From a while ago in the Washington Post, Eli Saslow reports from the Rio Grande Valley in Texas on Blanca, a single mother of five:
But the cheap foods she could afford on the standard government [food stamp] allotment of about $1.50 per meal also tended to be among the least nutritious — heavy in preservatives, fats, salt and refined sugar. Now Clarissa, her 13-year-old daughter, had a darkening ring around her neck that suggested early-onset diabetes from too much sugar. Now Antonio, 9, was sharing dosages of his mother’s cholesterol medication. Now Blanca herself was too sick to work, receiving disability payments at age 40 and testing her blood-sugar level twice each day to guard against the stroke doctors warned was forthcoming as a result of her diet.
Hidalgo County, Tex., is one of the fastest growing and poorest places in the nation. Although 40 percent of the county's residents are enrolled in the food-stamp program, diabetes and obesity have exploded in the region.
She drove toward the doctor’s office on the two-lane highways of South Texas, the flat horizon of brown dirt interrupted by palm trees and an occasional view of the steel fence that divides the United States from Mexico. Blanca’s parents emigrated from Mexico in the 1950s to pick strawberries and cherries, and they often repeated an aphorism about the border fence. “On one side you’re skinny. On the other you’re fat,” they said. Now millions more had crossed through the fence, both legally and illegally, making Hidalgo County one of the fastest-growing places in America.
“El Futuro” is what some residents had begun calling the area, and here the future was unfolding in a cycle of cascading extremes:
Hidalgo County has one of the highest poverty rates in the nation . . . which has led almost 40 percent of residents to enroll in the food-stamp program . . . which means a widespread reliance on cheap, processed foods . . . which results in rates of diabetes and obesity that double the national average . . . which fuels the country’s highest per-capita spending on health care.
This is what El Futuro looks like in the Rio Grande Valley: The country’s hungriest region is also its most overweight, with 38.5 percent of the people obese. For one of the first times anywhere in the United States, children in South Texas have a projected life span that is a few years shorter than that of their parents.
Tyler Cowen's leguminous insight about the future of America -- "Let them eat beans!" -- isn't popular in El Futuro, where local sentiment is more inclined toward "Let them drink Red Bull!" Saslow's article goes on to document how a Mexican-American politician tried to change the law so that food stamps couldn't be used to purchase energy drinks, which are made mostly of sugar, caffeine, and profit margin. But a combination of corporate and liberal interests defeated his reform effort.
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58 comments:
It's the world's most obvious scam. Worried about starving children? Okay, fine. Give every child an allotment of 50 pounds of flour/vegetables/beans/cheese/pork /chicken a month, in appropriate ratios. Problem solved, with healthy results, at minimal cost.
No one, aside from sane people, wants something like this to happen. And so it will never happen.
I'm not saying anything interesting or new but I'm reminded of how if I want a lot of calories I can buy a burger and fries for $5. If i want the equivalent number of calories from healthy food, I'm looking at more like $20. Food that isn't un-nutritious garbage costs real money.
BTW, a low carb diet worked for me. Don't listen to the people who say its all about calories. Carbs do make me fat. Lay nutritionists have known this for 50 years or so, and science and medicine is finally getting around to acknowledging it. Avoid starchy stuff (like bread and french fries) and avoid pop (all sugar) at all costs. Treat it like rat poison and only drink it if someone is prepared to pay you good money.
What's the matter with rice, beans, corn, and a green vegetable as a meal? Throw in some powdered milk for the kids and everything is hunky-dory. With five kids her food stamp allotment in Texas would be at least $700 a month.
http://www.dads.state.tx.us/handbooks/texasworks/C/100/100.htm
Plenty left over for chicken, some cheese and the occasional desert.
They are fat because she buys Cokes and Doritos instead of real food.
And what do preservatives have to do with any of the aforementioned medical conditions?
The solution is to tell them: Go back to working the fields. No work, no food. That way they'd be skinny and we'd get some value from their existence.
Every time a drunk slips up it's off to mandatory AA. Every time a man says something creepy it's off to sexual harassment education.
