Hi, friends!
I do not understand some of the stuff that gets made into shows for tv or streaming. I turned on the visio tv that I stream stuff on and it has this landing page with tiles for each service, plus a scrolling bar at the top of shit they’re advertising on those services.
Today I saw a tv show advertised called “Struggle Meals.” I was thinking perhaps it was a riff on the tiktok “depression meal Mondays,” but nope. It’s literally hey you’re broke, here’s food that you can make cheaply. I totally get the need and appeal of recipes that are economical, and there are other shows that have done that well. I’m just kind of chuffed they call it Struggle Meals, I think. Like has anyone involved in making the show have any personal experience being broke for extended periods of time?
Who is the demographic for this show? We can’t afford food but we can pay for a streaming service? Actually, that sounds very American! I would like to know how many fast food ketchup packets it takes to make a good hobo tomato soup? I’m guessing about 42, ok, I’m not guessing, it takes 42. Don’t judge me!
Pfft. It’s people who are using somebody else’s streaming password. But yeah, shows a lack of forethought on audience demographics. I’m surprised it got greenlit.
RIP posted an interesting article on American poverty a couple of days ago that explains why poor people can afford material stuff but not food or housing.
The late great Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickle and Dimed is a great dive into how expensive it is to be poor in America.
Douglas Adams?
A better choice would have been 57. The same as the number of communists in the State Dept… allegedly.
No (those shows are heavily produced – by people who already have money).
Next question.
Exactly. What you’re seeing is what rich people think poor people do when they eat.
If you’d like an interesting and poignant view of poverty, I direct you to John Scalzi’s post Being Poor. Trigger warning: If you’ve actually been through this, reading it hurts.
Many, many rich people like to use some brief period when they were starting out to claim humble beginnings, and gloss over the fact that they graduated debt free from college, lived in an apartment paid for by their parents, had a car they were given as a graduation present….
But they ate spaghetti sometimes! Maybe this show is for them?
Scalzi did, in fact, grow up wrenchingly, living-in-a-car, poor. He won a lottery for tuition to a prestigious private high school, which then helped him get into college. He’s very open about the fact that he owes a lot, if not all, of his success to a massive stroke of dumb luck.
There are definitely some outstanding accounts from people who have felt the bite — Frederick Douglass’s Narrative, Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickle and Dimed. I’m Scalzi is part of the club.
Sadly very few, if any, of those who grow up with such privileges pull up at some point and say to themselves, “hey! wait a minute! this shit isn’t right!” and make sacrifices…life changing sacrifices…from familial to educational expectations to financial to even status within the community in which they were raised by biting the hand that feeds instead of leaning into the polite nepotism of the way they were born and raised…that kind of thing takes unusual levels of humility.
Or being a sucker as their peers might view it.
Holy shit! That post is nostalgic. I remember where I was sitting when I first read it. And to spare y’all from anecdotes, I’ll just say that it was at the time that will go down as the lowest part of my life.
If you’ve been through any of it, *or* if you read the comments… (both here, fwiw!🥴)
That one about what their mom told them, community college, and that letter from Duke–where $300 was as far away as 3 mil… yeesh, the “but for luck and the grace of the flying spaghetti monster” feelings *that* one brings up!
And the one right below it, which was an absolute kick in the gut–right back to the late summer of ’05.
Where the person reminded everyone to read it, then remember that Katrina hit *right* at the tightest point in the month, budget-wise, for poor folks.
You could literally design a whole damn college course on Poverty, Politics, & Ethics in the United States, just put of this article and it’s comment section.
Dayum.
The demo seems to be bankers and their trophy wives on the verge of financial ruin.
Silicon Valley Stew with stale sour Credit Suisse bread.
Approved by the same kind of people that think hoarding, addiction, teen pregnancy, physical deformities, and life endangering obesity are entertainment. 🤬
That’s horrible as horrible as the Housewives of… Franchises.
I don’t need to see the emotionally crippled/arrested development folks either.
A friend of mine’s family had to put their collective foot down (and up certain people’s asses) to keep his brothers wives from appearing on one of the Canadian franchises.
Awful awful people.
It’s one guy doing a cooking show that focuses on how much each meal costs. Reviews for it are pretty mixed.
While I agree that “Struggle Meals” is not a great title, I can think of much, much worse, because I am sick and dark individual. Just think of the possibilities for a MAGAt cooking show….
“Fuck Veggies and Green Things”
All about deep fried everything with salt and mashed potatoes.
Yeah my situation is that I have a very visceral reaction to the title because it takes me back to a lot of bad times. Ketchup packets on discount bakery store bread. Etc etc.
I can DEFINITELY see how a person can have that visceral reaction to the title!
I checked out the YouTube channel and watched a couple of the challenges he did, and I guess, *to me,* the title reeeeeeally lines up with what I figured the show would most likely be–“Struggle Meals” in that Buzzfeed-style…
Not really designed so much for poor folks who are TRULY struggling to put food on the table… more “Struggle” in the *Young, college-aged folks, out on their own for the first time, working in a low-wage job, with little time, money, or cooking knowledge.
And in ^that^ way, honestly, the show seems pretty damn great, from what I saw in the challenges–one was using canned salmon (his explanations for the ways he cooks things are really EXCELLENT, if you’re watching this with the mindseye-view of a young person who knows diddly-squat about cooking!), and the way he at least *acts* like he doesn’t necessarily have a pre-established “plan” for what he’s gonna do is GREAT for taking the “anxiety factor” out of cooking when you’re fairly new to it (I can’t help but think of him as a modern-day equivalent to Julia–especially the nonchalance and “just try again next time” attitude😉💖)
The challenges I caught were these, and the “leftover herbs & citrus peels” one;
And this is that relaxed attitude from Julia, that made “fancy” cooking SO much more approachable for our moms & grandmas;
I had to Google ‘chuffed’.
LOL so I googled the word after seeing your post and it turns out I also cannot use the word correctly.
I meant the opposite of it, I don’t know why I thought it meant something that had a person really pissed off. I got nothing.
…the bane of my existence…
🙁
Inconceivable!
Brighter, you coooould just say that you got *so* kerfuffled after seeing the title that the gormless producers chose, that your brain shorted-out for a sec, and made you type “chuffed” instead of cheesed off, as you’d *really* meant!😉💖
(Words are fun, American English has nowhere near enough of them to really and truly describe the entire range of what we need–that’s what German, Japanese, Yiddish, & Icelandic are for!😁–and I have to do the Google doublecheck alllllll the time, in order to make *sure* that the word i’m thinking is really *that word i want*💞💗💓)
huh…..well…i guess showing people how to make cheap meals is better than the alternative to cheap cooking
last thing i need is some fucking tv show ratting out all the good shoplifting tactics
i dont need them for the moment….but its good to have the back up skills you know