> They can afford to buy in bulk when stuff is on sale, they can afford to store bulk supplies without them going bad, they can afford to drive a lot just to get the best deals.
In my experience, none of those three are that key at food cost cutting anyway. The key is choosing what to eat. If you make food at home out of cheap, nutritious ingredients, you will do well. The bag of beans that is only 1 lb and is at the expensive convenience store, is a much better deal than the 40 lb Costco crate of frozen pizza or something.
Beans, rice, potatos, eggs, oats. Start with staples like these and it really doesn't matter whether you are getting the name brand or the bulk discount....
> and lack of anything that resembles a decent food culture.
...ah, but here's the problem. If your food culture consists of habits around pizza and burgers, around eating fast food and heating frozen things in microwaves ..... if you never even learned to cook beans, in fact, never learned to even enjoy them and are grossed out by them, if you have no idea how to make a raw potato edible and delicious in 5 minutes.... then... yeah, you won't have any good mental "software" to help you easily feed yourself with stuff like the aforementioned. Instead you'll have to expend valuable time and energy on experimenting and learning new habits and recipes. Until you spend that time you are locked out of the cheaper food and locked into the expensive processed food trap.
> I'm sick and fucking tired of all of that. Fix poverty instead of patronizing those who are in direst needs.
And I'm sick and tired of both sides of this argument. Yes, fix poverty rather than patronizing thoese in need -- but acnowledge the real poverty is primarily cultural, not monetary, and tailor solutions to that, by somehow helping people relearn cultural food skills that were lost during the 20th century industrialization program.