i remember growing up with a single parent eating things like green bean casserole and hamburger soup. as a kid in highschool, the whole kahoot thing was taking off, and my teacher asked everyone to pull out their phones. i didn't have one, and the teacher looked at me and said "what you don't have a phone? oh your parent's must love you" in a sarcastic voice. talking down to me for not having this device, as if it meant i was unloved. i corrected her and said "parent, i only have one" and suddenly it was all apologies. but would it even have mattered if i had two? do people hate poor people that much, that they would ridicule a kid for being poor and not having the devices that all their peers have?
If lazy-brained fools would quit associating poverty with becoming a criminal and made any effort at all to understand why crime is higher in poverty stricken areas (The real reasons why, not THeY're PoOR sO TheY JUsT DOn'T CARe LolLOl) maybe they'd invest more time into thinking before they blurt out discriminatory, braindead remarks.
I never had the stigma like you did but I didn't get a phone till I was in 11th grade and I also had a single parent grew up below the poverty line fuck people who talk down on people for not being born into money it's bullshit
"Do people hate poor people that much?" Yes. Yes they do. Because our society has trained people that outside inherent traits - skin color, sexuality, gender identity, ancestry, etc - the worst thing you can be is poor, and every poor person is a threat to you as a thief, attacker, or worst of all an usurper who will take your place as Not-Poor if you ever become poor.
Hells yeah! Cock's comb soup, questionable vegetable material, all swimming in hot chilé that makes you temporarily blind if you rub your eye... This is my childhood wrapped up in a newspaper!
“i want you to think of the trashiest food you can imagine” “i can’t think of anything” -starts listing off the food i usually eat “ah yeah, that’s why”
@@grimsage5809 I suspect it's not just price but association as well? I associate ramen with students, maybe struggling artists or someone penny-pinching to get a business off the ground. It's cheap, but not a high-fat high-sugar low-status staple. Just... incredibly cheap. Another consideration is that while it's cheap, it uses "primary" agricultural products, mostly wheat flour. The white trash foods listed are remarkably often animal-derived, and the only way you can get animal products really cheap is if they are leftovers: rinds, and the scraped-off-bones bits of meat which don't look appealing and so get turned into sausages of all kinds. You don't raise a pig for the rinds, you raise it for the ham which you can sell at a premium, and the skin is pretty much waste which you deep fry to sell to the poor. Something similar goes for the RC Cola, which I expect is based on corn syrup, which is pretty much a corn subsidy waste product.
You will probably be shocked by this. I grew up in Alaska in the 1970s and 80s. Back then getting fresh food from “outside” our name for anywhere outside of Alaska, was not consistent, reliable, or cheap; and frankly often rotten by the time it got to us. The large military presence in Alaska ensured a nearly endless supply of canned goods, but for fresh food we hunted, gathered, fished and to a small extent, due to the very short season, grew our own food. Alaska is dark all winter long and with an abundance of moose, as well as icy, slick roads, well, you get the picture, dead moose on the roadway routinely. Every town had a road kill list, it was a list of every family in town. When your name came up the state troopers would call you when there was a dead moose in the roadway. You would then gather you family, friends and neighbors. You’d go clean up the road way and spend the next day cleaning, butchering and packaging moose to go in the freezer. I grew up eating Road kill on nearly a daily basis.
What a great story. And I guess since it was cold, the meat wouldn't spoil before it could be collected. It's actually kind of ingenious. (Best not say that or some rich asshole is going to "gentrify" it.)
I hope this doesn't come off wrong- but as someone with absolutely no experience eating roadkill or moose- I'd love to try this some day. Specifically from someone or someone's family that know what to do given a dead moose, because if I tried to prepare that I might poison myself.
In a similar vein to this, thrift shopping has gone from a necessity for lower income families to a treasure hunt for resellers. Instead of providing good quality preowned clothing at reasonable prices to people who simply cannot afford new or high quality items, thrift shops now adjust pricing to reflect this new secondary market. People have been generally looked down on for wearing preowned clothing. The quality of the garments is irrelevant to this shaming, the stigma has been attached to the method of obtaining the item. The bulk of thrift items are still considered trash, but now there are people going into thrift stores with the explicit purpose of finding the good items to sell for a profit. Instead of lower income folk getting access to essential things within their budget, people with means are coming in and swiping up all the decent quality 'bargains' and driving up prices.
Honestly this has always been the way, it's just more transparent now with online secondhand shops and crafttok/tube. I still remember doing a thrift tour of a new city, and running into a consignment shop owner at the Value Village, arms bursting with garments. I knew she owned a consignment shop bc I had walked out of her store the prior day, because it was too expensive.
I vividly remember going thrift shopping with my mom and older sister as a child. I didn't understand it at the time, but my sister was so embarrassed to be shopping there, and was afraid one of her classmates might see us in there
its looked down upon to wear second hand? what?? i got some all leather boots that would cost 200$ new, for 30$. same idea with some sports shoes (sports shoes here cost 100$, and i eat through them with violent movements in a year or so)
I don't think thrifting hasn't become popular only because of "trendy resellers" but also because there has been a growing push towards ethical buying, especially in clothes. Buying clothes second hand means you aren't contributing to fashion waste or fast fashion. There's a whole class of people who are not wealthy enough to be able to afford higher-end more ethical clothing pieces, but are wealthy enough that they can *choose* to buy second-hand, instead of it being their only option, but I don't think these people should be shamed for choosing to go thrifting instead of supporting unethical clothing practices. And of course there are people who have a very specific sense of style, which is easier to nourish in a thrift store than standard retailers
I remember seeing a Thai friend at the school cafeteria. He had leftovers from home or an Asian restaurant, wrapped in aluminum foil. It was rice and vegetables and whatever meat and spices, I couldn't tell what dish, and I don't know Thai food well enough. I had had either a school lunch or a sack lunch sandwich from home, typical white American solution. I remember telling him his food looked way better than what I had had. Luckily, he didn't feel obligated to share, since I had already eaten and we were just saying hi. But that has always stuck with me. What he may have felt was embarrassing, leftovers, I thought looked great. Of course, he may have been proud of his food too, I hope so. What he had was genuinely tastier and healthier than either a sack lunch sandwich (processed food), or the school lunch (OK but overcooked, bland, not as tasty or healthy as it could be). We graduated and moved on, lost contact. But that memory, seeing how good his food was, stuck with me. I live in a big city, very ethnically diverse, people from all over the planet, both visitors, immigrants, and native-born but many sources. (And I find myself asking why I haven't tried more Asian and Indian food. I should fix that.)
Years ago when I was working with my mom, we went out for lunch to a local Chinese buffet after one of our favorite Chinese restaurants had closed down. As we were leaving the buffet restaurant, it was the heat of summer and we heard the back door to the kitchen was open. Instead of Chinese, we heard rapid Spanish from the cooks! :D We both had a good laugh about it. (Hey, we like Mexican food too.) But there was more to it. The restaurant was run by Chinese immigrants, and those Spanish-speaking cooks were also immigrants. Both groups were struggling to get ahead and help their families and others to immigrate. So two "minority" groups, sizable in my city, were helping boost each other into middle class American citizenship. The food was pretty good, and we ate there several times. I don't recall if my mom and I really discussed it, but we both knew that was the situation. That the food wasn't just Chinese-American, but Asian-Latino-American :D was fine: It's what makes America at our best, people from all over making something new and better from all those different sources. -- That is a truth all those MAGA nuts will never understand. I LIKE the variety of my city. I like that there are people from all over. My city wouldn't thrive without that, both multi-generation native-born folks, and brand-new residents.
"I want you to think of the trashiest food you can imagine." *glances down at cheapest instant hotcoco mix i'm eating directly out of the can, dry* "Hotpockets!"
@James Henry Smith I guess so, but I don't think he mentioned black or white. I suppose that in a way, trash food, white or otherwise, became the soul food in an age where the cheapest foods are the most processed and unhealthy, and the original soul food became popular, ingredients went up, and many who ate soul food cause they could afford it were priced out of it .
I didn't know casserole was "trashy" until right now. I always knew I was poor but I never considered how many things that are completely normal to me would be looked down on by other classes.
It's funny -- my parents, moving up the social ranks, abandoned casseroles. I've brought them back because they're good, I just stay away from the creamed soups, making my own.
I don't think anyone thinks casserole is trashy. As someone from the upper class surrounded by white trash, my community was very judgemental of white trash growing up, and I have never heard anyone make fun of casserole. When the people I know made fun of white trash, the jokes were about meth labs exploding in trailer parks. I've never heard of someone making fun of their food choices.
As a Chinese kid who was made fun of consistent for the school lunches I would bring, I feel this so much. It especially hurt when I saw one of my childhood bullies tweeting out that she was eating szechuan food and how exotic it was.
@@senadarakic1813 This trips me out. When I was a kid, we were dirt poor surfers (only got good boards and wetsuits from winning contests and getting sponsored, or selling a lot of weed). But punk rock surfer kids always ended up with rich girlfriends. And in every one of their houses: Nutella. This was the early 80's, and no one I hung out with or anyone in their families ever went to Europe. Wayyy too expensive. Nobody traveled anywhere, except to the next town, when we ran out of food and went to eat at my aunt's house. But these rich girls all went to Europe every year almost, and their families got onto Nutella there. It meant "rich people" to us. Funny how shit gets twisted around. Like the Lobster change-up from poor to rich people food that she talked about early in her video here. I still remember eating Nutella on the porch by the pool, looking down on the city from that mansion up in the hills.
I noticed dollars genernal near me is mostly processed foods that aren't healthy. However if you look you find eggs milk and some organic things in mine 🤷♀️
yes this whole video I was thinking about the food I sell there frequently (I work at DG). But yeah I know some DG's have more fresh stuff than others, but my store just has milk and eggs.
This comment was exactly what I was looking for - where I live theres many scattered little towns that only have 1 dollar general, and my city is the only one with walmarts and more than an hours drive from these towns. It doesnt help that big companies like that drive out any local grocers taking away the possibility of nutritional food if there was one
@@safir2241 I've got a 40 minute drive to get to a major grocery store. Our local dollar general has eggs, milk, yogurt, a small selection of fruits and veggies, the little local independent grocery store has a bit more fruits and veggies, but the price at both is 3x Kroger prices. So I go to town every couple of weeks to stock up on things that I can get to last that long.
interesting how this is so very american. in other countries, home cooked meals are the cheapest. few people can afford buying pakcages and packages of processed food. even things like a package of doritos is a luxury to many.
i was thinking the same, where i'm from in europe processed food is something associated with camping, having stashed in your summerhouse / cabin, in your pantry for emergencies... most people cook at home, at least from what i've experienced, and people around me. and all that american fastfood? it's expensive for a lot of people to go to mcdonalds, when i was a kid that was something special to be deserved once in a while. for the price of one proper meal you can cook for a family of four!
@@lisasimpson8895 also an interesting thing to note, the prices of international fast food chains don’t really change in other countries that much! from what i can see the bigmac meal costs about 6 usd in america, and here it’s about 5.3 usd when i convert it… and our minimal wage is half of what it is in the US
"When someone wears the costume of 'poor person,' they aren't breaking boundaries or ending stigma. They're just perpetuating classism." damn there it is
That lobster story reminds me of a similar (but sadder) one from my home state: Tasmania, Australia. When white colonisers first arrived, the indigenous people ate a lot of seafood, including something the English called "muttonfish", which the English thought was gross so after the invasion they "allowed" the indigenous people to take as much as they wanted. However, when the English finally figured out how to cook muttonfish they discovered it was actually delicious, and so they started regulating it, and telling indigenous people they couldn't fish for it any more. We still fish muttonfish here. Now we call it abalone.
@@theRiver_joan British cooking is actually very diverse. Because of all the new recipes we learned of as we plundered the world, adapted a little, and adopted as our own.
@@allnaturalfigjam310 You can't help what your ancestors did, and you seem to be doing your part to spread the knowledge. That's all any of us can really do. (Other than being a staunch anticapitalist, which I do also reccomend lol).
My idea of “trash food” isn’t casseroles or canned food. When I think of trash food I think of food with no nutritional value like Doritos or pop. I hate how being economical or poor is seen as trash. I hate the idea of calling people trash.
!!! This This is the only comment here that SPOKE to me I'm from eastern Europe myself and we don't really have a "white trash" concept around here. Maybe it's because we're pretty much 99% white country anyway so why would we call our own a WT? Lol idk But hearing that term for the first time made me so sick and petrified, I was kinda shocked that this is so engraved in people's minds somewhere :(
Most people think about this like you, but if you frame it that way it's not a social justice issue so it has to be reframed purely in evil classist terms
"Imagine the trashiest food you can" Taco bell dorito tacos "Would you eat it." I mean... yeah. "Now imagine a person who would eat that food. What do they look like? How do they act?..." I feel attacked
There's ableism and classism with a lot of the food ideas. If you're working long hours or are disabled, you may not have the energy/ability to cook elaborate meals. I love how you point out the problematic attitudes/practices behind food tourism. The food/culture is treated as a commodity while the people are still ridiculed. It's taken a couple of decades for me to be confident enough to own and reclaim some of my culture while daring anyone to mock it.
Affording food when you're poor is HARD. Especially when you're disabled and have too much pain and fatigue to do cooking or food prep. The worst thing is when folks richer than you tell you about their diet, how it's "totally affordable," and how you won't be healthy and ethical if you don't eat like them; when in reality, their diet is far too expensive for your poor ass, and inaccessible in terms of the time and energy required for cooking. I hate how people gloat about their expensive diets and healthiness, and shit-talk about folks who eat things like processed foods. Like, do you think I eat ramen with chicken nuggets in it because I love it and think it's healthy? No, it's just one of the few hot foods that's both affordable and requires little enough effort for me to put it together. The level of arrogance people reach when they talk about food is astounding. I've gotten to a place in life where I've realized, I'm sick of how people treat poverty like it's a crime. I've started being open about how poor I am. I'm not going to pretend anymore. It's my belief that society won't stop demonizing the poor until we are vocal and unashamed of our poverty, and demand to be treated like human beings. If folks think I'm trash because my appearance is unkempt, or I eat cheap stuff, or my tiny apartment is messy, then they can take that opinion and stuff it. I and my fellow poor folks are doing our best with the hand we've been dealt in life. If this country, the US, is going to systematically impoverish people to make them easier to exploit, then I will be loud and visible and unashamed, so they have to look it in the eye.
Amen Harold. I'm not quite in the same boat but I've decided to stop hiding the fact that I have disabilities and am in pain all the time. We won't fix anything if we don't talk about it. I don't do this because it's fun or because I'm "just weird." I do this because I'm trying to cope in a world that wasn't built for me.
Who talks shit about poor people Im guessing it's through social media, because how often do you meet cuckholds that openly judge and mock you in public I hope i never have to deal with them and hope i never get sucked into social media and its toxicity
@TheDudeCalledAlan I have some privelage, but have you ever warn safety yellow in public? You encounter a palpable shift in tone from some people for nothing but your wardrobe. And that's just one type of signaling. It's not just an online thing.
And then they go "You can buy fruits and vegetables very cheaply from the super market, they cost literal cents." And it's like, sure, you asshole, I'm sure you just buy vegetables in bulk and just eat them raw like apples, just munching on that onion, instead of having the time and resources to prepare them into an actual meal that you're willing put in your mouth, or have someone else that gets payed minimum wage to do that for you... It's so easy to, after your shift of your second full time job that you need to do to pay rent, to just not need a quick and cheap way to introduce calories into your system for the next day of intensive work, and there's definitively not 4 McDonald's opened 24/7 within walking distance and they do not bombard you with advertising all day long because you're their target demographic, and you definitively have the time and energy to prepare something delicious and fully notorious with all the fresh vegetables that you just bought when you're in that situation...
Lobster became popular the same way ribs and other originally “poor people food” did, poor and black people made it taste good and so rich people realized wait I like that too and now formerly undesirable food is crazy expensive
So right! I remember when I moved to Canada from Eastern Europe 10+ yrs ago and I was surprised how everyone loves ribs and how expensive they are! Back home these are almost the cheapest meats and barely anyone wants to eat it!
Dipping in melted butter isn't much of a method of making a undersea bug taste good. A pencil could be dipped in melted butter and taste pretty good(if still too pointy)
i NEVER appreciated how my mom made me a meal every day and how we had a family dinner every night. i always wanted junk food when i was young and was mad i was fed healthy, home cooked meals. today i’m so thankful to my mom she’s helped me maintain good eating habits to this day thank u mom ❤️
I think that's just the nature of kids to want junk food, but there's also a huge issue of marketing that faces children, not adults. A parent sees the commercial one time; the parent hears the kids wheedle and plead endlessly for days when the kids sees the commercial. There was a Lunchables commercial obviously targeting kids, not parents, that absolutely drove me insane for depicting the kid consistently disappointed with the mother's sack lunch, but cheering like he was pulling the sword from the stone when one day he saw Lunchables inside. The commercial ends with the kid's voiceover of, "Thanks Mom," while camera focuses through the bus window on the mom's smiling face on the front porch. It literally made me grind my teeth for how they were programming children's desires.
Literally same. The way I was always jealous of Lunchables even when I had amazing sandwiches everyday. It's embarrassing to think about because I was so spoiled
Seriously, I remember going to a restaurant in San Francisco and seeing a bowl of jambalaya on the menu for 20 bucks, whereas you could get a huge portion of that anywhere back home for $8. It's just funny seeing it sold as a fancy food in a classy restaurant, when it's usually something you get when you can't afford the fancy food on the menu.
This is something that's interesting to me. My brother in law once told me that I made the best gumbo he'd had outside Louisiana, and I literally just threw together what I had available and kept adding stuff until it tasted "right". I feel like that's just how cuisine in general works. It's people working with what they've got and finding ways to make it taste good.
SE Texas born and raised. In Portland, Oregon I was served a "crawfish platter" that had FOUR crawfish on it, some loose corn (not on the cob) and a small cup of that they called dirty rice. It was 14 dollars. I asked where the rest of the crawfish were, as they had the four arranged in a + pattern on the plate. A woman told me, a guy who grew up at crawfish boils that "Crawfish is a delicacy in the south" and "this is how they eat it down there". I about died.
My great grandfather sat alone at lunch time because he had a lobster tail in his lunch while the rich kids had peanut butter sandwiches... He was embarrassed.
@@TheDanishGuyReviews Oh, my! Here, you can get a 26 ounce (~730 g) jar for about $4 or $5, and cold cuts cost about the same for a fraction of the size.
Food deserts make me scream. There's such an issue here in Detroit about the lack of freaking grocery stores. Whole Foods opened up in a wealthy part of the city, but far from the sprawling residential areas. It wasn't until Meijer opened up on 8-mile that everyday people had a big box grocery store to go to.
and that Meijer is less than great, compared to the burbs. One of the reasons why mutual aid in Detroit taking off - a lot of orgs compared to just a few years ago.
Detroit has some strange racial politics in general. I used to live in a suburb of Detroit that originally was part of Detroit, but broke off to be its own township. (Redford Township). They regularly would refuse to pave the roads, despite the fact that dirt roads were really ... "odd" here in a suburb so close to a major metro area. It was claimed that it was in the hopes of not having "newcomers" move in. (the unspoken fact was that the newcomers might be POC, as my high school was nearly all white, but across the borders in EVERY direction, white people were in the minority.) This was back in the late 80s, early 90s, and it was like our high school was frozen in time in the 50s. It was an odd place.
