Reply #46: Fat and starch fill you up. Sugar and salt taste good.

[bread_and_roses]

I worked with very low income families for more than twenty years. The factors working against healthy eating from utility costs for cooking, time, having a good refrigerator and stove, the need for decent cooking equipment, even the dishes generated by home cooking when maybe you have to make one bottle of dish liquid last all month - it goes on and on in just practical terms. Not to mention knowlege of nutrition, cooking skills, social factors such as mentioned above: habit, TV, and conditioned tastes, for instance.

If you are used to spongy white bread, the taste and texture of whole wheat bread is not appealing, and to children may be actively revolting. If you know it's good for you, you can re-condition your taste buds, but that takes time, energy, and if children are involved waste, and all of these are additional stressors in lives already so stressed that voluntarly taking on a major stress like changing food habits and preferences is simply unmanagable.

Over the years I also became convinced - this is totally unscientific, but I wish someone would study it (or maybe it has been studied, and I am totally off-base or even right and don't know it) that under chronic extreme stress the body craves sugar, salt, and fat.

I hope this helps. You are obviously a very good person; few who have to budget themselves would go to the efforts you do to help feed others.

For myself, I don't donate to any charity any more because I have come to the conclusion that my limited discretionary spending is better spent donating toward those working for social change. No one in this Country should have to beg for food at a food pantry (and however respectfully the clients are treated - and too often they are treated contemptuously - it is still begging. There is no reason at all that everyone in this Country should not have a guaranteed income adequate to meet basic needs - even NIXON floated that idea - how far backward we have come! But we all have to do what seems right and best to us.