Upon completion of this exercise, I most definitely have an even stronger appreciation for mothers/fathers/primary care givers who dedicate their time and efforts to grocery shopping and grocery list planning. Furthermore, I have an even deeper appreciation for my parents, who have provided me with everything I have ever needed, and then some. Planning a weeklong menu for a family was hard enough; but the tediousness of having meal variety, searching for organic products, and looking for healthier, cheaper options as substitutes are aspects I found to be the hardest and most stressful.
Throughout this entire process, the Devine articles and their concepts replayed in my head. The ideas of dedicating serious time and effort to planning meals and searching through stores for food items were completely exploited in this assignment. It took me roughly an hour to plan the menu, and hours to find the food items needed to make my menu a reality. I kept asking myself...who has time for this?? It's quite sad, I know-- especially because I am a college student and have more free time than, say, a parent who works 40+ hours a week. After I questioned who had time for this, I then thought..who has the patience to do this? The work-family spillover model came to life, actually, while completing this project. If it took me so long to simply plan the menu then find food items, how is a parent (working low wage, high demand jobs with children at home) supposed to complete a task such as this one? The answer seemed to be..prioritize, which is what the spillover model shows. However, prioritizing isn't a beneficial answer. No matter what a parent in this situation chooses to do, they risk some kind of loss in other aspects of life: personal time, family time, work obligations, etc. It's depressing, to be honest (poverty, that is). Those of low SES, who work (and work hard and diligently) are under an amount of stress that, if the average person were to take on suddenly, would wreak havoc. The work-family spillover model of low-income families is a vicious, saddening cycle.
In total, my original menu came to $157.61. This cost included 32 food items, most organic. Going back and trying to find substitutions for the most expensive, organic products, I realized that my menu is a complete reflection of my privileges; of a high social class and of education. Taking myself out of my own position, and trying to take on the mindset of a poor, hardworking parent, I searched and searched for healthy, cheap substitutions. Unfortunately, I feel as if I searched so long to no avail. I was able to save $25 total; however, I experienced loss in other very important areas. If I focused only on price, I almost always had to forgo brand names. This meant forgoing healthy nutrition, too. In some cases I found cheaper organic products than my original one, so I substituted those instead. However, in almost all of the cases I could have substituted items for Giant Eagle brand products and saved much more. Even though I chose to substitute original organic products for cheaper organic ones, I realize that a low income parent would probably go straight for the generic item. Part of me used to think this happened due to a lack of education; but I have quickly learned that, even if a low income parent is fully aware of a food's nutritional value, they have to make choices and, essentially, take risks in order to eat this way. Cost outweighs nutrition for a person living in poverty. In the off chance that nutrition did outweigh cost, this person would then experience a serious lack of choice, and would have to give up certain items-- there seems to be no way to feed a family completely organically while living in poverty.
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