Not to play devils advocate, but it’s just not profitable to put grocery stores in extremely poor areas. Less money is spent by customers, more coupons, and rampant stealing. They’re needs to be some kind of incentive, maybe increased tax breaks to entice grocery stores to open up in these areas.
@@devonwelch8014 It's a cycle. There's lots opportunity for many things there, which contributes to poverty, which lessens the opportunity. Those businesses also provide jobs as well as provide lower cost food than the convenience food which is all that is offered. Something does need to be done. But this is a case where capitalism doesn't care about the people who suffer because of the feedback loop. But government is there to protect citizens from things like this.
I misread this as food desserts and was like “But dessert makes us happy??? I don’t understand??? What do grocery stores have to do with not preferring sweets???” And then reread and felt like a big dumb idiot
I didn’t realize how poor I was until I went to deliver Christmas presents to poor families with my Church youth group. The rest of the kids couldn’t believe people lived in those conditions. I was just as surprised by their shock at a place that was in my mind normal.
Growing up, neither of my parents cooked much. We never sat down together to have family meals. So my “trash” diet was mainly just processed food, anything microwaveable, and lots of cheap fast food. Editing to add: I’m also interested in the class-related implications of home cooked meals vs relying on “junk” or fast food. Obviously there’s a massive stigma against buying or consuming too much junk food or fast food - it’s certainly seen as trashy. For my parents I think it was a combination of lack of time, energy, and cooking skills. They were self employed, raising four kids, so I can’t blame them for choosing whichever food options were quick or easy. As an adult I’ve had to unlearn a lot of these habits though. I’ve had to learn basic cooking skills and resist the urge to get takeout too frequently. There were so many foods, especially fruits and veggies, that I never tried as a kid, so I’m slowly trying to adjust my taste preferences as well. It’s a work in progress. Anyway thank you for this very thought-provoking video and congrats on the recent success! I’m a thought slime viewer but found this vid through the algorithm. I subscribed and am looking forward to watching more of your stuff 💛
@@safala She oftens watches small channels like these, even giving them shoutouts often. It's how I found D'Angelo for example, and now his channel is gigantic. Tiff is great.
I spent years teaching myself how to cook, in part just to . . . I don't know, put space between myself and where I came from. Frozen fish sticks. Anything that could go from a freezer to a deep fryer to a plate. Mountains of mashed potatoes. I didn't eat spinach prepared any way but canned until I was an adult. Credit to my parents, we did eat some kind of vegetables every day at least. They were almost always limp overcooked canned vegetables, but God love em for tryin. Honestly, I miss a lot of it. Tuna casserole still slaps. Venison was like, my favorite as a kid, that and catfish from the creek. Oh, and blackberries that we would go out and gather in the summer. Being insanely broke wasn't *all* bad, looking back. A lot of the food was a hot mess (government issue giant can with *PORK* on the side, impact font, black on white comes screaming to mind), but there was nothing pretentious about it at least? No idea what the point of this comment was. Chalk it up to algorithmic engagement. 👁👁👁👁👁👁👁👁👁👁👁👁👁👁
We could also talk about wolfberries being like $3 a pound when you get them in Chinatown, but then being $15 an ounce when they're sold is goji berries at whole foods
YES! The day I found out that those expensive ass tiny nuggets of deliciousness were being repackaged in little bags and sold to me at a premium because yet another white person decided to prey on the cultural ignorance of their fellow white people, rename them and give them "superfood" status I was so pissed. I really wish (as a white person) I'd been first shown them in their cultural context rather than as something completely devoid of any historical use because while they are pretty tasty on top of oatmeal it pales in comparison to goji/red date tea or gogi/ginseng/ginger chicken soup. It really opened my eyes though and I look at food/ingredients in a completely different way.
Yes! I have an Asian Market across the street from me in the same building as a gourmet grocery store. In the Asian Market I can get a huge jar of Kimchi for like 8 bucks. In the gourmet grocery they sell tiny jars of Kimchi for 10-20 dollars. Lol
I'd like to take this conversation to the next level, and hopefully you guys feel less upset about being "ripped off". Those goji berries also carry the same double pricetags right here in Asia (Singapore). In most places you can get them for the reasonable price, but some shops that identify as upmarket, sophisticated and higher-end will jack up the prices to five times more. And the funny thing is - you'll still get people who willingly choose to pay that premium. And these are locals, who know of the better-for-value alternatives. So the conclusion to draw here my friends, is that some people spend money for social signalling. They're not paying $x because they think item is worth $x. They pay $x because they think THEY are worth spending $x on.
As someone from Appalachia who spent the first half of my life trying to erase any vestige of where I came from and my culture so people wouldn't think I was ignorant and backwards, and as someone who has spent the second half desperately trying to get it all back, this really means a lot to me.
This video hit home for me as well, and I’d also like to highlight the music. I guess I’m so used to hearing the music my family plays as part of the comedy in videos (“people acting silly, let’s put a royalty free banjo song in the background”) that it brought me to tears hearing it used in a serious setting.
It's kinda interesting, Anthony Bourdain wrote in one of his books, that rich people don't have taste. When they came into his restaurants, they would often just aim for the high prices. They would have a steak "well done", meaning they would basically get the charred sole of a shoe for as little as 500 bucks. Caviar also used to be eaten by fishers who couldn't afford to buy the fishes they caught. Same with salmon, which used to be so abundant, it was considered poor people food.
I remember seeing a food taste test video where a person ate a pizza that was super expensive because of the way it was made, including the toppings that were used for it. Throughout the description of the process, not much was discussed about taste quality, rather there was mostly just flexing on the fact that there were ingredients like caviar and edible gold foil in the toppings.
@@jooot_6850 It's absolutely doable and a thing. "Salt Bae" does just this. Gold foil coated tomahawk steak for $2000 just because people will buy it, and only cost him $300 in ingredients. So, as a random internet stranger, I fully support your grift.
I don't think there is any correlation between how wealthy you are and taste, so people with taste would naturally fall randomly on the wealth spectrum, of course
My mom served us fried chicken hearts once, and I think it almost broke her heart. None of us kids really understood what was so difficult for her, with a bit of ketchup, we thought they tasted fine. Thanks for helping me consider how poor we were back then, and how hard that must have been for my folks, trying to be "independent" and "successful". EDIT: Mom would be mortified that I shared this story, so don't tell her.
I am from a Russian family and for us it is kind of normal to eat chicken hearts and other organs like livers etc. For us it's not considered cheap "trash" food I think the reason is that my kind isn't wasteful we just eat anything from the animal and I see that as normal Its kind of interesting to see the difference in different cultures
Simple foods with a long shelf life are also good for disabled people, as we often struggle or simply can't prepare meals from scratch. So not only is this classist it's also ablest...just throw all the isms on the pile!
This reminds me of when a bunch of people were complaining about precut vegetables and how lazy people bought them. They didn’t think about disabled people or those who just don’t have the time to make their own food from scratch
The worst is when, as someone disabled and chronically ill, you find out that a very particular kind of diet is actually what would help with managing symptoms, only to realize that it eliminates many of the kinds of long shelf life and easy to prepare foods you had previously relied on, and that there aren't easy replacements for those kinds of foods.
The trashiest food I can imagine is a meal of vienna sausages, generic saltines and those hostess frosted mini donuts. My dad was an over the road trucker when I was young and I would go with him in the summer. The healthiest things we had were hardboiled eggs and gatorade. Everything else was either truck stop food or stuff like what was above. As a kid I loved it, looking back, he was in his 40s and ate this way and as someone getting close to 40 myself that kind of breaks my heart. No one taught him nutrition.
man i loved those little powdered sugar donuts in the bag. Economically with bad parents, i would have those for breakfast whenever they came home late. also, same, no one taught me nutrition as a child. didn't get in shape and healthy till i was 43.
Same with my dad. He drove long hours, and was a construction worker. Had to get 4 heart stints put in at 50. He didn’t understand the food he ate was unhealthy.
Casseroles and canned foods were middle-class staples from the 1950s until the late 1990s. Truly poor people did their own canning and made soup from scratch. Then the Food Network changed everything, canned became lower class. Casseroles and canned food became "White Trash" only recently. It's old fashioned, that's all.
I’m latina and grew up in the ‘ghetto’ and I can honestly say I though casseroles were a rich white people thing lmao I never saw it as a poor thing. I guess we have a very different perception of poor. Loved this video though learned a lot. Edit: also Slim Jim’s were also a very expensive thing for me lmao
Same I always thought of casseroles as something your higher middle class white aunt brings to thanksgiving. I also never got to eat slim Jim’s very often because of how expensive they are lol
I had an """interesting""" childhood in the sense that we were kinda poor, but my dad worked as a sous chef. So while I did eat cheap food, he also gave us amazing culinary experiences. I mean one day I eat reheated kraft's mac and cheese and the next he whips up carpaccio or cassoulet.
same same same! I was a pretty poor kid but my dad was a head chef for 10 years and won himself a michelin star so we would have pretty crazy variation in meals over a week lol
Me too. Today looking back, im almost moved to tears when i think what awesome dishes my mom cooked with sometimes less then 100€ for the whole month. Limitations increase creativity (dont know how to translate this into english well) she always said.
My mom cooked good food until she didn't, it was time to move out at that point. No good food, meant time to leave home. It is hard to know what parents are like for other people, if it is a zero sum game, where all parents are the same regardless of what they do. I know my parents aren't great but, I know it could have been worse, much worse. Hearing some of the things other people have to go threw makes me glad for what I had. I wish it could have been better as well, but oh well.
My mom used to make "nine can soup", literally just nine cans of beans and vegetables mixed together. it would feed us for about a week, and it was actually pretty good.
Ooh that reminds me of "foil packets"!! Can of french onion soup, bunch of canned veggies, any cheap meat, roll it up in foil and throw it on the fire (or oven) for a while
Rebecca Williams that's a classic camping meal... chicken, rice, green beans and foil, you have an idiot proof meal scouts could cook without tasting like burned tires...
Omg I did this last spring! I was getting ready to move out of my dorm and I had to get rid of a bunch of food to avoid wasting it, so I got my last cans of tomato soup, threw in diced tomatoes, black beans and corn, and chili seasoning and random spices. There was probably other stuff I cant remember lol, but that was some pretty good soup. I didnt even get to finish it all before moving out 😭
As a child of ex-soviet immigrants I was raised on the concept of loving food, especially easily accessible and easily made food. When you asked me to imagine trashy food that I would never eat I honestly couldn't think of anything. When you started talking about casseroles and candy potato I got nostalgic because so much of the food I grew up with was made from similar ingredients. And in my country, eastern-European and Russian food is considered kind of trashy, weird (and it kinda is but I get to make fun of it because i actually tasted most of it), unsophisticated and with very bland taste. I totally felt everything you said in this video. This was very interesting, thank you for this video and for sharing your perspective.
Right? Those immediately caught my eye as well and then I looked at my books and thought, what if I sorted them by color, how nice would that look, but then would I do that just inside the subject categories, but it wouldn't be as dramatic as the set in her shot, but if I was going to choose books to have out like that, could I choose a set with those dramatic colors that would still represent books I wanted out for public consumption or would I need to choose books I wouldn't normally put out that don't represent ideas I want to portray just for the color some marketer choose to make the cover like Cokie Roberts' autobiography that has that dramatic blue-almost-purple? So yeah, that was a second and a half of thought I was carried away by....
I grew up in appalachia Ohio, you listing off "trash" food reminded me of my childhood. Casserole, pepperoni rolls, and canned food was eaten regularly. My wife was born and raised in China, and also grew up poor. Even though we would be considered upper-middle class now, our kids have grown up on the food of both of our childhoods. I don't care how well-off I become, pepperoni rolls and casserole will always be some of my favorite food.
One my friends said something to the effect of “everything that a peasant ate in the 1600s is trendy now”. Artisan sourdough bread, craft beer, cheese, “pot greens” like radicchio and arugula, beets
Sourdough bread is trendy? It's the most normal and boring bread where I come from. The most popular one I know is gray bread even the name is boring!😂
@@anname2678 People got tired of white bread, and wanted to be 'different from everyone else' by 'connecting with nature' (avoiding doing anything in common with the poor, basically). So yes, bakeries and 'whole food' in general now are trendy
I’m rewatching this video for a second time and it resonates so hard. I grew up Lower middle class, being raised by two teachers and living with my 2 sisters. we ate these things, these foods, grew up getting “new”clothes from church and goodwills. Thank you for making this video and making me feel so seen
As Thought Slime said, great quality videos are not being seen because they don’t meet the TH-cam algorithms or just luck. This is great! As someone who has “moved up” in class (from blue collar labor to white collar labor, even though I don’t feel rich, but maybe that’s the point? Keep me feeling poor), I feel like I have to distance myself from my upbringing to be accepted to get the capital necessary to help them out. But instead, I am paid like trash because I am trash so I can never get out. Thank you for this video! Subscribed and notified!
Indeed. As someone whose family didn't travel much, so my accent definitely isn't going anywhere unless I want to spend tens of thousands of dollars I don't have on elocution lessons, I totally get that feeling that people are just waiting for you to do something that fits a stereotype to mock you about it.
Also, even when I pointed out to one of the woke people in my office how that nobody thinks twice about mocking an Appalachian, she seemed to get what I was saying... until a day later when she was talking about needing to get work done on her teeth in order to avoid "a hillbilly grin." Without any malice, I said "a what?" three or four times before she got my point. Seeing as I have missing incisors because I didn't have the money for dental implants as a kid and lots of people have missing incisors, this one especially hurt.
@@wvu05 I'm really sorry to hear that happened to you with someone you trusted. Hopefully she'll learn from the experience. I feel that Appalachia is often overlooked by the leftist or "woke" community. It's totally unfair considering just how bad of a deal they've gotten, just how screwed they got by capitalism. But not only do they have a stereotype they also vote "wrong". Really, we need to be reaching out and try to be allies. Anyways... if you actually want to overcome your accent you might want to try looking on YT for hypnotherapy videos. I'm planning on finding one to fix my sleep schedule. They are surprisingly effective for stuff.
@@rosemali3022 At this point, my accent is what it is. I don't see it as something that needs to be "overcome." The people for whom that sort of thing matters are not the people who I want to impress. I have said for a long time that Appalachians are the last group that it is socially acceptable to mock. I'm not talking about Oppression Olympics stuff, just that there are certainly going to be less people who even think twice about saying such things. I remember a conversation in a class where someone wanted to insist that every bit of othering had to do with race (I'm really surprised that the women in the room didn't speak up about that one), and when I pointed out some of my experiences, he said that Appalachians get "racialized." No, because different groups deal with different things, and we shouldn't try to make them all the same for a convenient narrative.
This is VERY similar to how Black culture is exploited, and I think it just shows a pattern of how more privileged groups will try on the mantle of more marginalized ones "for the lulz," knowing full well they can cast it off whenever they want and not have to deal with the fallout of the mockery.
@@alexwr Cajun/creole food, all types southern bbq originated with how slaves slow cooked the scraps they were given into something delicious, many fashion trends like hoop earrings, acrylic nails, hair extensions, silk hair wraps. Also a lot of my white friends never listened to rap music until Eminem and then it was "like omg my favorite genre, saw raw and edgy" (that was a very 2006 argument and I don't know how old you are so you might not remember a time before rap was mainstream) but that's just a couple examples from the top of my head
TH-cam suggestions brought me here. This was a thought-provoking video! Trashiest food I grew up eating: Bean salad. Heinz beans served cold with mayonnaise, diced tomatoes, and Kraft parmesan. It’s more like soup. I liked it and was used to it, though I don’t eat it much anymore. Most people in my adult life have found it horrifying. 😂
I watched this for the second time. And I want to cry. To some extent, Filipino food is treated the same way as white trash food, if not worse. From travel bloggers, to academics, and even some locals themselves, our food was stamped "The Worst Food in the World". Some respected food critics would dispute this, and two American presidents have hired a Filipino as their head chef. But considering centuries of colonialism, some of our own people have deemed their local cuisine as "poor people" food and are embarrassed to serve them to foreign guests. Times are changing for the better now, and Filipino fine dining has grown a little bit...until covid came. We shall see what happens when this pandemic is over.
WORD. Food is all a matter of opinion and taste of course, but I am TIRED of white people touting their food and their culture as superior, always. I'm Filipino too and I had to deal with this while spending my teen years in Canada. Now I live in a different city in Canada, and while younger white folk are a bit better now about respecting my culture (still not great though tbh, ignorance/exoticism is still there), the old white folk are the WORST cause they just talk about anything foreign as like "oh so shocking can you believe that? Asian ppl eat dogs did you know??????"
I know I’m super late to the party but I just wanted to add my quick comment. I grew up as a Latino kid in Southern California but had never had the pleasure of trying Filipino cuisine (there wasn’t a big Filipino community in my town). That changed when I started dating a half Filipina/half white girl and I was literally blown away by everything I tried. Her parents would take us to different authentic Filipino restaurants in the San Fernando valley, especially those with a focus on food from her dad’s hometown of Cebu City. We always thought it was funny how the waiters would try to speak Tagalog to me after speaking with her dad. Even now years after that relationship ended I still go out and seek all of the wonderful foods I was introduced to even if it’s way out of my way. I think it’s a travesty how Filipino cuisine has been largely overlooked compared to their neighbors. In my opinion, it is not only as good as but better than all of the other more popular Asian cuisines.
So I'm not from the US, but The Netherlands. And this made me think of how when I was a kid I played with a boy in our street a lot. I was a little jealous of how often he got to eat pancakes. It is big fave with kids, usually a treat because it's not the healthiest. And only because I would't stop talking about how cool it was my friend ate pancakes so often, my mom told me it was because they're were struggling. All the ingredients are under or around an euro (eccept the eggs) and you can make a lot with it. Dutch pancake batter is quite thin. So yeah that made me shut up and think a bit (I was 6 or 7 I think).
I am from poland and pancakes/crepes were often ate in my home when i was a child, because as you said it’s pretty cheap (like 1 euro to make 20 crepes) to make and you can eat them with anything you have in your kitchen. Yoghurt, honey, ketchup, mayo, meat, vegetables, homemade jam, seasonal fruits-anything. Hell, i even survived on crepes when i moved out for the first time and was broke lmao
I'm also from the Netherlands and my idea of american white trash food was instant macaroni and cheese, and those american cheese single slices. But then I saw this video and saw many more I hadn't heard about. My idea of dutch white trash food is SPAM (called SMAC in the netherlands), macaroni salad, knakworst (vienna sausages but longer), breaded meat cuts, instant mashed potatoes and generally a food intake pattern that features fries and deep fried snacks 3 times a week or more.
The "trash food" that comes to mind immediately is TV dinners. I ate them all the time as a young kid because my parents worked offset schedules so that we would always have a parent at home. This had the side-effect of often neither of them having time to cook every night. I stopped eating them when we kids were old enough to cook and my Dad's hours changed so he was home a little more. Now I'm lucky enough to have the money and time to cook or eat out. The thing that makes me think of it as "trashy" is that it feels disposable. It always feels like just a step beyond a nutrient sludge that might satisfy your needs, with little regard for enjoyment. It takes no effort and you gain no real enrichment. I don't look down on those who eat them though. Especially with my past experience, I know why people get them and they are necessities for some. Something I've come to realize is that sometimes money isn't as important as time and having a lack of one often comes with a lacking in the other.