So it's time for conservatives to get their due. Every time someone slips up and needs food stamps, it should be time for mandatory home economics. Budgeting. Coupons. Shopping in bulk. Cooking. Keeping leftovers. $1.50 a meal doesn't sound like much, but $126/week is plenty for a family of 5 to eat healthy. Potatoes, cheese, rice, beans, pork, milk, carrots. All that stuff is cheap, especially in Texas. Time for some re-education.
I know for a fact that dried beans are cheap and low in sugar. This claim that people can't eat healthy on less than $2/meal is false.
Hidalgo County, Tex., is one of the fastest growing and poorest places in the nation.
I think they mean "in the United States."
Something tells me Hidalgo County, Tex. isn't really part of the nation. Not anymore, anyway.
I live in the Austin area and I swear it seems like every single Mestizo Hispanic woman is fat. And their kids. They eat way too much food at restaurants. The food in their shopping carts at the grocery store is terrible...and not cheap. They guzzle soda like an 8 year old left home alone with a 12 pack of Coke. Give me an effing break.
They should tell that reporter to spend a week observing Hispanics in Texas at grocery stores and Mexican restaurants and then get back to us. Mestizos have some kind of biological craving for sugar. I GUARANTEE you this woman isn't in this situation just because she's poor. Give her twice as much welfare, or more; she'll be in the same shape.
I see them shopping and at cheap restaurants and I live in white people land... for now. Texas by 2040: Hispanic 60%, White 25%, Remaining 15% mostly Black with some Asian. Pray for Texas; I don't want to live in Brazil 2.0 because we won't be getting supermodels.
News articles like this should be followed by a mandatory disclaimer to the effect of:
"We wouldn't have this problem if we hadn't imported it."
Imagine reading that after the latest foiled Muslim terror plot story, and the most recent lament about Hispanic achievement gaps, and reports about immigrant use of welfare programs, etc.
A big part of the reason we continue to have stupid immigration policies is because we tell ourselves that all our past immigration binges have been good for the country. Our national mythology requires us to make that claim.
Thus, the first step to better immigration policy is to identify costs that past immigration has imposed upon us. We do not live in the greatest of all possible Americas, and the evidence is all around us.
It would be like those warnings they put on cigarettes--immigration may be hazardous to your nation's health.
I forgot one amazing story:
My mom got a Mexican nurse to come by and spend some time with my dad when he was sick a few years ago so she could go out some. I came home to visit one weekend and she was there while my mom was gone. I'll never forget what I saw when I came in: the woman was eating straight butter out of the tub with a spoon. I kid you not; I saw it with my own eyes.
And she and her 4 kids were on welfare because her husband was out of work dreaming of becoming an MMA fighter. Plan B was to become a chef and open a restaurant. Again, pray for Texas.
There's a genetic component to diabetes that often gets ignored. Granted, a bad diet doesn't help, but maybe Mexican Americans are more genetically predisposed to contracting diabetes?
Again, pray for Texas.
You Texans need to help yourselves! You certainly used to, at the Alamo and San Jacinto.
Stop electing cheap-labor RINOs like W and Perry. Hell, leave the union if you have to. Don't tell me Texans aren't a match for a bunch of obese schlubs drifting north.
God helps those who help themselves.
"Josh Nathan-Kazis" - I've got pretty bad eye sight at the best of times, and waking up bleary eyed it's at its worst. So my first preliminary glimpse at the reporter's name was, I might say, a tad unfortunate.
$1.50 per meal works out to $135 a month for food. There's no way she's spending that little. With all the kids she has, she's definitely getting enough welfare to pay for much more than that. Perhaps the $1.50 figure is per meal per person. Additionally, her kids likely get free breakfast and lunch at school.
Here in expensive LA I buy 90% lean ground beef for $4 a pound. Combined with a box of whole wheat pasta and a jar of all natural tomato sauce, I get three full plates of pasta and meat sauce for $7 total. Add some milk to drink and the total is about $2.50 for each large, nutritious meal.
I'm an active young man trying to gain weight and need around twice the calories of a typical adult woman, so I eat a lot. One of the aforementioned meals could easily feed two kids.
This is just a simple example to illustrate that this notion that poor people are fat because the only things they can afford are soda and chips is nonsense. They choose to buy soda and chips. Furthermore, the very fact that they're fat implies they could cut out at least some of the soda and chips and replace it with more nutritious, less energy dense food and still meet their energy requirements while improving their health in a variety of ways.
