Friar Bijou wrote:
Further confirming that you were never poor and have apparently never been in a poor persons home.
I suspect that it indicates that our definition of poverty has changed dramatically since I was a kid. The idea that poor means you feed your kids soda because it's filling and sugary shows how completely out of whack our priorities have become.
To be fair, the definition and conditions had changed by the time I was a kid too. My dad grew up poor. Really poor. As in, lived with his mom on the edge of someone's property in Missouri, in an old broken down wagon (as in pulled by horses kind of wagon). A typical dinner for him was a can of WW2 surplus soybean soup heated over a steno stove. On the day he finished high school, he walked home diploma in hand, to find his mother standing out front of the wagon with a couple of bags packed with all of his belongings. She gave him a hug and told him he was a man now and sent him off into the world to find his own way.
So please don't try to tell me what poverty is. You honestly have no clue what you are talking about. I suspect that each generation in the US knows less and less about what "real" poverty is. Our standards change. But I do think that the point at which people are making regular purchasing decisions which include things which by any definition are complete luxury items, we've moved so far past "poverty" that the definition becomes meaningless. Are there people who are in such dire conditions that they would go seriously hungry without assistance? Absolutely. But those people would never fill their fridges with soda. Which is the most relevant point here IMO.