I’m horrified that we accept as normal any of the following situations. Having a family is a luxury,. 2 parents working to support a family. The complete illusion that there isn’t enough time to cook for a family (created by corporations who steal your productivity for themselves from your babies) The lie that there isn’t enough money to be paid to afford nourishing food, water, shelter and education. Big thanks to Politicians for perpetuating these lies to benefit their donors stealing your life for their profit.
@@zakosist Funny enough, I have been served dinner at work while working on a TV show. I used to work in VFX and this is somewhat common during crunch. :D
I've actually thought about writing a "white trash cookbook" consisting of meals I ate growing up. Tuna casserole, hamburger helper, hot dogs/chili dogs, baked beans with ham, minute rice with canned chili, and more that I can't think of right now. I still make a lot of these things today because they are cheap and easy to make.
I was talking to my husband about this video and gave him the examples of trash food (pigs in a blanket, RC Cola, casseroles) and he just replied, “Oh, you mean delicious food?” 😂😂
I made sloppy Joes and fries for my roommates and I for dinner one night and they were like “um... I haven’t had that since I was a kid. I’ll find something else for dinner.” And I felt genuinely offended
@@slamislife74 I don’t think they were intending to be mean, it was just kinda hurtful. Like what, you’re too good for sloppy Joe’s? We’re all broke college students.
This story plays out over and over with poor people all over the world. Quinoa is a good example. If people aren't ready to unpack these biases then how do we ever get to the rest?
@@prosquatter My point was that Ramen is dirt cheap, but ALSO gourmet. Think about any restaurant in America that sells Ramen comparatively in Japan at a low price of the equivalent of 5 dollars being sold here in America for 13 dollars and treated gourmet or fine dining.
@@WulfLovelace There will always be an ''upscale'' restaurant version of mundane foods. There are hamburgers that cost $100 in fancy restaurants, but a burger at your local fast food joint is still cheap. Problem arises when a staple food (like quinoa in Jessica's example) rises so much in price, that people who originally depended on it can no longer afford it. Same for lobster in Zoe's story.
I didn’t know “trashy food” was a thing and honestly couldn’t think of what would be considered trash food. Then she started listing all the things I grew up eating (and still do) and it clicked. Ooooh, right. Well, at least the trailer I grew up in was a double-wide and both my parents loved me lol
People have this perception of frozen and canned vegetables as being "lesser" than fresh, but it's nonsense. Freezing and canning makes vegetables accessible, reduces some of the huge amounts of food waste worldwide, and preserves nutrients.
adam ragusea made a great video on it, frozen food has gotten waaaaay better the past like 20 years, to the point that stuff like frozen meat and vegetables is essentially fresh.
A dietitian I talked to told me that the way they do Individually Quick Frozen foods these days, they are safer, fresher, and retain more nutrients the the "fresh" veggies that were picked pre-ripe and shipped on a truck
They do add quite a lot of sodium and unnecessary shit to canned veggies, and canned fruit is basically candy. Certain frozen foods are contested to potentially be better than fresh because of how well it preserves nutrients though.
@@aurelianjustice9622 I seem to remember that professional chefs use frozen peas for their fancy dishes because it makes them much better to work with for complicated cooking styles
@@nr5076 Living in the south greggs was a treat. Although that's probably because you can trace the north/south divide by number of greggs per city which just leads to the classism of the north/south divide in the first place.
@@envexenveritas clasy and a treat are also different things, Brighton rock, trifle, angel fluff or a battered sausage are all treats but it isn't food you'd find in an expensive restaurant
I find the aversion to casserole extremely interesting because in Germany they are a cultural staple with a long tradition. Every region has their own style of casserole and making one is part of the traditional housewife like baking apple pies is in the US. Also a tip for everyone: Casseroles are an amazing dish for having a group of friends over. Prepare it beforehand and put it in the oven when the first people arrive. It'll be done once everyone is there and you can spend the whole time with your guests without disappearing into the kitchen.
Yeah! I don't think Europe considers casseroles as lower class food.. there are so many forms of casserole all over Europe, very long traditional recipes. It's good eating.
One side of my family is Illinois German and the other is southern as far back as I can tell. I've always eaten casserole, of many different kinds. Green bean, chicken, leftovers, etc. It's a staple on both sides of my family
I was literally just waiting for the comparison to black-face... Not disappointed by what I got instead but the missed opportunity to brush on intersectionality was about the only con-crit I could offer her.
I’m glad i grew up near poor rural white people in my life. As a black person living in the projects nearby farmland down south it was always the poor white folks and poor black folks. And there were well to do white and black folks who lived in the big houses in the nicer neighborhoods. I was exposed to all types of classism and racism but it taught me that race or class isn’t the only ways to determine who a person is. I saw it on both sides and saw the similarities between the poor of both races and the well off of both races. Sad that the poor people would be going through the same things but hated each other for their race and ignorance of the other sides culture. But to this day i can see how similar the cultures are. Just been taught to hate and don’t understand the other side well enough.
I grew up in a very diverse area too. It always baffles me that people can know so little of each other but make such certain judgements on their character. There was classism and racism in my school but honestly if you wanted to get by you really needed to tolerate, at least tolerate, everyone. Otherwise someone would school you in the kids sense. Which meant alot of fights. But not alot of the constant tension I sense in isolated places.
Here's a "white trash" recipe for anyone who wants to try it: "The Alabama Possum's Delight": Get rice (any kind will do) and put it in a medium or even large sized pot Take 2 cups of water and pour it into the pot Set the stoves' eye to 2 or 4 Wait for the bubbles to appear and set it to low/simmer. Place the lid over the pot and let the rice cook for about 15 minutes. (Sprinkle some salt, pepper, and whatever seasoning you like) Get a skillet and pour three teaspoons of olive oil or veggie oil. Set stoves' eye to about 4 Take a can of spam (two cans could work too) Remove and cut the meat in thin slices, enough for everyone. (Incase you're eating with company) if alone, thick slices are good too. When the skillet heats up, place your spam slices to about five or even seven (depending on your skillet size) Cook one side for 2-5 minutes, then flip it over and repeat the process until it's golden brown or a little burnt. Don't worry, it can bring in the flavor. Then place in a bowl with a folded paper towel at the bottom. (To catch the grease so you'll have little to clean up) Once you've fried all of your slices your rice should be done Grab a plate (it can be paper, we ain't cooking for the King) If you have more than one plate, you can double stack to keep it steady Drink wise, It can go well with soda or sweet tea. For sauces, standard hot sauce will do just fine It ain't much, but it's filling, affordable, and if your heart's in the right place, it'll taste just fine
similarly, what gets to be called 'cuisine' vs not like 'street food'. for the longest time, only certain european based foods were called cuisine. only now are some other countries getting to call their food cuisine. and like with 'trashy food', its tied to economic status, but even more by ethnicities
As a broke college student, lemme give a quick casserole tip: if you want to amp up the flavor for free, cook it in a shallow dish instead of a deep one. You get more caramelization on the top, and I personally love the texture a lot more that way.
As someone who was raised in rural Ontario on a minister's salary, I feel this. Thank you Matt for showing me this. Zoe, I look forward to the follow-up; it sounds very interesting.
You mentioning cow tails brought me back immediately to my poor, rural childhood in north florida. I haven’t eaten one in years but I could almost feel the outer gelatinous coating
It's the same reason why being heavy used to be the socially desirable state: because rich people could afford to eat enough to get fat. Now, fattening food is cheaper, so it has inverted.
@@stevenmackintosh8160 Each of the last three years, I have taken part in a Lenten Food Stamp Challenge at my church. We limit ourselves to the food stamp budget and donate the difference between that and our normal food spending to an anti-hunger charity. Each of those three years, I gained two or three pounds in a month and a half. Try the challenge for long enough to see a difference and see what happens to you.
@@stevenmackintosh8160 Canned food, frozen food, and fast food is way cheaper than buying fresh fruits and vegetables or nice restaurant dinners, not to mention cooking a fresh meal costs a lot of time too when many people are working too often to have the energy to plan and cook meals. There are also food deserts, urban areas where there won't be fresh produce for miles, and the only groceries you can get are from the Dollar Tree or Walmart. Not everyone can afford Whole Foods, if there even is one close enough to shop at. What planet do you live on where that isn't true? I'll gladly move there.
@@KC-ep6sg Canned and frozen food is not less healthy than fresh thats another myth. Sometimes fresh is cheaper than frozen or canned it depends on the type of veg or fruit. Yes cooking takes time but thats not anything to do with expense. Its more a skill that unfortunatly most people dont have. I grew up eating trash food, but in adulthood learned how to make really easy cheap healthy meals; its not hard when you know how.
I once overheard a upper class person try to explain to a lower class person why a yogurt is healthier then a chocolate pudding. The lower class person pointed out that both had 28 grams of sugar and 2 grams of protein so there wasn't really a difference. This broke the upper class person's brain.
I literally only grew up with homemade "curd" which is usually served savory. Then went to a friend's house and discovered yoplait and chobani... how did western capitalism manage to fuck up yogurt so bad...
My mother-in-law only buys the excessively over processed yogurts like yoplait and activia. She doesn’t usually remember to eat them either.... I won’t actually bother to eat them until they are at LEAST six months after the sell by date. I grew up eating actual yogurt that didn’t have sugar in it. The yogurt my mother-in-law buys just tastes like pudding to me. It starts to actually taste like real yogurt if I let it ripen in the fridge six months to a year. I’m keep wondering why she doesn’t just buy pudding and actually eat it. I also wonder why she doesn’t let me pick out yogurt I actually like.
I grew up incredibly poor at times and am forever grateful to the efforts of my parents for always attempting to put "good" food on the table even if it meant making a lot of other sacrifices. Many others around me growing up were even poorer so I never felt any shame about our situation though I was frightfully aware of it. I think the only time I felt poor shame was the first time I answered the door and there were people from the state there looking to take our house away. As an adult I find myself getting sad if I'm ever in a situation that forces me to eat what I now personally consider "poor" food. Usually I am willing to spend a large portion of my income on "good" food b/c it so strongly affects my mental health. This all swings back to my poor upbringing as well as how I initially ate when first setting out on my own. Just wanted to share as I really appreciate all the work that went into creating this video and conversation.
As our most important resource, food is soooo commonly the number one thing tied up with our trauma and mental health if we grew up poor. I constantly overpurchase food for the pantry and cook too-large meals. And it can very much be traced back to my perception of lack up until middle school, when my mother took on a second job. Suddenly we had more food, a larger house with bigger kitchen to store said food, and a greater variety of processed quick foods from the commercials on tv (even if it was the store brand). Thus it became cemented in my subconscious that food=security=love.
@@lavendarcrash2941 I'm in the UK, but this form of food insecurity can really carry through your life. My father, for instance, grew up in a household where, while there was food on the table every day, there was always a threat that they wouldn't have a lot of food. He reminisces on days where their dinner was white bread and tinned peaches because that's all that was in. And he carries that trauma. He's doing well, but he always worries that the portions he gives aren't enough (they are) and he ALWAYS clears his plate.
As a Pennsylvanian, when you mentioned potato candy, so many fond memories lit up in my brain of the holidays (where my grandpa would ask my mom and I to make it) that I got some tears in my eyes. My dad and I still go out digging for leaks and foraging for berries. Both of which we use for eating. My mom makes "leak dip" which is chopped up leaks, jar cheese whiz and some other stuff. I've even made quite a bit of violet syrup and have been debating drying out dead nettle, henbit, and ground ivy for seasoning.
I'm not from the US. As an outsider looking in, all of these are just typical American food to me. It's the stuff I see in movies, TV shows and the international sections of our supermarkets. Most of them are more expensive than our local versions, because they have to be imported. It's a bit like your lobster example.
Yes, the obsession with American culture has increased obesity rates abroad. Look at the UAE & their love for American food. Here in the US we know it’s junk and stay away; unless you’re poor or uneducated about healthy nutrition
Same for here in the Philippines. All these imported American foods look prestigious, and they are placed on the expensive junkfood aisles separated from our local ones that are much cheaper.
Brings to mind a line from Frasier where snobby Niles says to elitist Frasier when trying to convince him to give fast food a whirl, "oh come on, you've sample the peasant cuisine of france, italy, and Spain. Why ignore the peasants in our own back yard."
When she said “picture the trashiest food you can think of” my mind immediately went to Joy from My Name Is Earl squirting ketchup onto a plate of spaghetti in lieu of marinara sauce.
I remember I used to eat green bean casseroles, pigs in a blanket, and all that stuff a lot as a kid but as I grew older my Mom stopped making them very often. This video makes me realize, that combined with her improved cooking skills, it's probably because my family was more well off in my adolescence than my grade school years.
This was an interesting video for me. I'm a Texan, and I actually had no idea that there was such a stigma attached to any of the foods she mentioned. It's just the reality that I've known all my life. When she got to the part where she asked, "what's a food that you wouldn't stoop to eat," I was stumped, because I realized she meant "by the status that it implies or its health value," and I've always been of the mind of, "if it's what I'm in the mood to eat and I've got enough money in my pocket to buy it, that's what I'm getting," and I ALWAYS buy the cheapest, knockoff store brand of everything at the grocery store (or deli food that's been marked down to 50% off, because they're about to throw it out). The few times I encountered someone sticking their nose up at these kinds of foods, I just dismissed them as "high falutin" douchebags who were trying to make themselves feel better by dissing me, so I shrugged them off. I will say that this kind of food snobbery is relatively rare in most of Texas, though. Just about everyone here, rich or poor, loves chili pie...and we damn sure ate a lot of it to stay warm during the recent snow storm, lol. That being said, I still liked the way Zoe dove deeper into the issue than I'd ever considered. Cheers!
“The trashiest food you can imagine” Immediately my mind went to those orange cheese puffs. Not Cheetos. Those cheese balls. With Cheetos texture (I assume??). The ones that come in a biiiiig bucket-like jar
It's nutritional, but it is a sorta bottom of the barrel dish. "tiger soup" is the largely spent carcass of a chicken, boiled until the last bits of meat and flavour come off into a broth, is bulked up with rice and flavoured with lemon juice. My mum always made it with chicken carcasses after a roast or something: it was largely recycled from a previous, more expensive meal and is thus extremely cheap to make. I love tiger soup and take pride in the fact that I can rinse 5 or more meals out of a small chicken: one roast, one curry one stir fry, and at least 2 bowls of tiger soup. With a large one, I can make a small family lunch, dinner, and lunch the next day: that last lunch will be tiger soup. Try it, it's good. The rice soaks up the broth as it cooks and becomes very flavourful.
That transition was MASTERFUL! One of the best transitions I've seen in a youtube video. Really engages the audience, turns everything on it's head, beautiful.
The 50s and 60s in America were a culinary dark age with the combination of microwaves, jell-o and canned food so it likely happened then. Not all moms are good cooks :(
I'm with you Finni, a well made casserole can be amazing comfort food. I'm not talking about the 5 cans of condensed soup varieties though which is what most people have experienced lol
When you said "seasonal work like agriculture" around the 9 min mark, it put the stark image in my mind that the people growing, picking, and and packaging organic produce and other "luxury" food items can't afford to eat them. What a shameful practice for society to uphold.
growing up as a Latino in a white community I can say that there were several different times when my food culture clashed with the majority. Thankful I was accepted but I know people who weren't. To me food can tell so much about someone and their culture. Food is food to me, and I will keep on eating what I enjoy.
bee affirmations canned tuna & mayo, salt & pepper. Wrapped in a flour tortilla because you're out of bread. 👍 also try dipping nacho Doritos in tuna salad, it just works i swear to god.
I did not come from a “white trash” family. We were middle class and lived in the suburbs but still at the edge. A close enough drive to the sticks for me to spend a lot of my time and have friends there. I grew up with “trashy” foods though and even now I find myself making them a lot. Not only because I love them and grew up on them but because I can’t afford a lot of the more “rich” dishes I ate as a kid. (Hey I’m a broke kid who graduated collage with a bachelors in graphic design and an associates in animal behavior. I work for 29K /yr at an animal shelter and have a dog of my own to look after.) We always made this really delicious chicken and rice dish. We would buy whole chickens then what we didn’t use for other meals we would shred and cook in our instant pot with butter and cartots and rice and milk and peas and broccoli and if we had any we’d use heavy cram and it was always my favorite dish, still is. I still make it all the time and I remember the first time I made it for my friends they laughed at me for making “trash food” and I didn’t cook it for like a year after. It is good though, I can’t believe I ever stopped eating it because I was embarrassed.
I assume someone will already have said it but it's so, so easy to connect this with a discussion of ableism. Regardless of income, a lot of ND/ASD/disabled/majorly depressed or otherwise non able bodied or minded people will eat trash food because it's all they can make due to lack of energy or dexterity and are thus also designated "trash".
i'm probably late to this but like it's deeply weird to me that "white trash" and "trash" are used so interchangeably here. it's not really a critique, and i think it's important that poor white people are acknowledged in a way that centers their class struggle, but it also felt really...off as a black american to hear "white trash" treated as a basically racially neutral term. like your poor foods are generally our poor foods too, esp. for black families in urban + suburban areas, but there's a difference in the way black and white people are treated when they eat 'trash' foods, and also in the perception of the economic class of people who eat them. (not to mention the places where our 'trash food' diverges like chitlins and gizzards and sugar grits which is a whole other conversation.) a lot of this is driven by the legacy of slavery and segregation so like it's not uncommon for some black families with a nominally higher income than some 'poor whites' to have basically the same levels of wealth and the same culturally driven tastes, but esp. in urban areas they definitely aren't coded as 'white trash' but 'ghetto,' our tastes serving as evidence not of a lack of class but of some larger cultural pathology inherent to our race. again, a lot to unpack, but it adds an extra dimension to this discussion that i think is worth exploring alongside the racial element of "white trash". i also think there's a world of difference between "white trash" as a white intraracial conversation (which i *think* is what is happening in this video but not made explicit) and "white trash" being used by people of color. poc usually use the phrase as a reaction to racism, to (cruelly) remind poor white people that they aren't superior to us just because of their skin color, but we generally aren't the ones throwing "white trash" parties (esp. black people, who again are largely eating the same caliber stuff bc of intergenerational poverty and food deserts). when the rich white people who do this shit, do this shit, it's classism motivated by the fear of losing their access to wealth or just straight up bigotry. (also something something colonizing and commodifying 'foreign' experiences etc) love the video, i think i just wanted this comment to kinda fill in some missing context! (p.s. jd vance just...whew. wish that man would go away.)
Okay, but she’s talking about *her* experiences. I think it’s unsettling that you say “it needs to be focused on” and then when it *is,* you criticize it. You can’t have it both ways.
@Emi L I can definitely see why you feel that way, but I think that might be intentional. She's reclaiming a term that was used to describe her and people with her background. I think the point is a little bit to make you uncomfortable. And honestly I'm pleasantly astounded by the conversation it's stirred up. Her viewers are much better conversationalist than most of TH-cam. The comment proceeding this is excellent. I think the purpose of focusing only on "white trash" instead of poverty foods in general with merely for simplicity, personal experience, and a bit of shock value. But I agree and I think she does too, that it deserves to be expanded on in a way that includes more than the white experience. I would suspect she would prefer it be a different video for times sake. Or perhaps she's hoping a creator might respond and bring in their experiences. I miss the day when we could reply to each other's videos. Lol sorry, I'm new here so a bit of gushing and thrill at find this community has seeped in.
