How You Shop When You Are Poor

laurendarling:

elfstaranymore:

I had to put this behind a cut because it’s way long for Tumblr, but I really hope you’ll read it because I think it’s a very important post.

I started discussing this a little bit here, but I wanted to expand on the idea of how shopping on a very tight budget works, because obviously some people have no idea. I will add the caveat that this is how shopping was done in my family, by which I mean shopping with food stamps for a family with no dietary restrictions, with access to a car, and in a rural area of the U.S. Obviously each family’s needs are different and that is why food prescriptivism - which, remember, is a form of body policing - is fucked up.

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This post has actually made me quite emotional as this is pretty much how my family (read as: my mother, as she works in a supermarket and buys food shopping after work every day) does our grocery shopping.

This is why I get annoyed when people claim poor people know nothing about nutrition - we all know about nutrition, and we do what’s best for our bodies and income at the time. It just doesn’t fit the arbritrary standard.