Reblog with the stereotypical meal of a poor single person in your country!

It varies in the US, but the stereotype I know of is Top Ramen and some kind of soft drink.

This is by far my most educational food question, thank you everyone for answering, and please add more!

another southern appalachian person doubling down on pinto beans and cornbread--w chow chow if you got it.

that's more old-timey though. today it's prob just the same pre-packaged noodles and gas station food you get everywhere.

(uk based answer)

well, it depends on how far back we want to go and matters of... uhm... legality in terms of sourcing... uhm... produce...

ahem. anyway.

one thing my granddad used to do was take his oldest sons with him and go and liberate some cabbages and such from a nearby farmers field (this was well over 35 years ago jsyk) and he’d buy some bacon from the butchers, a big hunk of it. boiled bacon with green vein cabbage. it was something he could cook, would make a lot of, and honestly, not a single one of the household went hungry for several days.

more recently, ala in my lifetime, my mother used to live on toast in order to make sure my brothers and i at least had a decent meal. most of our food was tinned, sometimes frozen, rarely fresh vegetables. the thing about uk vegetables is, as far as i can tell, it’s easier to source vegetables here than in the us for example. so fresh produce is possible to get. but we were poor af (still are lbr) but my mother was making do with £20 a week for three kids and herself in terms of food. it wasn’t easy. she’d make sunday dinner and it’d be a big thing because it’d have roast potatoes, some meat (usually chicken breast), and plenty of vegetables (all frozen in bags from farmfoods). but that was more of a One Time A Week thing. regular dinners would be simpler. especially with one kid (me) who was a picky af eater and two boys (my brothers) who would honestly eat anything in huge af quantities. she’d spend a good £5-6 on a sack of potatoes that’d last the week and use them to make chips, roast potatoes, jacket potatoes, mash and whatever else she could to go with whatever frozen veg she had and the meat she’d bought. more often than not, i remember dinners being simple affairs. tin of baked beans and sausage in that sauce with toast. perfectly suitable for me, less so for my brothers. they’d get corned beef hash which would knock my mother sick to make because he hates corned beef, but she’d be able to make a large amount that’d last two days at a time for my brothers.

most of the time, she heavily relied on my primary school feeding us. free school dinners made sure we were able to eat during school hours and made it easier to feed us when we got home. during the times when money was really scarce and my mother couldn’t actually feed us properly, she’d get us sorted out and we’d hike up to my auntie’s and we’d eat there. i didn’t realise it as a kid, neither did my brothers really, but if it weren’t for my aunt, we honestly wouldn’t have eaten a damned thing some days. food at my aunt’s was almost like having a sunday dinner every time we visited. she’d have a root through her giant ass freezer where she hoards frozen food (still does btw) and bring out sausages and bacon and frozen bread, frozen milk. just all sorts. 

the most common meals we had when i was a kid were usually things easy to cook in the oven with minimal attention paid because my mother had only herself to look after three kids, one of who was an absolute shit head when left alone for five minutes (my middle sib has not changed). 

chips and two or three slices of pizza were exceptionally common. and also one of my favourites. i had an absolute weakness for the mini party pizzas that farmfoods used to sell. 

it was by no means ‘healthy’ in the sense that fresh produce would have been but it was food. we were fit and active and full of zoomies like any other kid. my mother kept us active, kept us moving, and honestly we walked the entirety of my town several times over in a month because of how much we had to walk everywhere. 

Most of my favourite meals from when I was a kid are things that looking back on, I’m like “oh wait is that a poor people thing??”

My favourite thing was cut up hot dog sausages boiled in garlic VH sauce and water....

Also a dessert that was just like slices of white bread with cream and brown (or maple) sugar. That was like a fancy poor people dessert because cream is expensive I guess? (When you live in quebec and know 50 people who have maple farms, maple sugar is not expensive lol)

Also we ate mashed potatoes for every. Single. Meal. But I wouldnt call it nice. I hated that and still retain a complete exhaustion on the concept of mashed potatoes.

Texan here! As a kid we ate a LOT of hamburger helper, because we knew a guy who raised cattle and could get a quarter of beef dirt cheap. A lot of instant mashed potatoes. And now, ad a single working adult, Rice. So much rice, with whatever spices I got on sale at work. And not even soda most of the time, just tap water

My mom in Nebraska in the '80s would boil a frozen chicken thigh and pair it with potatoes or something to make chicken soup

Kansas girl from the ‘80s! At least twice a week, we had what my mom affectionately referred to as “shit on a shingle”...it was toast (always Shurfine bread) with hamburger gravy (cheap burger, milk, flour) poured on top. In the summer we might have Kool-Aid, but otherwise it was water.

Maybe I’ll make that this weekend...

For any of you who responded to this post I have a favor to ask...I run a small food pantry in a fairly well-to-do town in the northeast US. If you could ask for 3 things to get from a food pantry what would they be? I’d like to know if there’s anything else I should try to stock. Yes, I have asked my clients what they would like to see, but I would like to hear from you as well.

A poor, single person from Poland would probably buy a pack of frozen veggies to fry and cook some rice with it, alternatively go for ready-made sauce in a jar and pour it over pasta. They might as well buy some canned stew (/meat and veg type of meals) and cook mashed potatoes with it.

some things i’ve learned while studying in quarantine

idk I just love how we Young People Today use ~improper~ punctuation/grammar in actually really defined ways to express tone without having to explicitly state tone like that’s just really fucking cool, like

no    =    “No,” she said. 

no.    =    "No,” she said sharply.