Yeah, it struck me as really odd that a video that used the term "white trash" so many times didn't include any comment on why "white" is in there in the first place. There's a reason why we have a term for "white trash" specifically and not the same term for any other ethnic group, and, at least as I understand it, that's rooted in racism. Regardless of how it's used or who is using it, the term only exists because we live in a system that disproportionately values whiteness. It's like saying, "despite the fact that you're white, you're still trash," which of course can only be said if you live in a society where somehow "white" and "trash" are contradictory.
Phrases like "white trash" are used by rich white people to separate different parts of the the working class community, and pit poor white people and poor POC against eachother. If they tell poor POC that the ignorant, violent, racist ones are the "white trash" and tell the "white trash" that their enemy are POC, neither of them are fighting the rich white people.
Can we share casserole "recipes" here? This week I made green bean casserole, but added Italian sausage to the mix and topped it with stovetop stuffing before baking. It was really good.
I grew up in the Midwest eating tater tot casserole: a pound of ground beef, a can of cream of mushroom soup, a block of Velveeta cheese, and a layer of tater tots. Toss it in the oven at 350° for ~45 minutes or until the tots are golden and the cheese is bubbly. Even as an adult, I still make this occasionally - it holds a lot of nostalgia for me.
There's one my family makes that I love. I don't know the exact recipe but it's basically Velveeta shells and cheese, ground beef, and extra/different kind of cheese, mixed together and baked with another type of cheese on top (some kind of cheese that gets crispy), also sometimes there'll be an extra crunch added on top, crushed up Cheetos or Doritos or something similar! It's really good. There could also be some kind of canned or frozen vegetables added to the mix, like peas or chopped string beans, otherwise it's served with a salad or something on the side. Edit: missing an ingredient, tomato! Crushed, chopped, or sauce.
Here's my mum's pizza casserole, courtesy of rural Ontario and the 80's: Cook up a pile of whatever pasta you've got around and toss it into the casserole dish, then chop up some pepperoni, Italian sausage, or similar and toss it in with the pasta. Then pour in a can of spaghetti sauce, and add some canned mushrooms, stewed tomatoes, etc, if you've got them around/if you're trying to stealth some veggies into the fam. You can also toss in some extra chunks of cheese to make it extra gooey. Top with mozzarella, and bake at around 350, until the cheese is getting bubbly and browned - around 40 mins. My roomies in uni *loved* this stuff!
@@maxthemannequin4143 Same thing for me, but no velveeta. Instead when it was done, we’d put a slice of white American kraft cheese on each slice we took and let it melt. Actually amazing
My mom has this really good hash brown casserole recipe that actually came from my grandma when she was a single mom. It’s just hash browns, cream of chicken soup, shredded cheddar cheese, and sour cream, all covered in a bunch of corn flakes. It’s really good, and it has a funny story too. When my aunt moved out for the first time, she begged my grandma for the recipe, thinking it was some family recipe, and my grandma was just like “uhhh… it’s literally on the back of the corn flakes box lol”
"Think of the trashiest food you can imagine." "unseasoned half-cooked chicken, raw steak, washed eggs." "*proceeds to list actually edible things* "oh"
Those Jamaican Jerk Chicken patties in the freezer section, chopped up on a Mama celete Pizza folded in half and eaten like a taco. Eaten on your lunch break at your strip mall job behind the dirt mall.
I mean I don't it personally because it's not healthy for you at all. But I don't think it's trash. I just wish everyone could afford healthy food but I know that people are just trying to survive.
I am vegan but I often feel the need to clarify to people that I am "a terrible vegan" and I think it's because I still eat trashy foods. I eat vegan hot dogs cut up and mixed into vegan macaroni. I eat handfuls of vegan tofurky slices straight out of the package. Convenience is #1 for me because I am usually too depressed to cook "proper" food. I guess there is some internalized shame for not eating bougie vegan food made from all fresh organic produce.
I make “beanie weenie” with vegan dogs in canned beans with ketchup. Lol. I’m also fortunate to eat a lot of organic produce. Love the Aldi brand “chicken” patties on bread like it’s school lunch. Haha
No wonder people think it's too expensive to do. :/ How many of those types even do research on what brands or places they support? Not enough to support that holier-than-thou attitude. We don't live in a world where perfectly aesthetic, ethical consumption is feasible.
I am a poor vegan. So I have to limit the specialty foods. I am improving my diet. So I am avoiding junk food and eating cheap healthy staples like rice, potatoes, oats, beans, lentils etc. For veggies I buy frozen and get stuff from Imperfect Produce. You can eat pretty healthy on a budget if you eat a starch based diet and buy your starches in bulk. I get my rice in 50 lb bags from Costco via Instacart. I normally buy beans 20 lbs at a crack. Potatoes 10 lbs at a crack. Bulk packs of oats from Costco etc. I even get my soy milk by the case from Costco.
This video has really made me grateful that I have a mom who has the time & energy to cook for us, and does it well. I see all these comments about living off of the bare minimum, and I just wish I could have y'all over for dinner and make sure you're nourished. Hunger by necessity is something no one deserves to experience, least of all growing kids. I'm also really grateful to have access to the resources to cook for myself (at least at my parents' home), and it pains me that I took for granted the fact that I can just... cook shit... and have access to ingredients. Like, I have celiac disease and sensory issues with taste/texture, and it's absolutely a luxury that I can afford to feed myself and stay healthy on my gluten-free diet. And it shouldn't be a luxury, but it'd be naive of me to stick my head in the sand and ignore my privilege here. Idk where this comment is headed; I guess, to the people who can sit down for a home-cooked meal with the family, please be thankful, because it might have never occurred to you that people have it any way else (it sure didn't occur to me for most of my childhood, but then again I am a bit hollow in the noggin lmao)
I relate to this, as this experience an analogue to Black culture being appropriated by the wealthy white folks who never want to celebrate the Blackness which bore it.
“I want you to think of the trashiest food you can imagine.” This made me realize how much I love food. Any food that is edible is not trashy in my opinion. Sure, there are food I wouldn’t eat just because I don’t like their taste or because they come from sources I’m not comfortable eating, but I wouldn’t call any of those trashy. Edit: Just finished the video and I realize the reason I don’t have ‘trash foods’ is not because I love food but because I wasn’t raised in a culture that considers some food ‘trash foods’.
i feel sort of the same, but i do consider all the american processed foods that have 0 nutritional value outside of carbohydrates to be trashy, like wonderbread. it doesn't have anything to do with culture, just the fact that those foods are utterly soul-less and actively make you feel worse.
This was like being hit right between the eyes, because I straight up did not know a lot of these were “trash foods,” and grew up eating a lot of the things listed. I guess by these standards, the trashiest things I ate were two dishes we called “rice stuff” and “cheesy rice stuff.” The first was a bunch of rice and a can of cream of mushroom soup, and the second was rice, steamed frozen corn, and velveeta. Both were very good, imo
@@devenblackwell5690 ironic given the regular risotto started out as “poor people food”/“trash food” for rural Italians. Now it’s served at upscale Italian restaurants alongside historically high class dishes
@@alissaceruzzi3581 like fashion, food goes in an and out of “style” but people don’t go in and out of poverty. The tend to stay there as the rich intend :(
Ikr, dang! I thought "trashy" was going to be more of the typical unhealthy walmart food, but I loved this stuff growing up. Tuna noodle cassarole is the _bomb_
I came back to this video, because I struggle a lot with cooking because of my disabilities. And your list of features of trash foods is honestly kind of ideal as a starting point.
Interesting backstory on the lobster. Reminds me of how exposed brick and hardwood floors used to be considered low class, until new technologies drove down the price of plaster/drywall and carpeting. Then came the reversal.
I've never thought of casserole as a trash food and was surprised to learn that's a common opinion. In my mind trash food was always cheap food that had little nutritional value, foods that corporations aggressively advertise to poor people to take advantage of the fact that they often can't afford to invest in more nutritious products.
Thank you. I never understood this particular human interaction, so I never got why people gave me odd looks when I ate cheap food. (Or why I got pushback when suggested eating it as a way to cut expenses in a fiscal emergency.) I've found soup gets around this behavior. I just say, "The broth is homemade." and suddenly I'm a foodie. All I did was save my bones and boil them.
Excellent video! It really excellently puts into words a certain unease I've had for a while about the currently-popular meme(?) on Twitter of Americans making disparaging Bri'ish jokes. To be clear upfront I like many of the jokes when they actually make sense and in no way think British people are some kind of an oppressed group, but some really common jokes do just feel like extremely thinly-veiled classism. Like the apparent obsession with jellied eels (a food which I doubt more than 0.1% of the UK population has ever even tried) because "haha funny gross Bri'ish food" completely fails to recognise that jellied eels is popular with Cockneys because you can get eels (and no other kind of fish) straight out of the Thames and cheaply cook them to make them just about edible, which would often be your only way to eat, because Cockneys are historically extremely poor working-class people. Most jokes about British food, in fact, totally ignore that historically the upper classes would've just eaten what we think of as "French" cooking, as would have the upper classes of many other European societies. So the only identifiable natively British meals would naturally be extremely cheap, easy things made by the working class (take beans on toast - you get your tin of beans and your government-issued standard white bread and put them together because that's all you have left for a week). Then of course rationing during the war on a scale many Americans probably don't understand exacerbated these divides and completely changed an entire generation's relationship with food. I think it's easy for otherwise very considerate Americans to make these jokes because, since they're not from the UK and probably don't know much of its social history, they don't realise that the group they're actually disparaging isn't the colonising imperialists*, it's just working class people. In short, they can feel like they're punching up, even though they're really punching down. The same applies with a lot of the jokes about accents, but that's unrelated to this video. *I of course recognise that nigh on every person in the UK benefited from imperialism and has an obligation to understand and be mindful of that, but you know what I mean here, the people making the decisions and the direct profits weren't eating jellied eels, they were eating roast hog.
Howdy, I'm an American (obviously, from the use of "howdy") and I'll be honest with you, I really dig the sound of jellied eels. I'm not entirely certain as to the intent of other folks, but I personally don't care to discriminate other peoples' food, nor for other folks to do so either. Please do not be discouraged by some folks' either ribbing nor malicious intent. Please have a pleasant day.
@@TheThescottydont Howdy! Yeah, I do also suspect that classism aside, if jellied eels were from Asia so that white ppl could do an Asian mysticism to it, people would suddenly jump to its defense and say it's a delicacy lol.
I'm glad im not the only one that thinks that about said memes.. and the ones that are like 'lol all british food is brown and bland' even if they are sometimes funny Much of the foods on those lists are things that were eaten by often very poor working class brits, and still are in many cases, and while im no expert on the topic, spices, sauces etc were unaffordable, if you could even get them at all thanks in part to ww1/2 and what appears to be an attitude that 'fancy' foods werent for the poors, and were to be eyed with suspicion means many people would avoid them anyway (thats going a bit off topic though)
@@ratchetfox8111 Yeah, in general pretty much all the foods ppl make jokes about are very much working-class foods. Americans also don't at all understand the scale of rationing during the second world war. It not only changed what people could eat at the time, but if you think about the fact that most people learn cooking and seasoning etc from their parents when they're growing up, millions of people grew up in a time when their parents _could only make_ the simplest and blandest of foods. So it completely broke that intergenerational exchange, and a lot of people never learned more classic cooking techniques (mainly what we would think of as French food, stews and braises etc) that would've been commonplace in even some working class homes before the war.
The trashiest food I can think of is probably Twinkies because when you compare them to other garbage foods like Oreos or hot chips, there is no way to feel good eating them. I'm a sweets person and I've gone to some extreme lengths to get my sugar fix from time to time, but Twinkies make me feel genuinely awful inside. Nothing about their taste or texture is worth the feeling of utter disgust that comes with thinking "oh god I just ate that and it's inside me now" Edit: for the first couple of minutes I thought this video was talking about trash food as in "food that is bad for you" and not "food that acts as a symbol of someone's socioeconomic class". I want to apologize if my Twinkies rant was a bit heated and I also want to clarify that I mean no ill will to those who enjoy Twinkies or grew up eating them. You all can do something that I can't so feel free to make fun of my weird food taste in the replies
Idk I always associate trash food with really unhealthy or cheap food What I imagined was french fries soaking with grease. Why? Idk really lol, but there was a time in my life that I would eat those literally every day. I feel soooo bad even remembering that
Potato Candy sounds amazing. After my mom made juice from concentrate we were not allowed to fill a dixie cup with it. We just put a small amount in the bottom of the cup and then filled the rest with water. I did not realize this was weird until a friend came over and after I offered him a cup of this diluted mixture he said "noooo gross!!!
i remember growing up with a single parent eating things like green bean casserole and hamburger soup. as a kid in highschool, the whole kahoot thing was taking off, and my teacher asked everyone to pull out their phones. i didn't have one, and the teacher looked at me and said "what you don't have a phone? oh your parent's must love you" in a sarcastic voice. talking down to me for not having this device, as if it meant i was unloved. i corrected her and said "parent, i only have one" and suddenly it was all apologies. but would it even have mattered if i had two? do people hate poor people that much, that they would ridicule a kid for being poor and not having the devices that all their peers have?
This is part of the reason why the school I went to in highschool started issuing out laptops to every kid.
If lazy-brained fools would quit associating poverty with becoming a criminal and made any effort at all to understand why crime is higher in poverty stricken areas (The real reasons why, not THeY're PoOR sO TheY JUsT DOn'T CARe LolLOl) maybe they'd invest more time into thinking before they blurt out discriminatory, braindead remarks.
I never had the stigma like you did but I didn't get a phone till I was in 11th grade and I also had a single parent grew up below the poverty line fuck people who talk down on people for not being born into money it's bullshit
"Do people hate poor people that much?"
Yes. Yes they do. Because our society has trained people that outside inherent traits - skin color, sexuality, gender identity, ancestry, etc - the worst thing you can be is poor, and every poor person is a threat to you as a thief, attacker, or worst of all an usurper who will take your place as Not-Poor if you ever become poor.
Hells yeah! Cock's comb soup, questionable vegetable material, all swimming in hot chilé that makes you temporarily blind if you rub your eye... This is my childhood wrapped up in a newspaper!
“i want you to think of the trashiest food you can imagine”
“i can’t think of anything”
-starts listing off the food i usually eat
“ah yeah, that’s why”
I'm only really surprised ramen isn't in the bunch. 5 to a dollar and its pasta.
Literally
@@grimsage5809 I guess you mean instant Ramen, not Ramen.
@@twm0904 Fair difference to make, yeah.
@@grimsage5809 I suspect it's not just price but association as well? I associate ramen with students, maybe struggling artists or someone penny-pinching to get a business off the ground. It's cheap, but not a high-fat high-sugar low-status staple. Just... incredibly cheap.
Another consideration is that while it's cheap, it uses "primary" agricultural products, mostly wheat flour. The white trash foods listed are remarkably often animal-derived, and the only way you can get animal products really cheap is if they are leftovers: rinds, and the scraped-off-bones bits of meat which don't look appealing and so get turned into sausages of all kinds. You don't raise a pig for the rinds, you raise it for the ham which you can sell at a premium, and the skin is pretty much waste which you deep fry to sell to the poor.
Something similar goes for the RC Cola, which I expect is based on corn syrup, which is pretty much a corn subsidy waste product.
You will probably be shocked by this. I grew up in Alaska in the 1970s and 80s. Back then getting fresh food from “outside” our name for anywhere outside of Alaska, was not consistent, reliable, or cheap; and frankly often rotten by the time it got to us. The large military presence in Alaska ensured a nearly endless supply of canned goods, but for fresh food we hunted, gathered, fished and to a small extent, due to the very short season, grew our own food. Alaska is dark all winter long and with an abundance of moose, as well as icy, slick roads, well, you get the picture, dead moose on the roadway routinely. Every town had a road kill list, it was a list of every family in town. When your name came up the state troopers would call you when there was a dead moose in the roadway. You would then gather you family, friends and neighbors. You’d go clean up the road way and spend the next day cleaning, butchering and packaging moose to go in the freezer. I grew up eating Road kill on nearly a daily basis.
What a great story. And I guess since it was cold, the meat wouldn't spoil before it could be collected. It's actually kind of ingenious. (Best not say that or some rich asshole is going to "gentrify" it.)
That's badass
Fantastic not to waste that fresh meat!
Was it only done for moose or could you sometimes get fucked over by your name coming up for the rotation on a small mammal instead?
I hope this doesn't come off wrong- but as someone with absolutely no experience eating roadkill or moose- I'd love to try this some day. Specifically from someone or someone's family that know what to do given a dead moose, because if I tried to prepare that I might poison myself.
In a similar vein to this, thrift shopping has gone from a necessity for lower income families to a treasure hunt for resellers.
Instead of providing good quality preowned clothing at reasonable prices to people who simply cannot afford new or high quality items, thrift shops now adjust pricing to reflect this new secondary market.
People have been generally looked down on for wearing preowned clothing. The quality of the garments is irrelevant to this shaming, the stigma has been attached to the method of obtaining the item.
The bulk of thrift items are still considered trash, but now there are people going into thrift stores with the explicit purpose of finding the good items to sell for a profit.
Instead of lower income folk getting access to essential things within their budget, people with means are coming in and swiping up all the decent quality 'bargains' and driving up prices.
Honestly this has always been the way, it's just more transparent now with online secondhand shops and crafttok/tube. I still remember doing a thrift tour of a new city, and running into a consignment shop owner at the Value Village, arms bursting with garments. I knew she owned a consignment shop bc I had walked out of her store the prior day, because it was too expensive.
This.
I vividly remember going thrift shopping with my mom and older sister as a child. I didn't understand it at the time, but my sister was so embarrassed to be shopping there, and was afraid one of her classmates might see us in there
its looked down upon to wear second hand? what?? i got some all leather boots that would cost 200$ new, for 30$. same idea with some sports shoes (sports shoes here cost 100$, and i eat through them with violent movements in a year or so)
I don't think thrifting hasn't become popular only because of "trendy resellers" but also because there has been a growing push towards ethical buying, especially in clothes. Buying clothes second hand means you aren't contributing to fashion waste or fast fashion. There's a whole class of people who are not wealthy enough to be able to afford higher-end more ethical clothing pieces, but are wealthy enough that they can *choose* to buy second-hand, instead of it being their only option, but I don't think these people should be shamed for choosing to go thrifting instead of supporting unethical clothing practices. And of course there are people who have a very specific sense of style, which is easier to nourish in a thrift store than standard retailers
“Suddenly what I ate wasn’t weird anymore” every East and South Asian kids felt this in our souls 😭😭😭
also west asians
And Columbians now that Encanto came out and everyone thinks it's cool to eat arepas
I remember seeing a Thai friend at the school cafeteria. He had leftovers from home or an Asian restaurant, wrapped in aluminum foil. It was rice and vegetables and whatever meat and spices, I couldn't tell what dish, and I don't know Thai food well enough. I had had either a school lunch or a sack lunch sandwich from home, typical white American solution. I remember telling him his food looked way better than what I had had. Luckily, he didn't feel obligated to share, since I had already eaten and we were just saying hi. But that has always stuck with me. What he may have felt was embarrassing, leftovers, I thought looked great. Of course, he may have been proud of his food too, I hope so. What he had was genuinely tastier and healthier than either a sack lunch sandwich (processed food), or the school lunch (OK but overcooked, bland, not as tasty or healthy as it could be). We graduated and moved on, lost contact. But that memory, seeing how good his food was, stuck with me. I live in a big city, very ethnically diverse, people from all over the planet, both visitors, immigrants, and native-born but many sources. (And I find myself asking why I haven't tried more Asian and Indian food. I should fix that.)
