What Annoyed the Internet This Week?
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Food poverty undoubtedly exists in the UK and anyone who says otherwise need only spend a few minutes researching charities such as The Trussell Trust.
This week, the internet was annoyed by a man who said that food poverty was caused by idleness. Luckily though, everybody’s favourite activist and chef, Jack Monroe, was quick to put him right.
Some guy named Andrew Booton tweeted a picture of a very beige stir fry he made and totalled the cost of the ingredients.
He claimed that if HE could cook a meal on the cheap, then so could everybody. As Jack pointed out in her quote tweet, he completely failed to consider the bigger picture.
As Jack said, Andrew didn’t mention nutrition and other costs associated with cooking. How much did his commute to the shop cost? How much did it cost in electricity? One cheap meal proves absolutely nothing.
Jack wasn’t the only one to let him know the error of his ways. Countless other Twitter users replied to the tweet, attempting to inform Andrew about the other costs that need to be covered.
Somebody else tried to use basic maths to show Andrew that his theory wasn’t as concrete as he may have thought.
Satirical news reporter Jonathan Pie jumped in too.
I‘m always suspicious of people who assume everybody lives the exact same life as them. I assume Andrew has never been a disabled, single parent whose benefits have been stopped because they were five minutes late to a meeting at the Job Centre. He‘s never been left with £10 to last the month because of complications with universal credit.
I could go on a whole rant about people like Andrew but I‘ve always found that you can shout anecdotes and statistics at them until you‘re blue in the face and they‘ll still stand with their fingers in their ears. Is it because the truth is too much to handle? Or is poverty such an alien concept to them that they can‘t even picture it?