The notion that poor people "choose" to eat junk food is mostly nonsense, and surprising on a site where most posters presumably accept HBD as a reality. Most Mexicans are born with few defenses against sugar and fat addiction, and handing them money and access to cheap junk food is like throwing a rat into a bucket of cocaine. That being true, it is of course morally indefensible to give these people "food stamps". As the first poster said, it would make more sense to give people on welfare some sort of ration card until and unless they can demonstrate that they have the ability to behave rationally.
For one of the first times anywhere in the United States, children in South Texas have a projected life span that is a few years shorter than that of their parents.
French sociologist and anthropologist Emmanuel Todd noticed in the early 1970s that Soviet life expectancy had slightly decreased. He correctly foresaw that the USSR would eventually collapse, as the decrease in life expectancy was evidence that the Soviet state was becoming increasingly dysfunctional. Twenty years later, the USSR actually collapsed.
South Texas is a small part of the USA. Yet... Will South Texas collapse 20 years from now? El Futuro or... No Futuro?
If I were American, I would keep an eye on life expectancy stats.
Saslow's article goes on to document how a Mexican-American politician tried to change the law so that food stamps couldn't be used to purchase energy drinks, which are made mostly of sugar, caffeine, and profit margin.
Writing, insight and comedy like this is one of the reasons that keeps me coming back here. Lol.
Hidalgo County has one of the highest poverty rates in the nation . . . which has led almost 40 percent of residents to enroll in the food-stamp program . . . which means a widespread reliance on cheap, processed foods
Except the cheapest (and often healthiest) foods aren't processed. Being on food stamps doesn't force people to rely on crap-in-a-bag. Sloth and ignorance does. A dozen eggs cost what? About a dollar? Way cheaper than a box of sugary cereal and way healthier. Simple lard is healthy, bones are basically free, but add plenty of vitamins and proteins to soups. Stew meats are dirt cheap and delicious, they just require some slow cooking. Liver is cheap and has tons of vitamins. How about a garden? Hell, get some chickens, they'll eat up the bugs and produce fresh eggs that are healthier than factory farmed.
I love how it's simply taken as a given that these people are somehow forced into feeding their kids Cheetos and Capn Crunch because of food stamps.
Couple of points:
(1) Some people react to malnutrition by getting fat. And there's probably a strong genetic/ethnic component to that. For instance, as a white European, pretty much anything short of a full on keto diet makes me tired, lethargic, drives my blood sugar up to dangerous levels - in fact, the weight gain is actually one of the lesser symptoms.
Yes, it's expensive, but I simply have to cut back on other things. Which brings me to the second point:
(2) Yes, poor people probably could scrimp and save in order to feed their children on what Tyler Cowan gleefully predicts as America's future (for other people). But why the hell, in the richest country on earth, should they have to?
And that's the issue I have with all the people telling poor people, and especially those affected by immigration, to just double up their houses, work non stop, eat beans, feed their kids on razor thin margins etc. What happened to glorying in high living standards for your compatriots? Is it really so awful that some janitor (with an IQ of 85-90) and his family might be able to have a - gasp! - nice life with some leisure, not always on a knife edge of scrimping and saving?
In short, why do so many people act like it's shameful to work to gain that for their own compatriots? Do they feel guilt by proxy (the opinion makers would never knowingly take a dip in living standards for themselves or their own families) at the idea that the rest of the world can't get that for themselves, so they have to bring their own country down closer to international levels?
I suspect Mr. Sailer sometimes just posts particularly stupid articles so that a) he can enjoy all the comments pointing out how ridiculous the article, its writer, and the conventional wisdom behind it are, and b) to get some easy research done by reading the comments.
Both motives, by the way, are both laudable, so there's no negative criticism implied here.
Good comments everyone, and to the point. It is cheaper to eat wholesome food that you prepare yourself.
Where on earth did the Post author come up with the math that shows that food "heavy in preservatives, fats, salt and refined sugar" were "cheap foods she could afford"?
Refined food is expensive! It's that simple. Compare the per pound price of a bag of snacks to the foods you commenters have mentioned and it's obvious. And this is not even taking into account the subtleties of calories from sugar vs. complex carbohydrates, percentage of fats, proteins etc.