Years ago when I was working with my mom, we went out for lunch to a local Chinese buffet after one of our favorite Chinese restaurants had closed down. As we were leaving the buffet restaurant, it was the heat of summer and we heard the back door to the kitchen was open. Instead of Chinese, we heard rapid Spanish from the cooks! :D We both had a good laugh about it. (Hey, we like Mexican food too.) But there was more to it. The restaurant was run by Chinese immigrants, and those Spanish-speaking cooks were also immigrants. Both groups were struggling to get ahead and help their families and others to immigrate. So two "minority" groups, sizable in my city, were helping boost each other into middle class American citizenship. The food was pretty good, and we ate there several times. I don't recall if my mom and I really discussed it, but we both knew that was the situation. That the food wasn't just Chinese-American, but Asian-Latino-American :D was fine: It's what makes America at our best, people from all over making something new and better from all those different sources. -- That is a truth all those MAGA nuts will never understand. I LIKE the variety of my city. I like that there are people from all over. My city wouldn't thrive without that, both multi-generation native-born folks, and brand-new residents.
I read this exactly when she said it
"I want you to think of the trashiest food you can imagine."
*glances down at cheapest instant hotcoco mix i'm eating directly out of the can, dry*
"Hotpockets!"
How do i do this you don't ask? a very tiny spoon
oh crap i just noticed the tiny spoon earing, that was not a reference to that. i really do have a tiny spoon.
10/10 😆
but water stretches that out longer.
Pizza Pops! (In Canada)
Rich people: Eat this trash
Poor people: Alright we will figure out how to make this taste good
Rich people: Wait now I want it
@James Henry Smith ?
Rich people: And I will price it out of your range of affordability.
@James Henry Smith ....
@James Henry Smith I guess so, but I don't think he mentioned black or white. I suppose that in a way, trash food, white or otherwise, became the soul food in an age where the cheapest foods are the most processed and unhealthy, and the original soul food became popular, ingredients went up, and many who ate soul food cause they could afford it were priced out of it .
That’s basically the history of Southern bbq. Slow cooked unwanted meats to make them taste better
I didn't know casserole was "trashy" until right now. I always knew I was poor but I never considered how many things that are completely normal to me would be looked down on by other classes.
It isn't in the normal parts of the world. I never heard an Italian say that lasagne is trashy😂
@@orui9197takes too much work, American + Italian genes = lots of spaghetti, goulash, & just pasta and butter
It's funny -- my parents, moving up the social ranks, abandoned casseroles. I've brought them back because they're good, I just stay away from the creamed soups, making my own.
Just do what the french/swiss do: call them gratin, and it sounds fancy ;)
I don't think anyone thinks casserole is trashy. As someone from the upper class surrounded by white trash, my community was very judgemental of white trash growing up, and I have never heard anyone make fun of casserole.
When the people I know made fun of white trash, the jokes were about meth labs exploding in trailer parks. I've never heard of someone making fun of their food choices.
As a Chinese kid who was made fun of consistent for the school lunches I would bring, I feel this so much. It especially hurt when I saw one of my childhood bullies tweeting out that she was eating szechuan food and how exotic it was.
Filipino here, hate how sometimes people think they’re special because they just tried sweet purple yams (ube)
Hi, I’m from Eastern Europe and I would get made fun of for bringing Nutella filled crepes and pomegranates 😂
@@senadarakic1813That sounds delicious to be honest
@@senadarakic1813 that would be a really rich kid lunch where I'm from haha
@@senadarakic1813 This trips me out. When I was a kid, we were dirt poor surfers (only got good boards and wetsuits from winning contests and getting sponsored, or selling a lot of weed). But punk rock surfer kids always ended up with rich girlfriends. And in every one of their houses: Nutella. This was the early 80's, and no one I hung out with or anyone in their families ever went to Europe. Wayyy too expensive. Nobody traveled anywhere, except to the next town, when we ran out of food and went to eat at my aunt's house. But these rich girls all went to Europe every year almost, and their families got onto Nutella there. It meant "rich people" to us. Funny how shit gets twisted around. Like the Lobster change-up from poor to rich people food that she talked about early in her video here. I still remember eating Nutella on the porch by the pool, looking down on the city from that mansion up in the hills.
All of the foods are also available at dollar general, which is the only “groceries” in a lot of food deserts. Just something I immediately noticed
I noticed dollars genernal near me is mostly processed foods that aren't healthy. However if you look you find eggs milk and some organic things in mine 🤷♀️
yes this whole video I was thinking about the food I sell there frequently (I work at DG). But yeah I know some DG's have more fresh stuff than others, but my store just has milk and eggs.
This comment was exactly what I was looking for - where I live theres many scattered little towns that only have 1 dollar general, and my city is the only one with walmarts and more than an hours drive from these towns. It doesnt help that big companies like that drive out any local grocers taking away the possibility of nutritional food if there was one
@@vipse6586 jesus... an hour drive for a proper grocery store?
@@safir2241 I've got a 40 minute drive to get to a major grocery store. Our local dollar general has eggs, milk, yogurt, a small selection of fruits and veggies, the little local independent grocery store has a bit more fruits and veggies, but the price at both is 3x Kroger prices. So I go to town every couple of weeks to stock up on things that I can get to last that long.
interesting how this is so very american. in other countries, home cooked meals are the cheapest. few people can afford buying pakcages and packages of processed food. even things like a package of doritos is a luxury to many.
Yeah as a paraguayan the "cacerolle" sounded a lot like a less moist version of a guiso, a meal I personaly eat twice a week
i was thinking the same, where i'm from in europe processed food is something associated with camping, having stashed in your summerhouse / cabin, in your pantry for emergencies... most people cook at home, at least from what i've experienced, and people around me. and all that american fastfood? it's expensive for a lot of people to go to mcdonalds, when i was a kid that was something special to be deserved once in a while. for the price of one proper meal you can cook for a family of four!
@@thetheodora2371 this is my experience too. trashy fast food is an expensive treat.
@@lisasimpson8895 also an interesting thing to note, the prices of international fast food chains don’t really change in other countries that much! from what i can see the bigmac meal costs about 6 usd in america, and here it’s about 5.3 usd when i convert it… and our minimal wage is half of what it is in the US
@@thetheodora2371 that explains a lot hahaha
"When someone wears the costume of 'poor person,' they aren't breaking boundaries or ending stigma. They're just perpetuating classism." damn there it is
That lobster story reminds me of a similar (but sadder) one from my home state: Tasmania, Australia. When white colonisers first arrived, the indigenous people ate a lot of seafood, including something the English called "muttonfish", which the English thought was gross so after the invasion they "allowed" the indigenous people to take as much as they wanted. However, when the English finally figured out how to cook muttonfish they discovered it was actually delicious, and so they started regulating it, and telling indigenous people they couldn't fish for it any more. We still fish muttonfish here. Now we call it abalone.
It figures that the Brit’s didn’t know how to cook properly 🙄
@@theRiver_joan British cooking is actually very diverse. Because of all the new recipes we learned of as we plundered the world, adapted a little, and adopted as our own.
Oh! Like in Island of the Blue Dolphins. Thanks for the story :) I can't believe they took fucking fishing away from you. Colonizers suck.
@@rosemali3022 Oh actually I'm not an Indigenous Tasmanian... unfortunately that makes me one of the colonisers :'(
@@allnaturalfigjam310 You can't help what your ancestors did, and you seem to be doing your part to spread the knowledge. That's all any of us can really do. (Other than being a staunch anticapitalist, which I do also reccomend lol).
My idea of “trash food” isn’t casseroles or canned food. When I think of trash food I think of food with no nutritional value like Doritos or pop. I hate how being economical or poor is seen as trash. I hate the idea of calling people trash.
!!! This
This is the only comment here that SPOKE to me
I'm from eastern Europe myself and we don't really have a "white trash" concept around here. Maybe it's because we're pretty much 99% white country anyway so why would we call our own a WT? Lol idk
But hearing that term for the first time made me so sick and petrified, I was kinda shocked that this is so engraved in people's minds somewhere :(
There's pain in this comment
Most people think about this like you, but if you frame it that way it's not a social justice issue so it has to be reframed purely in evil classist terms
@@alexv2553 what the fuck are you talking about
Instant Ramen
"Imagine the trashiest food you can"
Taco bell dorito tacos
"Would you eat it."
I mean... yeah.
"Now imagine a person who would eat that food. What do they look like? How do they act?..."
I feel attacked
LOL
Underrated
I had the same thought process about hot Cheetos and velveeta 🤣
They have a taco where instead of a tortilla it's fried chicken now. It's ok.
But the doritos shell tacos are like one of of the best things at taco bell.
There's ableism and classism with a lot of the food ideas. If you're working long hours or are disabled, you may not have the energy/ability to cook elaborate meals.
I love how you point out the problematic attitudes/practices behind food tourism. The food/culture is treated as a commodity while the people are still ridiculed. It's taken a couple of decades for me to be confident enough to own and reclaim some of my culture while daring anyone to mock it.
Affording food when you're poor is HARD. Especially when you're disabled and have too much pain and fatigue to do cooking or food prep. The worst thing is when folks richer than you tell you about their diet, how it's "totally affordable," and how you won't be healthy and ethical if you don't eat like them; when in reality, their diet is far too expensive for your poor ass, and inaccessible in terms of the time and energy required for cooking.
I hate how people gloat about their expensive diets and healthiness, and shit-talk about folks who eat things like processed foods. Like, do you think I eat ramen with chicken nuggets in it because I love it and think it's healthy? No, it's just one of the few hot foods that's both affordable and requires little enough effort for me to put it together. The level of arrogance people reach when they talk about food is astounding.
I've gotten to a place in life where I've realized, I'm sick of how people treat poverty like it's a crime. I've started being open about how poor I am. I'm not going to pretend anymore. It's my belief that society won't stop demonizing the poor until we are vocal and unashamed of our poverty, and demand to be treated like human beings. If folks think I'm trash because my appearance is unkempt, or I eat cheap stuff, or my tiny apartment is messy, then they can take that opinion and stuff it. I and my fellow poor folks are doing our best with the hand we've been dealt in life.
If this country, the US, is going to systematically impoverish people to make them easier to exploit, then I will be loud and visible and unashamed, so they have to look it in the eye.
Amen Harold. I'm not quite in the same boat but I've decided to stop hiding the fact that I have disabilities and am in pain all the time.
We won't fix anything if we don't talk about it.
I don't do this because it's fun or because I'm "just weird." I do this because I'm trying to cope in a world that wasn't built for me.
@@SoulDevoured Ahh, best of luck! You deserve to be treated well, and to live in a world that's good for you.
Who talks shit about poor people
Im guessing it's through social media, because how often do you meet cuckholds that openly judge and mock you in public
I hope i never have to deal with them and hope i never get sucked into social media and its toxicity
@TheDudeCalledAlan I have some privelage, but have you ever warn safety yellow in public? You encounter a palpable shift in tone from some people for nothing but your wardrobe. And that's just one type of signaling. It's not just an online thing.
And then they go "You can buy fruits and vegetables very cheaply from the super market, they cost literal cents." And it's like, sure, you asshole, I'm sure you just buy vegetables in bulk and just eat them raw like apples, just munching on that onion, instead of having the time and resources to prepare them into an actual meal that you're willing put in your mouth, or have someone else that gets payed minimum wage to do that for you... It's so easy to, after your shift of your second full time job that you need to do to pay rent, to just not need a quick and cheap way to introduce calories into your system for the next day of intensive work, and there's definitively not 4 McDonald's opened 24/7 within walking distance and they do not bombard you with advertising all day long because you're their target demographic, and you definitively have the time and energy to prepare something delicious and fully notorious with all the fresh vegetables that you just bought when you're in that situation...
Lobster became popular the same way ribs and other originally “poor people food” did, poor and black people made it taste good and so rich people realized wait I like that too and now formerly undesirable food is crazy expensive
So right! I remember when I moved to Canada from Eastern Europe 10+ yrs ago and I was surprised how everyone loves ribs and how expensive they are! Back home these are almost the cheapest meats and barely anyone wants to eat it!
Dipping in melted butter isn't much of a method of making a undersea bug taste good.
A pencil could be dipped in melted butter and taste pretty good(if still too pointy)
@@Praisethesunson well there's your problem, you're not supposed to sharpen the pencil before eating it
Same with creole food. Look at how expensive it is now, especially in New Orleans. But originally, it was what the poor people ate in that region.
@@thevirtualtraveler They didn’t call it a po’ boy ironically
i NEVER appreciated how my mom made me a meal every day and how we had a family dinner every night. i always wanted junk food when i was young and was mad i was fed healthy, home cooked meals. today i’m so thankful to my mom she’s helped me maintain good eating habits to this day thank u mom ❤️
It is good to know that some parents are good. My mom cooked good food until she didn't, It was time for me to move out at that point.
I think that's just the nature of kids to want junk food, but there's also a huge issue of marketing that faces children, not adults. A parent sees the commercial one time; the parent hears the kids wheedle and plead endlessly for days when the kids sees the commercial.
There was a Lunchables commercial obviously targeting kids, not parents, that absolutely drove me insane for depicting the kid consistently disappointed with the mother's sack lunch, but cheering like he was pulling the sword from the stone when one day he saw Lunchables inside.
The commercial ends with the kid's voiceover of, "Thanks Mom," while camera focuses through the bus window on the mom's smiling face on the front porch. It literally made me grind my teeth for how they were programming children's desires.
Literally same. The way I was always jealous of Lunchables even when I had amazing sandwiches everyday. It's embarrassing to think about because I was so spoiled
As someone who grew up in poverty--literally living in a junkyard, this hits home so hard. Thanks for sharing this!
This is how I feel about all Cajun food. It’s suddenly this expensive food when forever it was literally whatever we pulled from the mud
I've lived on Zatarains dirty rice and Zummo boudain forever. Bout as trashy as it gets judging by this video
Seriously, I remember going to a restaurant in San Francisco and seeing a bowl of jambalaya on the menu for 20 bucks, whereas you could get a huge portion of that anywhere back home for $8. It's just funny seeing it sold as a fancy food in a classy restaurant, when it's usually something you get when you can't afford the fancy food on the menu.
This is something that's interesting to me. My brother in law once told me that I made the best gumbo he'd had outside Louisiana, and I literally just threw together what I had available and kept adding stuff until it tasted "right". I feel like that's just how cuisine in general works. It's people working with what they've got and finding ways to make it taste good.
As someone from New Orleans this aggravates me to no end.
SE Texas born and raised. In Portland, Oregon I was served a "crawfish platter" that had FOUR crawfish on it, some loose corn (not on the cob) and a small cup of that they called dirty rice. It was 14 dollars. I asked where the rest of the crawfish were, as they had the four arranged in a + pattern on the plate. A woman told me, a guy who grew up at crawfish boils that "Crawfish is a delicacy in the south" and "this is how they eat it down there". I about died.
My great grandfather sat alone at lunch time because he had a lobster tail in his lunch while the rich kids had peanut butter sandwiches... He was embarrassed.
Wow to be fair tho he might also get picked even today since seafood is just too stinky for a kids lunch..
To be fair, l never have PB because it's more expensive than, say, cold cuts.
@@TheDanishGuyReviews Really? It's the opposite here.
@@wvu05 I guess it might last longer, but it's also almost 3 times the price as well.
@@TheDanishGuyReviews Oh, my! Here, you can get a 26 ounce (~730 g) jar for about $4 or $5, and cold cuts cost about the same for a fraction of the size.
Food deserts make me scream. There's such an issue here in Detroit about the lack of freaking grocery stores. Whole Foods opened up in a wealthy part of the city, but far from the sprawling residential areas. It wasn't until Meijer opened up on 8-mile that everyday people had a big box grocery store to go to.
and that Meijer is less than great, compared to the burbs.
One of the reasons why mutual aid in Detroit taking off - a lot of orgs compared to just a few years ago.
Detroit has some strange racial politics in general.
I used to live in a suburb of Detroit that originally was part of Detroit, but broke off to be its own township. (Redford Township).
They regularly would refuse to pave the roads, despite the fact that dirt roads were really ... "odd" here in a suburb so close to a major metro area. It was claimed that it was in the hopes of not having "newcomers" move in. (the unspoken fact was that the newcomers might be POC, as my high school was nearly all white, but across the borders in EVERY direction, white people were in the minority.)
This was back in the late 80s, early 90s, and it was like our high school was frozen in time in the 50s. It was an odd place.
Not to play devils advocate, but it’s just not profitable to put grocery stores in extremely poor areas. Less money is spent by customers, more coupons, and rampant stealing. They’re needs to be some kind of incentive, maybe increased tax breaks to entice grocery stores to open up in these areas.
@@devonwelch8014
It's a cycle. There's lots opportunity for many things there, which contributes to poverty, which lessens the opportunity. Those businesses also provide jobs as well as provide lower cost food than the convenience food which is all that is offered.
Something does need to be done. But this is a case where capitalism doesn't care about the people who suffer because of the feedback loop. But government is there to protect citizens from things like this.
I misread this as food desserts and was like
“But dessert makes us happy??? I don’t understand??? What do grocery stores have to do with not preferring sweets???”
And then reread and felt like a big dumb idiot
I didn’t realize how poor I was until I went to deliver Christmas presents to poor families with my Church youth group. The rest of the kids couldn’t believe people lived in those conditions. I was just as surprised by their shock at a place that was in my mind normal.
Growing up, neither of my parents cooked much. We never sat down together to have family meals. So my “trash” diet was mainly just processed food, anything microwaveable, and lots of cheap fast food.
Editing to add: I’m also interested in the class-related implications of home cooked meals vs relying on “junk” or fast food. Obviously there’s a massive stigma against buying or consuming too much junk food or fast food - it’s certainly seen as trashy.
For my parents I think it was a combination of lack of time, energy, and cooking skills. They were self employed, raising four kids, so I can’t blame them for choosing whichever food options were quick or easy.
As an adult I’ve had to unlearn a lot of these habits though. I’ve had to learn basic cooking skills and resist the urge to get takeout too frequently. There were so many foods, especially fruits and veggies, that I never tried as a kid, so I’m slowly trying to adjust my taste preferences as well. It’s a work in progress.
Anyway thank you for this very thought-provoking video and congrats on the recent success! I’m a thought slime viewer but found this vid through the algorithm. I subscribed and am looking forward to watching more of your stuff 💛
Never thought I’d find you here as this is a growing channel, but I guess YT recommendations blesses even the best.
Finding Tiffany commenting on 3 of my most recent recommended videos really reassures me that I'm on the right side of TH-cam
@@safala She oftens watches small channels like these, even giving them shoutouts often. It's how I found D'Angelo for example, and now his channel is gigantic. Tiff is great.
❤️❤️❤️
I spent years teaching myself how to cook, in part just to . . . I don't know, put space between myself and where I came from. Frozen fish sticks. Anything that could go from a freezer to a deep fryer to a plate. Mountains of mashed potatoes. I didn't eat spinach prepared any way but canned until I was an adult.