No    =    “No,” she stated firmly.

No.    =    “No,” she snapped.

NO    =    “No!” she shouted.

noooooo    =    “No,” she moaned.

no~    =    “No,” she said with a drawn-out sing-song.

~no~    =    “No,” she drawled sarcastically.

NOOOOO    =    “No!” she screamed dramatically.

no?!    =    “No,” she said incredulously.

I’ve been calling this “typographical nuance” and I have a few more to add: 

*no* = “No,” she said emphatically. 

*nopes on out of here* = “No,” she said of herself in the third person, with a touch of humorous emphasis.

~*~noooo~*~ = “No,” she moaned in stylized pseudo-desperation.

#no = “No,” she added as a side comment.

“no” = “No,” she scare-quoted.

wtf are you kidding no = “No,” she said flatly. “And I can’t believe I have to say this.”

no no No No NO NO NO NO = "No,” she repeated over and over again, growing louder and more emphatic. 

nooOOOO = “No,” she said, starting out quietly and turning into a scream.

*no = “Oops, I meant ‘no,’” she corrected, “Sorry for the typo in my previous message.”

I cannot express how strongly I absolutely love language and writing and communication but if anyone asks why I will be showing them this post from now on

this is the realest shit i’ve ever read

all the french in the notes are like

English vocabulary

All words are taken from Magoosh vocabulary builder! Miser - someone who has a strong wish to have money and hates to spend it Pith -  the essence of something Precedent - an action, situation, or decision that has already happened and can be used as a reason why a similar action or decision should be performed or made Recapitulation -  a concise summary To bolster - to support or improve something or make it stronger To dissipate - to disappear gradually, or to cause something to disappear gradually To extrapolate - to infer by extending known information To maintain - to express firmly your belief that something is true Appreciable - large enough to be noticed or to have an effect Artful -  clever and skillful, especially in getting what you want Equitable -  treating everyone fairly and in the same way Oblique - not clear or direct

tfw you want the word in one language and your brain has to cycle through every single language you have ever studied to get to it

That bilingual feeling when someone asks you point-blank to translate a word you’ve heard about a thousand times and you suddenly forget every possible equivalent to said word (and also lose the ability to produce any coherent utterance as a whole)

Ok ok but why is language learning becoming so competitive?

- If you want to learn one language and practice a few times a week, that’s fine.

- If you want to study 7 languages at once and practice every day, that’s fine.

- If you like to go out and use your target language, that’s fine.

- If you just like to watch movies or youtube in your target language, that’s fine.

Different things work for different people.

Some things may be scientifically proven to work better, but not everyone has the time or the energy.

Language learning is a passion we all share. Why are we gatekeeping people who aren’t learning as many languages or aren’t as invested?

Realiser Conjugation

le 30 novembre   ⋮   la lumière de soleil   ⋮   sunlight

Languages of Europe

Esperanto (Esperanto lingvo)

Basic facts

History

The language was initiated by Ludwig Lazar Zamenhof, who created the grammar on the basis of European languages with a minimal quantity of exceptions. The vocabulary is mostly based on Romance languages, although there are also words from Germanic and other languages. Two decades later, the first children speaking in Esperanto with their parents were born, the first native speakers of the language. It is a language created for international communication, which later became creolized and is nowadays the language of a diaspora of Esperanto speakers.

It was created on the basis of the vocabulary of Indo-European languages, but was intended to be easy to learn. For this reason, its grammar is agglutinative, a characteristic feature of Turkic and Finno-Ugric languages, and at a deeper level it is isolating, as in Mandarin Chinese and Vietnamese. This means that its morphemes can be used as independent words. It has a completely regular grammar and allows the creation of a large quantity of words by combining lexical roots and about forty affixes. 

The main parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs) have consistent endings that always allow the recognition of all parts of speech. Its regularity makes it particularly easy to learn, and its streamlined capacity to create new words make it one of the most productive languages, with a potentially unlimited number of words, is capable of expressing all new ideas or states. 

Writing system and pronunciation

These are the letters that make up the alphabet: a b c ĉ d e f g ĝ h ĥ i j ĵ k l m n o p r s ŝ t u ŭ v z.

Esperanto is read as it is written. Each letter always has the same sound, the same sound is always expressed by the same letter, and the stress is always on the next to last syllable. Diphthongs such as aŭ, eŭ, oŭ or aj count as one syllable.

Special letters in Esperanto are translitarated into English in the following way: ĉ = ch, ŝ = sh, ĝ = j, ĥ (ch as in Scottish loch), ĵ = zh (or French j).

Grammar

All nouns end in -o, all adjectives end in -a, all infinitive verbs end in -i, and most adverbs end in -e.

In the present tense, the ending is -as, while the past tense ending is -is and the ending for the future tense is -os.

In addition to the nominative case, there is also an accusative ending which is used for nouns, adjectives and pronouns in both the singular and plural: -n. Thanks to the accusative, the word order is free.

The plural of nouns and adjectives is formed by the ending -j added after the -o or -a ending.

Lieu VS endroit VS place

Un lieu :

Ex : lieu du crime (crime scene), lieu de travail (workplace), lieu de vacances (holiday destination)

Un endroit :

Ex : endroit du monde (place on earth), endroit du corps (body location), remettre ses chaussettes à l’endroit (put one’s socks the right way out)

Une place :

Ex : place du marché (market place), ne pas être à sa place (to be out of place)