How can authors who are so clueless, inept or dishonest be published?
This woman must be one of those illegal immigrants who, if only they dared to come out from living in the Shadows, would start up their own businesses and create jobs for native non-"star performers" like me.
In the meantime, maybe she could send a plate of beans my way.
Yes, there are these magical poor people foods that make them become massively obsese, no matter how little of them they eat. We need to export these foods to the Third World and solve World Hunger.
"She drove toward the doctor’s office on the two-lane highways of South Texas, the flat horizon of brown dirt interrupted by palm trees and an occasional view of the steel fence that divides the United States from Mexico."
What do you figure that Eli Saslow is a frustrated novelist? Why do so-called news-stories so often include irrelevant fluff like this.
Anyway, if Saslow is trying to make me feel sorry for these people, he has failed. I don't. They get money from the government - money they did not earn - to buy food for the children they irresponsibly had and whom they cannon support themselves. If they choose to buy bad food that is thier problem. Many of them shouldn't even be here in the first place, and I should not be paying for any of them or for thier children.
But the cheap foods she could afford on the standard government [food stamp] allotment of about $1.50 per meal also tended to be among the least nutritious — heavy in preservatives, fats, salt and refined sugar.
Nonsense. Rice, beans, canned vegetables are full of fat and sugar?
It's the world's most obvious scam. Worried about starving children? Okay, fine. Give every child an allotment of 50 pounds of flour/vegetables/beans/cheese/pork /chicken a month, in appropriate ratios. Problem solved, with healthy results, at minimal cost.
Bingo. I have a family member who's "down on his luck" and shows little indication of understanding how to spend money. I buy him staples in generic brands that he thinks he's too good for. I do not hand him cash.
Even this is prone to abuse of course, since it frees him up to spend his cash stupidly elsewhere, but no solution is perfect.
I live in the Austin area and I swear it seems like every single Mestizo Hispanic woman is fat. And their kids. They eat way too much food at restaurants. The food in their shopping carts at the grocery store is terrible...and not cheap. They guzzle soda like an 8 year old left home alone with a 12 pack of Coke. Give me an effing break.
As I pointed out in another thread, the Mexican diet is perfect for peasants battling starvation. Deep frying a tortilla in oil is a great way to add calories when you aren't getting enough of them. Mexicans are famous for working magic on crappy beef.
The problem comes when the population gets over the economic hump and achieves food abundance; then the diet that kept them alive turns them obese and starts killing them young. Mexicans will eventually get over the diet hump, too, if they stay on a relatively stable economic track.
Chief Seattle writes:
"Every time someone slips up and needs food stamps, it should be time for mandatory home economics."
What minimum IQ would make that training effective in people who resist modern schooling in general?
"energy drinks, which are made mostly of sugar, caffeine, and profit margin. "
But when Four Loko was rumored to cause white college girls to want to have sex the whole government when on red alert.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Loko#Restrictions_on_sale
Well, El Futuro is the other Texas over a million strong in the south border part of the state. Its not what Republicans like Rick Perry like to talk about but its been poor for decades.
"But the cheap foods she could afford -- heavy in preservatives, fats, salt and refined sugar."
Only two of the four have anything to do with weight gain.
HHS has statistics on obesity by ethnicity/race, and while compared to non-Hispanic whites, Hispanic men are moderately more likely to be obese (30.9 vs 27.8), Hispanic women are far more likely to be obese (32.6 vs 24.8).
http://minorityhealth.hhs.gov/templates/content.aspx?lvl=3&lvlID=537&ID=6459
Interestingly enough, looking just at Mexican Americans, the difference is far worse (the first table).
But pointing out trends like this is rude. Just ask Jason Richwine.
see them shopping and at cheap restaurants and I live in white people land... for now. Texas by 2040: Hispanic 60%, White 25%, Remaining 15% mostly Black with some Asian. Pray for Texas; I don't want to live in Brazil 2.0 because we won't be getting supermodels.
Well, its your politicians in fact Texas has a former Republican Party politician called Chuck Devore from Orange County Ca which also has a Mexican problem. Texas politicians allow big businesses to use Mexicans as construction workers or worked in restaurants. It has a better chance than California now because liberal Mexican politicians who want to keep their people at all cost have not been elected as much. Changed the philosophy of the Republican Party in Texas who wants guest workers. Also, there are some white democratic and some more moderate Mexicans that don't want wages to be kept low all the time.