Credit to my parents, we did eat some kind of vegetables every day at least. They were almost always limp overcooked canned vegetables, but God love em for tryin.
Honestly, I miss a lot of it. Tuna casserole still slaps. Venison was like, my favorite as a kid, that and catfish from the creek. Oh, and blackberries that we would go out and gather in the summer.
Being insanely broke wasn't *all* bad, looking back. A lot of the food was a hot mess (government issue giant can with *PORK* on the side, impact font, black on white comes screaming to mind), but there was nothing pretentious about it at least?
No idea what the point of this comment was. Chalk it up to algorithmic engagement.
👁👁👁👁👁👁👁👁👁👁👁👁👁👁
We could also talk about wolfberries being like $3 a pound when you get them in Chinatown, but then being $15 an ounce when they're sold is goji berries at whole foods
YES! The day I found out that those expensive ass tiny nuggets of deliciousness were being repackaged in little bags and sold to me at a premium because yet another white person decided to prey on the cultural ignorance of their fellow white people, rename them and give them "superfood" status I was so pissed. I really wish (as a white person) I'd been first shown them in their cultural context rather than as something completely devoid of any historical use because while they are pretty tasty on top of oatmeal it pales in comparison to goji/red date tea or gogi/ginseng/ginger chicken soup. It really opened my eyes though and I look at food/ingredients in a completely different way.
Yes! I have an Asian Market across the street from me in the same building as a gourmet grocery store. In the Asian Market I can get a huge jar of Kimchi for like 8 bucks. In the gourmet grocery they sell tiny jars of Kimchi for 10-20 dollars. Lol
I didn’t know I ate trash until this video. oh boy
Gotta love the gentrification of minority cultures~ Seeing the same people who called my homemade potstickers gross then eat at PF Changs is a big oof
I'd like to take this conversation to the next level, and hopefully you guys feel less upset about being "ripped off". Those goji berries also carry the same double pricetags right here in Asia (Singapore).
In most places you can get them for the reasonable price, but some shops that identify as upmarket, sophisticated and higher-end will jack up the prices to five times more. And the funny thing is - you'll still get people who willingly choose to pay that premium. And these are locals, who know of the better-for-value alternatives.
So the conclusion to draw here my friends, is that some people spend money for social signalling. They're not paying $x because they think item is worth $x. They pay $x because they think THEY are worth spending $x on.
As someone from Appalachia who spent the first half of my life trying to erase any vestige of where I came from and my culture so people wouldn't think I was ignorant and backwards, and as someone who has spent the second half desperately trying to get it all back, this really means a lot to me.
This video hit home for me as well, and I’d also like to highlight the music. I guess I’m so used to hearing the music my family plays as part of the comedy in videos (“people acting silly, let’s put a royalty free banjo song in the background”) that it brought me to tears hearing it used in a serious setting.
Florida Man 👞👞
It's kinda interesting, Anthony Bourdain wrote in one of his books, that rich people don't have taste. When they came into his restaurants, they would often just aim for the high prices. They would have a steak "well done", meaning they would basically get the charred sole of a shoe for as little as 500 bucks.
Caviar also used to be eaten by fishers who couldn't afford to buy the fishes they caught. Same with salmon, which used to be so abundant, it was considered poor people food.
I remember seeing a food taste test video where a person ate a pizza that was super expensive because of the way it was made, including the toppings that were used for it. Throughout the description of the process, not much was discussed about taste quality, rather there was mostly just flexing on the fact that there were ingredients like caviar and edible gold foil in the toppings.
I should make a restaurant specifically to catch “big fish”
@@jooot_6850 It's absolutely doable and a thing. "Salt Bae" does just this. Gold foil coated tomahawk steak for $2000 just because people will buy it, and only cost him $300 in ingredients. So, as a random internet stranger, I fully support your grift.
@Alias Fakename "Caviar again? Can't we have shrimps for once?"
I don't think there is any correlation between how wealthy you are and taste, so people with taste would naturally fall randomly on the wealth spectrum, of course
My mom served us fried chicken hearts once, and I think it almost broke her heart. None of us kids really understood what was so difficult for her, with a bit of ketchup, we thought they tasted fine. Thanks for helping me consider how poor we were back then, and how hard that must have been for my folks, trying to be "independent" and "successful".
EDIT: Mom would be mortified that I shared this story, so don't tell her.
@Stirgid Lanathiel Man good fried gizzards are awesome tasting!
Nothing wrong with hearts and gizzards
I am from a Russian family and for us it is kind of normal to eat chicken hearts and other organs like livers etc. For us it's not considered cheap "trash" food
I think the reason is that my kind isn't wasteful we just eat anything from the animal and I see that as normal
Its kind of interesting to see the difference in different cultures
Chicken hearts are delicious!!!
Fried gizzards and hearts are sooooo good, like the judgement is soo annoying
Simple foods with a long shelf life are also good for disabled people, as we often struggle or simply can't prepare meals from scratch. So not only is this classist it's also ablest...just throw all the isms on the pile!
The food distribution services for disabled and elder homes deserves to be subsidized!
This reminds me of when a bunch of people were complaining about precut vegetables and how lazy people bought them. They didn’t think about disabled people or those who just don’t have the time to make their own food from scratch
It's quite the accomplishment for my amputated self to get to the grocery store and figure out how $24 worth of EBT will last me a month.
The worst is when, as someone disabled and chronically ill, you find out that a very particular kind of diet is actually what would help with managing symptoms, only to realize that it eliminates many of the kinds of long shelf life and easy to prepare foods you had previously relied on, and that there aren't easy replacements for those kinds of foods.
@@RoselynTate Food deserts, man, food deserts
The trashiest food I can imagine is a meal of vienna sausages, generic saltines and those hostess frosted mini donuts. My dad was an over the road trucker when I was young and I would go with him in the summer. The healthiest things we had were hardboiled eggs and gatorade. Everything else was either truck stop food or stuff like what was above. As a kid I loved it, looking back, he was in his 40s and ate this way and as someone getting close to 40 myself that kind of breaks my heart. No one taught him nutrition.
man i loved those little powdered sugar donuts in the bag. Economically with bad parents, i would have those for breakfast whenever they came home late.
also, same, no one taught me nutrition as a child. didn't get in shape and healthy till i was 43.
Same with my dad. He drove long hours, and was a construction worker. Had to get 4 heart stints put in at 50. He didn’t understand the food he ate was unhealthy.
I never thought of casseroles as cheap. They were just traditional southern cooking to me.
The connotations may vary by country or even just region.
Where I live casserole is mostly seen as slightly old-fashioned.
I grew up in Maryland, and definitely thought they were just a Midwestern thing.
Casseroles and canned foods were middle-class staples from the 1950s until the late 1990s. Truly poor people did their own canning and made soup from scratch. Then the Food Network changed everything, canned became lower class. Casseroles and canned food became "White Trash" only recently. It's old fashioned, that's all.
And pigs in a blanket to right?
@@NewtNotNootthe are that as well.
I’m latina and grew up in the ‘ghetto’ and I can honestly say I though casseroles were a rich white people thing lmao I never saw it as a poor thing. I guess we have a very different perception of poor. Loved this video though learned a lot.
Edit: also Slim Jim’s were also a very expensive thing for me lmao
Same I always thought of casseroles as something your higher middle class white aunt brings to thanksgiving. I also never got to eat slim Jim’s very often because of how expensive they are lol
Yeah here slim jims are a rich thing people with landrovers that go camping a lot eat
@officialmer yes I understand that, never said it wasn’t cheap. I just never saw it as “trash” food
Thats crazy. When Iwas a kid my mom made Casseroles all the time to finish the food off we grew up on food stamps
Same! I think that poverty in first world countries and in Latin America is just insanely different.
I had an """interesting""" childhood in the sense that we were kinda poor, but my dad worked as a sous chef. So while I did eat cheap food, he also gave us amazing culinary experiences. I mean one day I eat reheated kraft's mac and cheese and the next he whips up carpaccio or cassoulet.
same same same! I was a pretty poor kid but my dad was a head chef for 10 years and won himself a michelin star so we would have pretty crazy variation in meals over a week lol
Me too.
Today looking back, im almost moved to tears when i think what awesome dishes my mom cooked with sometimes less then 100€ for the whole month. Limitations increase creativity (dont know how to translate this into english well) she always said.
@@desotaku5202 Necessity is the mother of invention?
@@joannalewis7699 sounds right😅
In german it is "Not macht erfinderisch"
My mom cooked good food until she didn't, it was time to move out at that point. No good food, meant time to leave home. It is hard to know what parents are like for other people, if it is a zero sum game, where all parents are the same regardless of what they do.
I know my parents aren't great but, I know it could have been worse, much worse. Hearing some of the things other people have to go threw makes me glad for what I had. I wish it could have been better as well, but oh well.
My mom used to make "nine can soup", literally just nine cans of beans and vegetables mixed together. it would feed us for about a week, and it was actually pretty good.
Ooh that reminds me of "foil packets"!! Can of french onion soup, bunch of canned veggies, any cheap meat, roll it up in foil and throw it on the fire (or oven) for a while
Rebecca Williams that's a classic camping meal... chicken, rice, green beans and foil, you have an idiot proof meal scouts could cook without tasting like burned tires...
Omg I did this last spring! I was getting ready to move out of my dorm and I had to get rid of a bunch of food to avoid wasting it, so I got my last cans of tomato soup, threw in diced tomatoes, black beans and corn, and chili seasoning and random spices. There was probably other stuff I cant remember lol, but that was some pretty good soup. I didnt even get to finish it all before moving out 😭
I do that for myself (with less cans).
As a child of ex-soviet immigrants I was raised on the concept of loving food, especially easily accessible and easily made food. When you asked me to imagine trashy food that I would never eat I honestly couldn't think of anything. When you started talking about casseroles and candy potato I got nostalgic because so much of the food I grew up with was made from similar ingredients. And in my country, eastern-European and Russian food is considered kind of trashy, weird (and it kinda is but I get to make fun of it because i actually tasted most of it), unsophisticated and with very bland taste. I totally felt everything you said in this video. This was very interesting, thank you for this video and for sharing your perspective.
I'm vibrating into oblivion for the color sorted books.
thank u for this comment
Can't unsee...
Right? Those immediately caught my eye as well and then I looked at my books and thought, what if I sorted them by color, how nice would that look, but then would I do that just inside the subject categories, but it wouldn't be as dramatic as the set in her shot, but if I was going to choose books to have out like that, could I choose a set with those dramatic colors that would still represent books I wanted out for public consumption or would I need to choose books I wouldn't normally put out that don't represent ideas I want to portray just for the color some marketer choose to make the cover like Cokie Roberts' autobiography that has that dramatic blue-almost-purple?
So yeah, that was a second and a half of thought I was carried away by....
Lowkey one of my favorite things about ASOIaF. Line em up, and most of the books are a rainbow.
@@craniifer those are asoiaf?? DAUYYYM thanks for letting me know!
I grew up in appalachia Ohio, you listing off "trash" food reminded me of my childhood. Casserole, pepperoni rolls, and canned food was eaten regularly. My wife was born and raised in China, and also grew up poor. Even though we would be considered upper-middle class now, our kids have grown up on the food of both of our childhoods. I don't care how well-off I become, pepperoni rolls and casserole will always be some of my favorite food.
This is what my parents did which is why this video confused me so much, lol
One my friends said something to the effect of “everything that a peasant ate in the 1600s is trendy now”. Artisan sourdough bread, craft beer, cheese, “pot greens” like radicchio and arugula, beets
Sourdough bread is trendy? It's the most normal and boring bread where I come from. The most popular one I know is gray bread even the name is boring!😂
@@anname2678
People got tired of white bread, and wanted to be 'different from everyone else' by 'connecting with nature' (avoiding doing anything in common with the poor, basically).
So yes, bakeries and 'whole food' in general now are trendy
I’m rewatching this video for a second time and it resonates so hard. I grew up Lower middle class, being raised by two teachers and living with my 2 sisters. we ate these things, these foods, grew up getting “new”clothes from church and goodwills. Thank you for making this video and making me feel so seen
As Thought Slime said, great quality videos are not being seen because they don’t meet the TH-cam algorithms or just luck.
This is great! As someone who has “moved up” in class (from blue collar labor to white collar labor, even though I don’t feel rich, but maybe that’s the point? Keep me feeling poor), I feel like I have to distance myself from my upbringing to be accepted to get the capital necessary to help them out. But instead, I am paid like trash because I am trash so I can never get out.
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Indeed. As someone whose family didn't travel much, so my accent definitely isn't going anywhere unless I want to spend tens of thousands of dollars I don't have on elocution lessons, I totally get that feeling that people are just waiting for you to do something that fits a stereotype to mock you about it.
Also, even when I pointed out to one of the woke people in my office how that nobody thinks twice about mocking an Appalachian, she seemed to get what I was saying... until a day later when she was talking about needing to get work done on her teeth in order to avoid "a hillbilly grin." Without any malice, I said "a what?" three or four times before she got my point. Seeing as I have missing incisors because I didn't have the money for dental implants as a kid and lots of people have missing incisors, this one especially hurt.
@@wvu05 I'm really sorry to hear that happened to you with someone you trusted. Hopefully she'll learn from the experience. I feel that Appalachia is often overlooked by the leftist or "woke" community. It's totally unfair considering just how bad of a deal they've gotten, just how screwed they got by capitalism. But not only do they have a stereotype they also vote "wrong". Really, we need to be reaching out and try to be allies.
Anyways... if you actually want to overcome your accent you might want to try looking on YT for hypnotherapy videos. I'm planning on finding one to fix my sleep schedule. They are surprisingly effective for stuff.
@@rosemali3022 At this point, my accent is what it is. I don't see it as something that needs to be "overcome." The people for whom that sort of thing matters are not the people who I want to impress.
I have said for a long time that Appalachians are the last group that it is socially acceptable to mock. I'm not talking about Oppression Olympics stuff, just that there are certainly going to be less people who even think twice about saying such things. I remember a conversation in a class where someone wanted to insist that every bit of othering had to do with race (I'm really surprised that the women in the room didn't speak up about that one), and when I pointed out some of my experiences, he said that Appalachians get "racialized." No, because different groups deal with different things, and we shouldn't try to make them all the same for a convenient narrative.
This is VERY similar to how Black culture is exploited, and I think it just shows a pattern of how more privileged groups will try on the mantle of more marginalized ones "for the lulz," knowing full well they can cast it off whenever they want and not have to deal with the fallout of the mockery.
Having vegan chicken and waffles... sets it down. Ah no. What have I become.
Forgive me, but how is that culture exploited? I can't think of any examples off the top of my head of definitive exploitation.
@@alexwr Cajun/creole food, all types southern bbq originated with how slaves slow cooked the scraps they were given into something delicious, many fashion trends like hoop earrings, acrylic nails, hair extensions, silk hair wraps. Also a lot of my white friends never listened to rap music until Eminem and then it was "like omg my favorite genre, saw raw and edgy" (that was a very 2006 argument and I don't know how old you are so you might not remember a time before rap was mainstream) but that's just a couple examples from the top of my head
@@alexwr Google taco bell. Mexican culture is exploited just as much as black culture.
doesn't take long for a victimized black person to come on a video about a white person and make it allll about them 🤡
TH-cam suggestions brought me here. This was a thought-provoking video! Trashiest food I grew up eating: Bean salad. Heinz beans served cold with mayonnaise, diced tomatoes, and Kraft parmesan. It’s more like soup. I liked it and was used to it, though I don’t eat it much anymore. Most people in my adult life have found it horrifying. 😂
hildegard!!!
Tbh that doesn't sound that bad, I'm gonna try it. :D
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Aww naw I've had that, we tried to make it a little healthier with onion celery and diced boiled eggs, more like an egg salad with beans
Love your name!
I watched this for the second time. And I want to cry. To some extent, Filipino food is treated the same way as white trash food, if not worse. From travel bloggers, to academics, and even some locals themselves, our food was stamped "The Worst Food in the World". Some respected food critics would dispute this, and two American presidents have hired a Filipino as their head chef. But considering centuries of colonialism, some of our own people have deemed their local cuisine as "poor people" food and are embarrassed to serve them to foreign guests. Times are changing for the better now, and Filipino fine dining has grown a little bit...until covid came. We shall see what happens when this pandemic is over.
That is horrific and incredibly disrespectful. Sorry to hear that.
WORD. Food is all a matter of opinion and taste of course, but I am TIRED of white people touting their food and their culture as superior, always. I'm Filipino too and I had to deal with this while spending my teen years in Canada. Now I live in a different city in Canada, and while younger white folk are a bit better now about respecting my culture (still not great though tbh, ignorance/exoticism is still there), the old white folk are the WORST cause they just talk about anything foreign as like "oh so shocking can you believe that? Asian ppl eat dogs did you know??????"
I know I’m super late to the party but I just wanted to add my quick comment. I grew up as a Latino kid in Southern California but had never had the pleasure of trying Filipino cuisine (there wasn’t a big Filipino community in my town). That changed when I started dating a half Filipina/half white girl and I was literally blown away by everything I tried. Her parents would take us to different authentic Filipino restaurants in the San Fernando valley, especially those with a focus on food from her dad’s hometown of Cebu City. We always thought it was funny how the waiters would try to speak Tagalog to me after speaking with her dad. Even now years after that relationship ended I still go out and seek all of the wonderful foods I was introduced to even if it’s way out of my way. I think it’s a travesty how Filipino cuisine has been largely overlooked compared to their neighbors. In my opinion, it is not only as good as but better than all of the other more popular Asian cuisines.
So I'm not from the US, but The Netherlands. And this made me think of how when I was a kid I played with a boy in our street a lot. I was a little jealous of how often he got to eat pancakes. It is big fave with kids, usually a treat because it's not the healthiest. And only because I would't stop talking about how cool it was my friend ate pancakes so often, my mom told me it was because they're were struggling. All the ingredients are under or around an euro (eccept the eggs) and you can make a lot with it. Dutch pancake batter is quite thin. So yeah that made me shut up and think a bit (I was 6 or 7 I think).
I am from poland and pancakes/crepes were often ate in my home when i was a child, because as you said it’s pretty cheap (like 1 euro to make 20 crepes) to make and you can eat them with anything you have in your kitchen. Yoghurt, honey, ketchup, mayo, meat, vegetables, homemade jam, seasonal fruits-anything. Hell, i even survived on crepes when i moved out for the first time and was broke lmao
I'm also from the Netherlands and my idea of american white trash food was instant macaroni and cheese, and those american cheese single slices. But then I saw this video and saw many more I hadn't heard about.
My idea of dutch white trash food is SPAM (called SMAC in the netherlands), macaroni salad, knakworst (vienna sausages but longer), breaded meat cuts, instant mashed potatoes and generally a food intake pattern that features fries and deep fried snacks 3 times a week or more.
@@itsalwayshalloweenexceptwh5118 ah yes snackbar food is a staple, keeping all of Dutch society afloat. xD
@@peppermint1358 LOL. I used to hate frikadel speciaal (seriously, which kid hates that?) but now I love it. With ketchup mind you, not curry ketchup.
Pancakes are not "unhealthy" in the least. Actually they contain all three major classes of nutrients and are therefore maximally healthy.
