour or three!
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