So it's time for conservatives to get their due
Its time for conservatives to kick out Rand Paul, Lew Rockwell and every libertarian who don't want to fine companies for hiring illegal immigrants out.
Like all your other commenters I deeply resent the newspaper writers' script which explains that welfare recipients are obese because taxpayers give them too little money to buy food. This is typical leftist inversion of the facts and reminds me once again of Theodore Dalrymple's explanation that the purpose of leftist propaganda is not to persuade, but to humiliate.
I know welfare queens driving cadillacs is a myth, but get a lod of Blanca's car in the picture.
I'm sure she got a good deal on it used, right.
I've heard that food stamps were supposed to be about buying stuff from farmers, rather than from grocery stores.
Additionally, in the early days of me getting healthy, I noticed the lard in the stores are all hydrogenated- and, indeed, a lot of the stuff that is marketed to Mexicans is adulterated with crap. So, even if they ate exactly the same things initially, they'd start getting bigger and eventually get hooked on the same crap as all the Walmart people.
Real lard is good for you. Hydrogenated lard is terrible.
Similarly, a Mexican in Mexico may eat sugar, but he's not getting hit with as much wheat/soy/omega-6 oil/HCFS etc... They may even still have corn laying around that isn't GMO.
I don't think Cowen is right about beans either. They might keep you alive in a pinch, but we need to be putting a lot more cattle on the land- especially desertified land, so that we can rehabilitate the land and have more meat.
I've seen fat white people in Arizona, Texas and California so it just isn't Mexicans. Granted, the white people are our citizens while in certain places less Mexicans are not.
Bobby - that's what happens when you surround hunter-gatherers with refined fats and cheap carbs.
They really have not out-bred very much either. I see these five-feet tall Indo's straggling up and down the side of the road all over Atlanta. I'm sure one day I'll see them with bones in their noses.
Blanca’s parents emigrated from Mexico in the 1950s to pick strawberries and cherries, and they often repeated an aphorism about the border fence. “On one side you’re skinny. On the other you’re fat,” they said. Now millions more had crossed through the fence, both legally and illegally, making Hidalgo County one of the fastest-growing places in America.
Good point, South Texas border sector now is getting as much or more traffic than Tucson border sector. Mexicans and Central Americans are heading more in a direct route instead of going thru Arizona or California which is more indirect for the rural states of Mexico. First, Texas has been growing during the oil boom since whites think they will land a good job, some do and some don't from what I told. This is similar to what happen in California in the 1980's when whites were still moving to Calfornia but Latins Mexicans and others were moving into more. Second, the Texas route is easier to go to the Midwest. Believe it or not Mexican and Central Americans according to studies make more money in some midwestern cities like Black St Louis at 35,000 versus Houston at 26,000.
What's the matter with rice, beans, corn, and a green vegetable as a meal? Throw in some powdered milk for the kids and everything is hunky-dory. With five kids her food stamp allotment in Texas would be at least $700 a month.
Well, part of its bad decisions on her part but conservatives here are blaming the folks too much. Its the government and businesses interest like the former president Bush that scream that Family Values don't stop at the Rio Grande and I bet that Hidalgo probably has very low education levels similar to Santa Ana in California but politicians and businesses people compound the problem with people that have the same bad habits.
Food stamps wouldn't be as awful if the recipients had physical exercise quotas and and restrictions on what sort of foods they can buy. Make them eat turkey sandwiches, salads, cooked vegetables...coffee can be their dessert.
Don't forget now, they need those food stamps to have enough soda to put in all their kids' bottles and sippy cups (anyone who lives in Texas/the Southwest has seen it with their own eyes).
The few times we went out to pick up pizza at Cicis a few years ago, the place was packed with Mestizos and Indians (call center) shoveling it in.
That's another thing that comes to mine, Texas having lots of Mexicans means lots of food stamps. Liberal Democrats use this against Republicans like they do the Southern States with lots of blacks. Fox news picks San Diego but San Diego even with a Mexican population over 32 percent has only 6 percent of the population on food stamps but rules in California will changed where more white surfers and Mexicans in particular will get the food stamps.