The "trash food" that comes to mind immediately is TV dinners. I ate them all the time as a young kid because my parents worked offset schedules so that we would always have a parent at home. This had the side-effect of often neither of them having time to cook every night. I stopped eating them when we kids were old enough to cook and my Dad's hours changed so he was home a little more. Now I'm lucky enough to have the money and time to cook or eat out.
The thing that makes me think of it as "trashy" is that it feels disposable. It always feels like just a step beyond a nutrient sludge that might satisfy your needs, with little regard for enjoyment. It takes no effort and you gain no real enrichment.
I don't look down on those who eat them though. Especially with my past experience, I know why people get them and they are necessities for some. Something I've come to realize is that sometimes money isn't as important as time and having a lack of one often comes with a lacking in the other.
Yeah, you need the TV with the TV dinner to take your mind off what you’re eating
I’m horrified that we accept as normal any of the following situations. Having a family is a luxury,. 2 parents working to support a family. The complete illusion that there isn’t enough time to cook for a family (created by corporations who steal your productivity for themselves from your babies) The lie that there isn’t enough money to be paid to afford nourishing food, water, shelter and education. Big thanks to Politicians for perpetuating these lies to benefit their donors stealing your life for their profit.
I had to google what a TV-dinner was. I thought you actually worked on TV and got served dinner at the workplace and wondered why is that trashy?
@@zakosist Funny enough, I have been served dinner at work while working on a TV show. I used to work in VFX and this is somewhat common during crunch. :D
I've actually thought about writing a "white trash cookbook" consisting of meals I ate growing up. Tuna casserole, hamburger helper, hot dogs/chili dogs, baked beans with ham, minute rice with canned chili, and more that I can't think of right now. I still make a lot of these things today because they are cheap and easy to make.
Yes, anything that is quick or made with ground beef
Ramen with cheese spread
@@JessiTheBestiGaming I used to get chicken cheese ramen in Korea, pretty good stuff.
What is holding you back?
@@schiffelers3944 Laziness.
I was talking to my husband about this video and gave him the examples of trash food (pigs in a blanket, RC Cola, casseroles) and he just replied, “Oh, you mean delicious food?” 😂😂
I made sloppy Joes and fries for my roommates and I for dinner one night and they were like “um... I haven’t had that since I was a kid. I’ll find something else for dinner.” And I felt genuinely offended
That is so mean!
@@slamislife74 I don’t think they were intending to be mean, it was just kinda hurtful. Like what, you’re too good for sloppy Joe’s? We’re all broke college students.
That BITCH doesn't understand food
Damn sloppy joe’s are good af 😩
I fucking love sloppy joes, that person was just a prick
This story plays out over and over with poor people all over the world. Quinoa is a good example. If people aren't ready to unpack these biases then how do we ever get to the rest?
Wow quinoa too?! I like ALL the trash foods!
Ramen is a similar story
@@WulfLovelace Ramen is still dirt cheap.
@@prosquatter My point was that Ramen is dirt cheap, but ALSO gourmet. Think about any restaurant in America that sells Ramen comparatively in Japan at a low price of the equivalent of 5 dollars being sold here in America for 13 dollars and treated gourmet or fine dining.
@@WulfLovelace There will always be an ''upscale'' restaurant version of mundane foods. There are hamburgers that cost $100 in fancy restaurants, but a burger at your local fast food joint is still cheap. Problem arises when a staple food (like quinoa in Jessica's example) rises so much in price, that people who originally depended on it can no longer afford it. Same for lobster in Zoe's story.
The Eyeballs say hello!
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🧿🧿🧿🧿🧿🧿🧿🧿🧿🧿
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Eyeballs? I think you mean the solidarity corner 😛
I didn’t know “trashy food” was a thing and honestly couldn’t think of what would be considered trash food. Then she started listing all the things I grew up eating (and still do) and it clicked. Ooooh, right. Well, at least the trailer I grew up in was a double-wide and both my parents loved me lol
People have this perception of frozen and canned vegetables as being "lesser" than fresh, but it's nonsense. Freezing and canning makes vegetables accessible, reduces some of the huge amounts of food waste worldwide, and preserves nutrients.
adam ragusea made a great video on it, frozen food has gotten waaaaay better the past like 20 years, to the point that stuff like frozen meat and vegetables is essentially fresh.
A dietitian I talked to told me that the way they do Individually Quick Frozen foods these days, they are safer, fresher, and retain more nutrients the the "fresh" veggies that were picked pre-ripe and shipped on a truck
@@mscout1 it's true. Modern freezing techniques are amazing.
They do add quite a lot of sodium and unnecessary shit to canned veggies, and canned fruit is basically candy. Certain frozen foods are contested to potentially be better than fresh because of how well it preserves nutrients though.
@@aurelianjustice9622 I seem to remember that professional chefs use frozen peas for their fancy dishes because it makes them much better to work with for complicated cooking styles
As a non American casseroles and pigs in blankets being seen as trashy is wild.
I thought the same thing. We only have pigs in blankets at Christmas. Its special occasion food.
Yeah it's like, a children's birthday staple around here.
I think pigs in blankets is a bit like sausage rolls? I wouldn't say greggs is classy
@@nr5076 Living in the south greggs was a treat. Although that's probably because you can trace the north/south divide by number of greggs per city which just leads to the classism of the north/south divide in the first place.
@@envexenveritas clasy and a treat are also different things, Brighton rock, trifle, angel fluff or a battered sausage are all treats but it isn't food you'd find in an expensive restaurant
Everybody hates a tourist, especially one who thinks it's all such a laugh.
“I’ll see what I can do”
Laugh along with the common people. Laugh along, even though they're laughing at you.
You got no money?
Yeah, and the chip stains and grease will come out in the bath.
I find the aversion to casserole extremely interesting because in Germany they are a cultural staple with a long tradition. Every region has their own style of casserole and making one is part of the traditional housewife like baking apple pies is in the US.
Also a tip for everyone: Casseroles are an amazing dish for having a group of friends over.
Prepare it beforehand and put it in the oven when the first people arrive. It'll be done once everyone is there and you can spend the whole time with your guests without disappearing into the kitchen.
Yeah! I don't think Europe considers casseroles as lower class food.. there are so many forms of casserole all over Europe, very long traditional recipes. It's good eating.
@Jon Hudson you didn't realize? So you never heard of lasagne???????
One side of my family is Illinois German and the other is southern as far back as I can tell. I've always eaten casserole, of many different kinds. Green bean, chicken, leftovers, etc. It's a staple on both sides of my family
"Suddenly what I ate wasn't weird anymore."
Facts, and this is exactly how many rich people view Black Culture(s) too.
I was literally just waiting for the comparison to black-face... Not disappointed by what I got instead but the missed opportunity to brush on intersectionality was about the only con-crit I could offer her.
@@Aima952 ?????
@@kitbracadabra People looking for shit will find... shit.
Cultural Strip Mining is definitely a thing. American mainstream is very good at it. It's like the Borg, almost.
@@jesusnice850 read a book. Basic knowledge
Your days of underexposed content are numbered mortal, beholdeth a horde of eyeballs coming to observe!!!
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I came here from a zone...a zone made of eyeballs.
The eyeballs guide, and we must follow
the occular guides do good! this video is excellent, I'm so excited for the next part!
This does explain why the video has shown up in my recommendations. Must have missed the shout out.
I’m glad i grew up near poor rural white people in my life. As a black person living in the projects nearby farmland down south it was always the poor white folks and poor black folks. And there were well to do white and black folks who lived in the big houses in the nicer neighborhoods. I was exposed to all types of classism and racism but it taught me that race or class isn’t the only ways to determine who a person is. I saw it on both sides and saw the similarities between the poor of both races and the well off of both races. Sad that the poor people would be going through the same things but hated each other for their race and ignorance of the other sides culture. But to this day i can see how similar the cultures are. Just been taught to hate and don’t understand the other side well enough.
Someone gets it! Keep it up friend!
I grew up in a very diverse area too. It always baffles me that people can know so little of each other but make such certain judgements on their character.
There was classism and racism in my school but honestly if you wanted to get by you really needed to tolerate, at least tolerate, everyone. Otherwise someone would school you in the kids sense. Which meant alot of fights. But not alot of the constant tension I sense in isolated places.
Ya, that sucks man. I hope everything is getting better for you.
Here's a "white trash" recipe for anyone who wants to try it:
"The Alabama Possum's Delight":
Get rice (any kind will do) and put it in a medium or even large sized pot
Take 2 cups of water and pour it into the pot
Set the stoves' eye to 2 or 4
Wait for the bubbles to appear and set it to low/simmer. Place the lid over the pot and let the rice cook for about 15 minutes. (Sprinkle some salt, pepper, and whatever seasoning you like)
Get a skillet and pour three teaspoons of olive oil or veggie oil.
Set stoves' eye to about 4
Take a can of spam (two cans could work too)
Remove and cut the meat in thin slices, enough for everyone. (Incase you're eating with company) if alone, thick slices are good too.
When the skillet heats up, place your spam slices to about five or even seven (depending on your skillet size)
Cook one side for 2-5 minutes, then flip it over and repeat the process until it's golden brown or a little burnt. Don't worry, it can bring in the flavor.
Then place in a bowl with a folded paper towel at the bottom. (To catch the grease so you'll have little to clean up)
Once you've fried all of your slices your rice should be done
Grab a plate (it can be paper, we ain't cooking for the King)
If you have more than one plate, you can double stack to keep it steady
Drink wise, It can go well with soda or sweet tea.
For sauces, standard hot sauce will do just fine
It ain't much, but it's filling, affordable, and if your heart's in the right place, it'll taste just fine
my family would just do chicken & rice occasionally with broccoli mixed in
That sounds delicious actually.
similarly, what gets to be called 'cuisine' vs not like 'street food'. for the longest time, only certain european based foods were called cuisine. only now are some other countries getting to call their food cuisine. and like with 'trashy food', its tied to economic status, but even more by ethnicities
As a broke college student, lemme give a quick casserole tip: if you want to amp up the flavor for free, cook it in a shallow dish instead of a deep one. You get more caramelization on the top, and I personally love the texture a lot more that way.
As someone with sensory issues who is a picky eater but loves crunchy textures, thank you!!!
I find the bigger the gap at the top, the softer the meat.
As someone who was raised in rural Ontario on a minister's salary, I feel this. Thank you Matt for showing me this. Zoe, I look forward to the follow-up; it sounds very interesting.
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You mentioning cow tails brought me back immediately to my poor, rural childhood in north florida. I haven’t eaten one in years but I could almost feel the outer gelatinous coating
It's funny to see how much oxtail sell for now$$$
oxtail is fucking delicious
It's the same reason why being heavy used to be the socially desirable state: because rich people could afford to eat enough to get fat. Now, fattening food is cheaper, so it has inverted.
Not to mention the beauty standard for weight is reversed.
It's weird how beauty and status standards never contradict each other.
Fattenig food is not cheaper that is a myth.
@@stevenmackintosh8160 Each of the last three years, I have taken part in a Lenten Food Stamp Challenge at my church. We limit ourselves to the food stamp budget and donate the difference between that and our normal food spending to an anti-hunger charity. Each of those three years, I gained two or three pounds in a month and a half. Try the challenge for long enough to see a difference and see what happens to you.
@@stevenmackintosh8160 Canned food, frozen food, and fast food is way cheaper than buying fresh fruits and vegetables or nice restaurant dinners, not to mention cooking a fresh meal costs a lot of time too when many people are working too often to have the energy to plan and cook meals. There are also food deserts, urban areas where there won't be fresh produce for miles, and the only groceries you can get are from the Dollar Tree or Walmart. Not everyone can afford Whole Foods, if there even is one close enough to shop at.
What planet do you live on where that isn't true? I'll gladly move there.
@@KC-ep6sg Canned and frozen food is not less healthy than fresh thats another myth. Sometimes fresh is cheaper than frozen or canned it depends on the type of veg or fruit. Yes cooking takes time but thats not anything to do with expense. Its more a skill that unfortunatly most people dont have. I grew up eating trash food, but in adulthood learned how to make really easy cheap healthy meals; its not hard when you know how.
I once overheard a upper class person try to explain to a lower class person why a yogurt is healthier then a chocolate pudding. The lower class person pointed out that both had 28 grams of sugar and 2 grams of protein so there wasn't really a difference. This broke the upper class person's brain.
I mean it depends on the type of yogurt. Like Greek yogurt will have much more protein and fats than the normal Yoplait yogurt
General rule: If a food is labeled 'low fat' it's probably full of sugar, and vice versa.
But also, it's better for your gut.
I literally only grew up with homemade "curd" which is usually served savory. Then went to a friend's house and discovered yoplait and chobani... how did western capitalism manage to fuck up yogurt so bad...
My mother-in-law only buys the excessively over processed yogurts like yoplait and activia. She doesn’t usually remember to eat them either.... I won’t actually bother to eat them until they are at LEAST six months after the sell by date. I grew up eating actual yogurt that didn’t have sugar in it. The yogurt my mother-in-law buys just tastes like pudding to me. It starts to actually taste like real yogurt if I let it ripen in the fridge six months to a year. I’m keep wondering why she doesn’t just buy pudding and actually eat it. I also wonder why she doesn’t let me pick out yogurt I actually like.
I grew up incredibly poor at times and am forever grateful to the efforts of my parents for always attempting to put "good" food on the table even if it meant making a lot of other sacrifices. Many others around me growing up were even poorer so I never felt any shame about our situation though I was frightfully aware of it. I think the only time I felt poor shame was the first time I answered the door and there were people from the state there looking to take our house away. As an adult I find myself getting sad if I'm ever in a situation that forces me to eat what I now personally consider "poor" food. Usually I am willing to spend a large portion of my income on "good" food b/c it so strongly affects my mental health. This all swings back to my poor upbringing as well as how I initially ate when first setting out on my own. Just wanted to share as I really appreciate all the work that went into creating this video and conversation.
As our most important resource, food is soooo commonly the number one thing tied up with our trauma and mental health if we grew up poor. I constantly overpurchase food for the pantry and cook too-large meals. And it can very much be traced back to my perception of lack up until middle school, when my mother took on a second job. Suddenly we had more food, a larger house with bigger kitchen to store said food, and a greater variety of processed quick foods from the commercials on tv (even if it was the store brand). Thus it became cemented in my subconscious that food=security=love.
@@lavendarcrash2941 I'm in the UK, but this form of food insecurity can really carry through your life.
My father, for instance, grew up in a household where, while there was food on the table every day, there was always a threat that they wouldn't have a lot of food. He reminisces on days where their dinner was white bread and tinned peaches because that's all that was in.
And he carries that trauma. He's doing well, but he always worries that the portions he gives aren't enough (they are) and he ALWAYS clears his plate.
As a Pennsylvanian, when you mentioned potato candy, so many fond memories lit up in my brain of the holidays (where my grandpa would ask my mom and I to make it) that I got some tears in my eyes.
My dad and I still go out digging for leaks and foraging for berries. Both of which we use for eating. My mom makes "leak dip" which is chopped up leaks, jar cheese whiz and some other stuff. I've even made quite a bit of violet syrup and have been debating drying out dead nettle, henbit, and ground ivy for seasoning.
I'm not from the US. As an outsider looking in, all of these are just typical American food to me. It's the stuff I see in movies, TV shows and the international sections of our supermarkets. Most of them are more expensive than our local versions, because they have to be imported. It's a bit like your lobster example.
In Canada I have to get import Korean food and it's always so expensive
Yes, the obsession with American culture has increased obesity rates abroad. Look at the UAE & their love for American food. Here in the US we know it’s junk and stay away; unless you’re poor or uneducated about healthy nutrition
Same. I tot all americans ate casserole lol.
Same for me (a brazillian), it all looks very much America too me.
Same for here in the Philippines. All these imported American foods look prestigious, and they are placed on the expensive junkfood aisles separated from our local ones that are much cheaper.
Brings to mind a line from Frasier where snobby Niles says to elitist Frasier when trying to convince him to give fast food a whirl, "oh come on, you've sample the peasant cuisine of france, italy, and Spain. Why ignore the peasants in our own back yard."
I like the quote from Daphne, who said Niles would eat a worm if it had a french name.
@@ctlvrx Well, I'm sure he's probably eaten escargot at least once.
When she said “picture the trashiest food you can think of” my mind immediately went to Joy from My Name Is Earl squirting ketchup onto a plate of spaghetti in lieu of marinara sauce.
Yes!! Also same recipe on Honey Boo Boo.
Honestly I almost can't stand marinara sauce after being raised on ketchup
this is doubly funny because where I live ketchup is actually much more expensive than plain tomato sauce
@@MCArt25 depends on the marina but that is generally true pretty much everywhere.
I remember I used to eat green bean casseroles, pigs in a blanket, and all that stuff a lot as a kid but as I grew older my Mom stopped making them very often. This video makes me realize, that combined with her improved cooking skills, it's probably because my family was more well off in my adolescence than my grade school years.
This was an interesting video for me. I'm a Texan, and I actually had no idea that there was such a stigma attached to any of the foods she mentioned. It's just the reality that I've known all my life.
When she got to the part where she asked, "what's a food that you wouldn't stoop to eat," I was stumped, because I realized she meant "by the status that it implies or its health value," and I've always been of the mind of, "if it's what I'm in the mood to eat and I've got enough money in my pocket to buy it, that's what I'm getting," and I ALWAYS buy the cheapest, knockoff store brand of everything at the grocery store (or deli food that's been marked down to 50% off, because they're about to throw it out).
The few times I encountered someone sticking their nose up at these kinds of foods, I just dismissed them as "high falutin" douchebags who were trying to make themselves feel better by dissing me, so I shrugged them off.
I will say that this kind of food snobbery is relatively rare in most of Texas, though. Just about everyone here, rich or poor, loves chili pie...and we damn sure ate a lot of it to stay warm during the recent snow storm, lol.
That being said, I still liked the way Zoe dove deeper into the issue than I'd ever considered. Cheers!
“The trashiest food you can imagine”
Immediately my mind went to those orange cheese puffs. Not Cheetos. Those cheese balls. With Cheetos texture (I assume??). The ones that come in a biiiiig bucket-like jar
Yeah I second this, hated those
God those are so awful
I love those things omfg, they're weirdly delicious
we have this brand of popcorn here that's like those but no cheese, just butter and salt. They're fricken delicious and I love them
@@a-bird-lover that sounds amazing where is it sold
It's nutritional, but it is a sorta bottom of the barrel dish. "tiger soup" is the largely spent carcass of a chicken, boiled until the last bits of meat and flavour come off into a broth, is bulked up with rice and flavoured with lemon juice. My mum always made it with chicken carcasses after a roast or something: it was largely recycled from a previous, more expensive meal and is thus extremely cheap to make. I love tiger soup and take pride in the fact that I can rinse 5 or more meals out of a small chicken: one roast, one curry one stir fry, and at least 2 bowls of tiger soup. With a large one, I can make a small family lunch, dinner, and lunch the next day: that last lunch will be tiger soup. Try it, it's good. The rice soaks up the broth as it cooks and becomes very flavourful.
Isn’t that kinda risotto? Sounds good though.
That transition was MASTERFUL! One of the best transitions I've seen in a youtube video. Really engages the audience, turns everything on it's head, beautiful.
I will never forgive whoever decided casseroles are trash. Literally why, they're so good??
The 50s and 60s in America were a culinary dark age with the combination of microwaves, jell-o and canned food so it likely happened then. Not all moms are good cooks :(
casseroles are terrible.
