The vegeconomists

By an amazing coincidence, outbursts of dickish populism seem to run on a cycle, just like elections. And when it comes to the lifestyles of low income people, the comments section overfloweth.

Take this article as an example, if you can bear it.[1] Mum lost her job because of a heart condition, and despite her efforts, hasn’t found a new one.

She’s battling depression. She eats last, after her two sons – whatever’s left over. One of the boys doesn’t have a correct school uniform. She can’t afford it. The boys want to play rugby, but when the basics are a struggle, extras are a pipedream.

And out of this entire distressing situation, what do the commentators focus on? The $5 that mum gives her sons each day to buy lunch. The kinder commentators prescribe budgeting advice, peanut butter and cheap bread. The remarks of the unkind ones don’t bear repeating.

Amongst this ratatouille of righteousness – just as there is EVERY SINGLE TIME such an article appears – are the commentators who patronisingly insist that the poor would be fine if they just grew their own vegetables. Swede as.

Sometimes these comments come from older folks, who believe their better standard of living was owing to vege gardens – rather than, say, New Zealand’s booming post-war economy and relatively effective welfare state. Easy mistake.

I call these people the vegeconomists. They rush to point out the bad decisions of the poor, dietary and other. They’ve got all the financial solutions. They know how to run your life better than you do, and they like to recommend a healthy dose of sacrafice.

Now, I have no problem with veges, or the growing thereof. If you’re a gardener, it’s good for your health and the planet. Likewise, if you produce other food or goods at home. Kei te pai.

But you may or may not be interested that the average household spends 2.6% of its net income on veges. That compares with 24.6% on housing and utilities (2013 figures – probably worse now).[2]

A small spend on veges means even smaller savings from growing your own. So how are the vegeconomists finding their wealth in vegetables? Are they building their homes from yams? Sending their children to school in jerkins crafted from lettuce? Driving a Little Red Courgette?

Maybe I’m getting carrot away with this line of argument. Because it’s not just the diets of the poor that these commentators like to judge. Back in the day, they like to remind us, kids didn’t have phones – possibly because phones didn’t frickin exist.[3]

My 15 year old son is one of these pampered modern kids. He uses his phone to organise public transport for himself, make money transactions, and research his homework – skills that will help him get to university and find work.

Kids who miss out on these ‘extras’ are increasingly left behind. Buy second hand, make your own, just do without. At the end of each of these survival strategies is a child – one who is missing out on something the other kids have.

It’s not that poor people always do sensible things. There’s a debate about whether bad financial decisions are partly because of the way poverty affects cognitive functions.[4]

Some argue that it’s a cultural thing – poor people, like all the rest of us, want to fit into the communities around them, so they buy stuff they can’t afford.

Others think that what seems like bad decision-making is actually pretty rational. If you’re never going to get ahead financially, and it’s making you miserable to try, why bother? What if that handful of change you save making lunches adds up to diddly squat in your life? Buy now, worry later.

And, of course, some people are just dicks.

But better off people aren’t always sensible either. I’ll stand in the supermarket aisle, mulling over which tinned tomatoes are best value for money, like I’m pondering the works of Confucius – then I’ll impulse buy a lounge suite, because the decision seemed big and scary and it was stressing me out.

Simply put, I earn enough to get away with my irrational decisions. My foolishness is my own business, not a topic for speculation on websites.

There is an irony, too, in the better-off urging people on low incomes to reform their diets. We use the phrase ‘cheap as chips’ for a reason.

Even as the vegeconomists urge the poor to give peas a chance, Brian Easton, a real economist, writes the heartbreaking story of a family who, with a pittance left over for food after other bills were paid, lived on hot chips. As poor people know, hot chips are the cheapest calories around – and for all that they damaged the health of this family, they filled their pukus better than veges could.[5]

Added to that, for reasons unclear, fruit and vege consumption by New Zealanders is reducing across the board. Even the vegeconomists aren’t taking their own advice.[6]

Cauli gosh – behind the nonsensical financial advice of the vegeconomists, there is another motivation, and it is not charitable. Take hold of your life and turnip around, they urge, like it’s the easiest thing in the world. Amongst the five plus servings of smugness a day, a punitive vein is lurking.

We, all of us, live in a society in which to consume is to participate. The skills and time to make things are dwindling, so we buy instead. That may be good, or it may be bad, but that’s how it is.

It’s why mobile sales trucks, with their obscene interest rates, hang around schools in poor areas. They know they will meet with parents who just want to do their best for their kids, to give them nice things, see them smile. Buying stuff is pleasurable; it’s what other people do. To be unable to consume is to be excluded.

The vegeconomists would have the poor return to a virtuous economy of things made and grown that no longer exists, if it ever existed at all. But they would not give up their own modern conveniences, like the internet connection they need to post their berating comments.

They would banish the poor to a mythical past while they reserve the present, and its consumer pleasures, for themselves.

I think of the kids with $5 for their lunch; how I would feel if they were my kids. Maybe they could be fed cheaper, better. But maybe the low-quality pies they buy, warm in the stomachs of hungry boys, are a small daily pleasure – in lives from which much bigger pleasures, rugby just one of them, are simply out of reach.

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PS. When I googled the phrase ‘Brian Easton hot chips’ to find the referenced article, I got this picture. I’m as confused as you are.

[1]

http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/92638606/what-poverty-looks-like-meet-the-sikaleti-brothers

[2] http://www.stats.govt.nz/browse_for_stats/people_and_communities/Households/HouseholdEconomicSurvey_HOTPYeJun13/Commentary.aspx#household

[3] K, my now 11 year old, asked me what age I was when I got my first phone. I explained that phones weren’t invented when I was a kid. Turns out he knew that already. He just wanted to hear me say it so he could laugh at me.

[4]

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/09/poverty_and_cognitive_impairment_study_shows_money_troubles_make_decision.html

[5] http://www.eastonbh.ac.nz/2014/04/chips-with-everything/

[6] http://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/well-good/78418512/vegetable-consumption-is-too-low-but-not-because-prices-are-high