Another thing Republicans are big supporters of Walmart that keep wages low and many of their employees are on the dole. If they cut food stamps and Walmart loses money to competitor Costco then wages go up maybe from 8 to 10 per hr to 12 to 13 per hr less folks working in retail that need food stamps and so forth. This is nationally probably will not happen as much in a depressed area like the Rio Grande.
The amount is $1.50 per meal per person so for a 6 person household (mama and her 5 little bastards) it's almost $200 per week, $800 per month or $10,000 per year. For that amount of $, I could eat like a king. I'm a professional w. an advanced degree but I don't spend that much $ on food. I go to the grocery store and buy a few little things because I'm paying with my own money and I see the ladies and gents with the Access cards (I rarely see a brown person paying any other way - virtually the entire black population of Philadelphia is on food stamps) has their cart piled higher with crap more than I ever have purchased in my entire life. And the processed food industry, the grocery stores, they all just love the business. There's something about free food that makes it extra tasty.
"Josh Nathan-Kazis" - I've got pretty bad eye sight at the best of times, and waking up bleary eyed it's at its worst. So my first preliminary glimpse at the reporter's name was, I might say, a tad unfortunate.
Josh Kathan-Nazis?
She is not as hot as the Columbian citizen who was the face of Obamacare until she was not.
"I know welfare queens driving cadillacs is a myth"
That's not a myth.
Let in a few million more immigrants and the economy will really take off, lifting everybody out of poverty...Why aren't we giving these people free Kindles loaded with a copy of Hayek's Road to Serfdom? Think about it...We fix education, and Clarissa and Antonio grow up to invent a Green Energy solution or the next Google or Choptastic. Fix education now!
Woo hoo, Hidalgo County. I grew up there. Ben Milam elementary school. Nice place in a lot of ways. Jones and Jones had a beautiful tea room in their downtown McAllen store. Ah, childhood memories. Back then many Mexicans liked the arrangement of working in the US and living in Mexico because they made more money in the US and had lower expenses in Mexico. My grandmother would pick up the maid in Mexico and bring her back to work.
The standard progressive argument about fat poor people blowing their food stamps on junk food is that they live in "food deserts" where The Man will only sell them pork rinds and malt liquor.
Actually, looking at the video I don't see conditions in Los Angeles with people in garages as bad as I see the living conditions of Hildago, so the new adjusted poverty rate overstates cost of housing when you looked at this there are still poor places where housing is cheap..
. McAllen-Edinburg-Mission, Texas
Median household income: $33,732
Percentage below poverty line: 33.4 percent (2nd highest)
Unemployment rate: 12.6 percent
Population: 780,087
Brownsville-Harlingen, TX
Median household income: $31,736
Percentage below poverty line: 36.3 percent (the highest)
Unemployment rate: 12.5 percent
Population: 408,054
With a median household income more than $18,000 less than the national average, this metropolitan area suffers from the worst poverty rate in the country. Located in the southern tip of Texas, along the Mexican border, it's one of America's fastest growing cities, due primarily to its high rate of immigration. The high school graduation rate is exceptionally low -- only 53 percent.
Laredo, Texas
Median household income: $35,770
Percentage below poverty line: 31.7 percent (third highest)
Unemployment rate: 8.5 percent
Population:251,632
Located on the Rio Grande, this city serves as one of the biggest border crossings in the U.S., and is the point of entry for a large percentage of the goods that come into the country from Mexico. But while the border crossing provides certain economic benefits, it also attracts crime and drug trafficking.
Free Insulin. One 1250 mcg dose, provided by Affordable Care Act.
Should work for all body weights.
The proximate reason the US went to war with Mexico in 1846 was to secure Texan/American claims to the land between the Rio Grande and Nueces Rivers.
It's pretty sad to think that Americans died for this.
It's not 'el futuro' it's 'el presentivo.'
How does one get to weight 1100 pounds?
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/half-ton-killer-mayra-rosales-sheds-600-pounds-loves-sister-article-1.1210050
This is no hoax; she was on Youtube. She really did weigh over 1000 pounds.
She is now down to a sylphlike 200, which indicates that she has some willpower, there's nothing wrong w/her metabolism, and should never have been beyond morbidly obese in the first place.
Morbid obesity is entirely a modern creation.
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