I'm with you Finni, a well made casserole can be amazing comfort food. I'm not talking about the 5 cans of condensed soup varieties though which is what most people have experienced lol
@@toxicat Casseroles are delicious and can feed an entire family.
@@KyrenaH yes, sure, if you're terrible at cooking
When you said "seasonal work like agriculture" around the 9 min mark, it put the stark image in my mind that the people growing, picking, and and packaging organic produce and other "luxury" food items can't afford to eat them. What a shameful practice for society to uphold.
growing up as a Latino in a white community I can say that there were several different times when my food culture clashed with the majority. Thankful I was accepted but I know people who weren't. To me food can tell so much about someone and their culture. Food is food to me, and I will keep on eating what I enjoy.
Did you have hot dogs wrapped in a tortilla like I did as a kid?
@@jennoscura2381 is the sky blue?
Tuna burritos here. I would love to tell people they're actually delicious but that shit is too embarrassing to admit lol
@@PiranhaTub interesting. can i get the recipe?
bee affirmations canned tuna & mayo, salt & pepper. Wrapped in a flour tortilla because you're out of bread. 👍 also try dipping nacho Doritos in tuna salad, it just works i swear to god.
I did not come from a “white trash” family. We were middle class and lived in the suburbs but still at the edge. A close enough drive to the sticks for me to spend a lot of my time and have friends there. I grew up with “trashy” foods though and even now I find myself making them a lot. Not only because I love them and grew up on them but because I can’t afford a lot of the more “rich” dishes I ate as a kid. (Hey I’m a broke kid who graduated collage with a bachelors in graphic design and an associates in animal behavior. I work for 29K /yr at an animal shelter and have a dog of my own to look after.)
We always made this really delicious chicken and rice dish. We would buy whole chickens then what we didn’t use for other meals we would shred and cook in our instant pot with butter and cartots and rice and milk and peas and broccoli and if we had any we’d use heavy cram and it was always my favorite dish, still is. I still make it all the time and I remember the first time I made it for my friends they laughed at me for making “trash food” and I didn’t cook it for like a year after. It is good though, I can’t believe I ever stopped eating it because I was embarrassed.
I assume someone will already have said it but it's so, so easy to connect this with a discussion of ableism. Regardless of income, a lot of ND/ASD/disabled/majorly depressed or otherwise non able bodied or minded people will eat trash food because it's all they can make due to lack of energy or dexterity and are thus also designated "trash".
Agreed. Also, they likely make less money, so all they can afford is cheap “trash” food.
i'm probably late to this but like it's deeply weird to me that "white trash" and "trash" are used so interchangeably here. it's not really a critique, and i think it's important that poor white people are acknowledged in a way that centers their class struggle, but it also felt really...off as a black american to hear "white trash" treated as a basically racially neutral term. like your poor foods are generally our poor foods too, esp. for black families in urban + suburban areas, but there's a difference in the way black and white people are treated when they eat 'trash' foods, and also in the perception of the economic class of people who eat them. (not to mention the places where our 'trash food' diverges like chitlins and gizzards and sugar grits which is a whole other conversation.)
a lot of this is driven by the legacy of slavery and segregation so like it's not uncommon for some black families with a nominally higher income than some 'poor whites' to have basically the same levels of wealth and the same culturally driven tastes, but esp. in urban areas they definitely aren't coded as 'white trash' but 'ghetto,' our tastes serving as evidence not of a lack of class but of some larger cultural pathology inherent to our race. again, a lot to unpack, but it adds an extra dimension to this discussion that i think is worth exploring alongside the racial element of "white trash".
i also think there's a world of difference between "white trash" as a white intraracial conversation (which i *think* is what is happening in this video but not made explicit) and "white trash" being used by people of color. poc usually use the phrase as a reaction to racism, to (cruelly) remind poor white people that they aren't superior to us just because of their skin color, but we generally aren't the ones throwing "white trash" parties (esp. black people, who again are largely eating the same caliber stuff bc of intergenerational poverty and food deserts). when the rich white people who do this shit, do this shit, it's classism motivated by the fear of losing their access to wealth or just straight up bigotry. (also something something colonizing and commodifying 'foreign' experiences etc)
love the video, i think i just wanted this comment to kinda fill in some missing context! (p.s. jd vance just...whew. wish that man would go away.)
Okay, but she’s talking about *her* experiences. I think it’s unsettling that you say “it needs to be focused on” and then when it *is,* you criticize it. You can’t have it both ways.
@Emi L I can definitely see why you feel that way, but I think that might be intentional. She's reclaiming a term that was used to describe her and people with her background. I think the point is a little bit to make you uncomfortable. And honestly I'm pleasantly astounded by the conversation it's stirred up. Her viewers are much better conversationalist than most of TH-cam. The comment proceeding this is excellent. I think the purpose of focusing only on "white trash" instead of poverty foods in general with merely for simplicity, personal experience, and a bit of shock value. But I agree and I think she does too, that it deserves to be expanded on in a way that includes more than the white experience. I would suspect she would prefer it be a different video for times sake. Or perhaps she's hoping a creator might respond and bring in their experiences. I miss the day when we could reply to each other's videos. Lol sorry, I'm new here so a bit of gushing and thrill at find this community has seeped in.
That’s libs for you
Yeah, it struck me as really odd that a video that used the term "white trash" so many times didn't include any comment on why "white" is in there in the first place.
There's a reason why we have a term for "white trash" specifically and not the same term for any other ethnic group, and, at least as I understand it, that's rooted in racism. Regardless of how it's used or who is using it, the term only exists because we live in a system that disproportionately values whiteness. It's like saying, "despite the fact that you're white, you're still trash," which of course can only be said if you live in a society where somehow "white" and "trash" are contradictory.
Phrases like "white trash" are used by rich white people to separate different parts of the the working class community, and pit poor white people and poor POC against eachother. If they tell poor POC that the ignorant, violent, racist ones are the "white trash" and tell the "white trash" that their enemy are POC, neither of them are fighting the rich white people.
Can we share casserole "recipes" here?
This week I made green bean casserole, but added Italian sausage to the mix and topped it with stovetop stuffing before baking. It was really good.
I grew up in the Midwest eating tater tot casserole: a pound of ground beef, a can of cream of mushroom soup, a block of Velveeta cheese, and a layer of tater tots. Toss it in the oven at 350° for ~45 minutes or until the tots are golden and the cheese is bubbly. Even as an adult, I still make this occasionally - it holds a lot of nostalgia for me.
There's one my family makes that I love. I don't know the exact recipe but it's basically Velveeta shells and cheese, ground beef, and extra/different kind of cheese, mixed together and baked with another type of cheese on top (some kind of cheese that gets crispy), also sometimes there'll be an extra crunch added on top, crushed up Cheetos or Doritos or something similar! It's really good. There could also be some kind of canned or frozen vegetables added to the mix, like peas or chopped string beans, otherwise it's served with a salad or something on the side. Edit: missing an ingredient, tomato! Crushed, chopped, or sauce.
Here's my mum's pizza casserole, courtesy of rural Ontario and the 80's: Cook up a pile of whatever pasta you've got around and toss it into the casserole dish, then chop up some pepperoni, Italian sausage, or similar and toss it in with the pasta. Then pour in a can of spaghetti sauce, and add some canned mushrooms, stewed tomatoes, etc, if you've got them around/if you're trying to stealth some veggies into the fam. You can also toss in some extra chunks of cheese to make it extra gooey. Top with mozzarella, and bake at around 350, until the cheese is getting bubbly and browned - around 40 mins.
My roomies in uni *loved* this stuff!
@@maxthemannequin4143 Same thing for me, but no velveeta. Instead when it was done, we’d put a slice of white American kraft cheese on each slice we took and let it melt. Actually amazing
My mom has this really good hash brown casserole recipe that actually came from my grandma when she was a single mom. It’s just hash browns, cream of chicken soup, shredded cheddar cheese, and sour cream, all covered in a bunch of corn flakes. It’s really good, and it has a funny story too. When my aunt moved out for the first time, she begged my grandma for the recipe, thinking it was some family recipe, and my grandma was just like “uhhh… it’s literally on the back of the corn flakes box lol”
"Think of the trashiest food you can imagine."
"unseasoned half-cooked chicken, raw steak, washed eggs."
"*proceeds to list actually edible things*
"oh"
"I want you to think of the trashiest food you can imagine."
*Me, thinking back to Tuesday night when my partner and I ate dollar tree frozen dinner*
Oh man, I do remember the days of grocery shopping at 99c Only. Best of fortune to you!
Zoe: would you eat that food?
Me: y e s
Those Jamaican Jerk Chicken patties in the freezer section, chopped up on a Mama celete Pizza folded in half and eaten like a taco. Eaten on your lunch break at your strip mall job behind the dirt mall.
Ah, a fellow fan of "The Wolfe Pit," I see.
wow, ur rich enough to have a freezer? /j
I didn't even know that about half the foods you listed were considered trashy. If it's good it's good, also EYEBALLS.
+
I mean I don't it personally because it's not healthy for you at all. But I don't think it's trash. I just wish everyone could afford healthy food but I know that people are just trying to survive.
I am vegan but I often feel the need to clarify to people that I am "a terrible vegan" and I think it's because I still eat trashy foods. I eat vegan hot dogs cut up and mixed into vegan macaroni. I eat handfuls of vegan tofurky slices straight out of the package. Convenience is #1 for me because I am usually too depressed to cook "proper" food. I guess there is some internalized shame for not eating bougie vegan food made from all fresh organic produce.
the best convenient vegan food is canned beans. It’s great food.
I make “beanie weenie” with vegan dogs in canned beans with ketchup. Lol. I’m also fortunate to eat a lot of organic produce. Love the Aldi brand “chicken” patties on bread like it’s school lunch. Haha
No wonder people think it's too expensive to do. :/ How many of those types even do research on what brands or places they support? Not enough to support that holier-than-thou attitude. We don't live in a world where perfectly aesthetic, ethical consumption is feasible.
Are you like literally me
Except I live in the middle of nowhere and vegan meat is really hard to come by
I am a poor vegan. So I have to limit the specialty foods. I am improving my diet. So I am avoiding junk food and eating cheap healthy staples like rice, potatoes, oats, beans, lentils etc. For veggies I buy frozen and get stuff from Imperfect Produce. You can eat pretty healthy on a budget if you eat a starch based diet and buy your starches in bulk. I get my rice in 50 lb bags from Costco via Instacart. I normally buy beans 20 lbs at a crack. Potatoes 10 lbs at a crack. Bulk packs of oats from Costco etc. I even get my soy milk by the case from Costco.
This video has really made me grateful that I have a mom who has the time & energy to cook for us, and does it well. I see all these comments about living off of the bare minimum, and I just wish I could have y'all over for dinner and make sure you're nourished. Hunger by necessity is something no one deserves to experience, least of all growing kids.
I'm also really grateful to have access to the resources to cook for myself (at least at my parents' home), and it pains me that I took for granted the fact that I can just... cook shit... and have access to ingredients. Like, I have celiac disease and sensory issues with taste/texture, and it's absolutely a luxury that I can afford to feed myself and stay healthy on my gluten-free diet. And it shouldn't be a luxury, but it'd be naive of me to stick my head in the sand and ignore my privilege here.
Idk where this comment is headed; I guess, to the people who can sit down for a home-cooked meal with the family, please be thankful, because it might have never occurred to you that people have it any way else (it sure didn't occur to me for most of my childhood, but then again I am a bit hollow in the noggin lmao)
same
I relate to this, as this experience an analogue to Black culture being appropriated by the wealthy white folks who never want to celebrate the Blackness which bore it.
“I want you to think of the trashiest food you can imagine.”
This made me realize how much I love food. Any food that is edible is not trashy in my opinion. Sure, there are food I wouldn’t eat just because I don’t like their taste or because they come from sources I’m not comfortable eating, but I wouldn’t call any of those trashy.
Edit: Just finished the video and I realize the reason I don’t have ‘trash foods’ is not because I love food but because I wasn’t raised in a culture that considers some food ‘trash foods’.
I'd say bacon pig pork sausages haribos and "ethnic microwave meals"
i completely had the same experience!! i couldn’t think of anything really...unhealthy food maybe but not trashy food
i feel sort of the same, but i do consider all the american processed foods that have 0 nutritional value outside of carbohydrates to be trashy, like wonderbread.
it doesn't have anything to do with culture, just the fact that those foods are utterly soul-less and actively make you feel worse.
This was like being hit right between the eyes, because I straight up did not know a lot of these were “trash foods,” and grew up eating a lot of the things listed. I guess by these standards, the trashiest things I ate were two dishes we called “rice stuff” and “cheesy rice stuff.” The first was a bunch of rice and a can of cream of mushroom soup, and the second was rice, steamed frozen corn, and velveeta. Both were very good, imo
That was my favorite meal growing up! But we called it rice and gravy. Now I call it the poor mans risotto
@@devenblackwell5690 ironic given the regular risotto started out as “poor people food”/“trash food” for rural Italians. Now it’s served at upscale Italian restaurants alongside historically high class dishes
@@alissaceruzzi3581 like fashion, food goes in an and out of “style” but people don’t go in and out of poverty. The tend to stay there as the rich intend :(
Ikr, dang! I thought "trashy" was going to be more of the typical unhealthy walmart food, but I loved this stuff growing up. Tuna noodle cassarole is the _bomb_
Yeah, tuna casserole was listed in the comments somewhere but it is one of my favorite foods today
I came back to this video, because I struggle a lot with cooking because of my disabilities. And your list of features of trash foods is honestly kind of ideal as a starting point.
"either mozzarella or parmesan", no no no; mozzarella *and* parmesan
Interesting backstory on the lobster. Reminds me of how exposed brick and hardwood floors used to be considered low class, until new technologies drove down the price of plaster/drywall and carpeting. Then came the reversal.
I've never thought of casserole as a trash food and was surprised to learn that's a common opinion. In my mind trash food was always cheap food that had little nutritional value, foods that corporations aggressively advertise to poor people to take advantage of the fact that they often can't afford to invest in more nutritious products.
Thank you. I never understood this particular human interaction, so I never got why people gave me odd looks when I ate cheap food. (Or why I got pushback when suggested eating it as a way to cut expenses in a fiscal emergency.)
I've found soup gets around this behavior. I just say, "The broth is homemade." and suddenly I'm a foodie. All I did was save my bones and boil them.
yeah, i feel like soups were literally made by people to feed a whole family with one piece of meat and occasional vegetable
Excellent video! It really excellently puts into words a certain unease I've had for a while about the currently-popular meme(?) on Twitter of Americans making disparaging Bri'ish jokes. To be clear upfront I like many of the jokes when they actually make sense and in no way think British people are some kind of an oppressed group, but some really common jokes do just feel like extremely thinly-veiled classism. Like the apparent obsession with jellied eels (a food which I doubt more than 0.1% of the UK population has ever even tried) because "haha funny gross Bri'ish food" completely fails to recognise that jellied eels is popular with Cockneys because you can get eels (and no other kind of fish) straight out of the Thames and cheaply cook them to make them just about edible, which would often be your only way to eat, because Cockneys are historically extremely poor working-class people. Most jokes about British food, in fact, totally ignore that historically the upper classes would've just eaten what we think of as "French" cooking, as would have the upper classes of many other European societies. So the only identifiable natively British meals would naturally be extremely cheap, easy things made by the working class (take beans on toast - you get your tin of beans and your government-issued standard white bread and put them together because that's all you have left for a week). Then of course rationing during the war on a scale many Americans probably don't understand exacerbated these divides and completely changed an entire generation's relationship with food. I think it's easy for otherwise very considerate Americans to make these jokes because, since they're not from the UK and probably don't know much of its social history, they don't realise that the group they're actually disparaging isn't the colonising imperialists*, it's just working class people. In short, they can feel like they're punching up, even though they're really punching down. The same applies with a lot of the jokes about accents, but that's unrelated to this video.
*I of course recognise that nigh on every person in the UK benefited from imperialism and has an obligation to understand and be mindful of that, but you know what I mean here, the people making the decisions and the direct profits weren't eating jellied eels, they were eating roast hog.
As a Brit,thank you also as a working class Londoner & an East Londer at that I have never eaten Eel.
Howdy, I'm an American (obviously, from the use of "howdy") and I'll be honest with you, I really dig the sound of jellied eels. I'm not entirely certain as to the intent of other folks, but I personally don't care to discriminate other peoples' food, nor for other folks to do so either.
Please do not be discouraged by some folks' either ribbing nor malicious intent. Please have a pleasant day.
@@TheThescottydont Howdy! Yeah, I do also suspect that classism aside, if jellied eels were from Asia so that white ppl could do an Asian mysticism to it, people would suddenly jump to its defense and say it's a delicacy lol.
I'm glad im not the only one that thinks that about said memes.. and the ones that are like 'lol all british food is brown and bland' even if they are sometimes funny
Much of the foods on those lists are things that were eaten by often very poor working class brits, and still are in many cases, and while im no expert on the topic, spices, sauces etc were unaffordable, if you could even get them at all thanks in part to ww1/2 and what appears to be an attitude that 'fancy' foods werent for the poors, and were to be eyed with suspicion means many people would avoid them anyway (thats going a bit off topic though)
@@ratchetfox8111 Yeah, in general pretty much all the foods ppl make jokes about are very much working-class foods. Americans also don't at all understand the scale of rationing during the second world war. It not only changed what people could eat at the time, but if you think about the fact that most people learn cooking and seasoning etc from their parents when they're growing up, millions of people grew up in a time when their parents _could only make_ the simplest and blandest of foods. So it completely broke that intergenerational exchange, and a lot of people never learned more classic cooking techniques (mainly what we would think of as French food, stews and braises etc) that would've been commonplace in even some working class homes before the war.
Did anyone else get super emotional while watching this video? I'm so angry, sad, hurt...I felt like crying 😭 and I'm not even from Appalachia.
Yes.
The trashiest food I can think of is probably Twinkies because when you compare them to other garbage foods like Oreos or hot chips, there is no way to feel good eating them. I'm a sweets person and I've gone to some extreme lengths to get my sugar fix from time to time, but Twinkies make me feel genuinely awful inside. Nothing about their taste or texture is worth the feeling of utter disgust that comes with thinking "oh god I just ate that and it's inside me now"
Edit: for the first couple of minutes I thought this video was talking about trash food as in "food that is bad for you" and not "food that acts as a symbol of someone's socioeconomic class". I want to apologize if my Twinkies rant was a bit heated and I also want to clarify that I mean no ill will to those who enjoy Twinkies or grew up eating them. You all can do something that I can't so feel free to make fun of my weird food taste in the replies
Idk I always associate trash food with really unhealthy or cheap food
What I imagined was french fries soaking with grease. Why? Idk really lol, but there was a time in my life that I would eat those literally every day. I feel soooo bad even remembering that
I was too poor to even afford twinkies as a kid, so ya good with me.
nahhh twinkies were like the high point of life as a kid, I don't eat em much now but when I do I think "I'll keep eating this garbage"
Potato Candy sounds amazing.
After my mom made juice from concentrate we were not allowed to fill a dixie cup with it.
We just put a small amount in the bottom of the cup and then filled the rest with water.
I did not realize this was weird until a friend came over and after I offered him a cup of this diluted mixture he said "noooo gross!!!