For me, food has always gone hand and hand with money. I know it's like this for everyone, and that we live in a monetary world, but my experience has always been that little to no money means shitty, unhealthy eating.
Some of my earliest memories of food involve the McDonald's Playland. That towering, colorful maze of shapes and slides gives me a tingle even now. I remember many dinners at McDonald's. Feasts of cheeseburgers and McNuggets, topped off with 2-for-$1.00 apple pie desserts. We ate a lot of fast food then. We also ate a lot of buffets like the one at Sizzler. Sizzler had the best around. They had a huge salad bar that was filled with tons of non-salad items, which is great for a salad-hating kid. They even had cookies and ice cream bars. The quantities of food you could get at fast food joints and buffets was perfect if you were poor, and we were just that. Poor.
Like almost 57% of the families in this country, mine was below the poverty line. My mother was a single mom, working as a waitress, feeding us kids on food stamps and a prayer. She did all this with diabetes on her plate.
For the better part of five years we lived in a motel while my father was in prison. Eventually we received government housing. It was a shit hole, but it was our shit hole.
The eating out fit our lifestyle and budget, but now we had an actual place of our own, even if it was the projects. We could prepare food on a stove, and not the hot plate we had in the motel. Money was still tight though, so it didn't improve the meal situation all that much. Between two jobs and making sure us kids weren't fucking up, she didn't have much time to make a Norman Rockwell home situation. She tried, though. She made veggies. We had fried cauliflower. Fried broccoli. We had liver and fried chicken. We had lots of red meat and desserts galore. We just were not eating all too well. I mean, this was the 70's and 80's, so no one was on the PC health craze they are now, and it was also the east coast, not California with its hippie garden cuisine. We ate hard, cold and rough. Make no mistake, though; my mother worked hard and provided for us. She loved and supported us as best as a depressed, broken woman doing it on her own could.
My bad food habits carried on into my adult life, where I had no excuses. I continued to eat bad and it caught up with me. I moved to LA and became really broke and really hungry.
When you're lonely and looking for a career in Hollywood it can get tough to stay above water. Basic survival becomes an everyday struggle. You work day jobs and spend the rest of the time being broke and auditioning. The things you took for granted at home become little laughing demons following you around, dancing all over your hopes and dreams, while forming your fears. You can come close to or actually sleep in your car out there if you're not careful. Cheap eats become not only a comfort, but a means to survival.
In LA, fast food joints are on every corner. I do mean every corner. It's an epidemic out there. I think more people die of drive-thru than drive-by. The streets of Hollywood are slick with vegetable oil. The list of places is endless, with any kind of cuisine you can imagine. Hot dogs (including fried and chili). Pizza. Mexican. Burgers and Chinese (sometimes in the same place). The burgers are the best, though. LA reigns supreme for burger joints. Carl's Jr. McDonald's. BK, but most importantly, the infamous one-two punch of In 'N Out and Fat Burger.
The menus are undeniable. You can lunch for $3 on these value menus. Dinner can $2 or $3 or $4 if you wanna splurge, and why not? It's a buck! You can get full on this. It's quick, tasty and easy on the wallet. I like my fast food like I like my women. Not to mention, it fits the constant on the go lifestyle. Nowhere else have I experienced such a go-go-go way of life. Work. Auditions. Meetings. Maybe some social life if you're lucky. When you're in traffic, and late for something, a 69-cent burrito sure does the trick to keep you going. It's the kind of fuel you need. The kind you opt for most days.
This isn't just for on the go fast food eating. Even at home, when you're broke, you eat like crap, like we did when I was a kid. Many a night in my small, shitty studio apartment in the middle of smelly Hollywood, did I eat pasta, and pasta and more pasta. I have eaten more pasta than an Italian living in the mountains of Florence, Italy. Pasta = carbs, which = fat. You can get it cheap though, and lots of it. It's like 80 cents a a pound. That one box is your lunch and dinner most days, or if you're me, just lunch. Lunch #1.
You become inventive, too. Take a 10 cent pack of Ramen Noodles, some stolen packs of soy sauce from the Chinese joint, and fry that shit up. Bang - you got welfare Lo Mein.
The Ramen is the best deal. You can eat 2 - 3 packs per meal. You can buy in bulk too. I would hit the Smart and Final every few days for my $6.00 case of sodium.
There's all sorts of cheap eats at the supermarket that will kill your insides. Fifty-nine cent mac & Cheese. Ninety-nine cent two liter bottles of generic sugar-filled soda or shitty-tasting diet.
Notice there's no greens or real protein. That shit is too pricey. That's some Whole Foods country club shit, yo.
While this food is cheap and fueling, it's killing you. Between all the sugar, sodium and chemicals, it's putting on so much weight and handing you every other disease you can imagine. Also, the food makes you so depressed that you don't wanna go on some hike or go to the gym. Gym? If you can't afford good food, you can't afford the gym.
One of the opportunities you have to eat well is at someone else's house. Dinner parties are always good for some healthy, clean foods. Fun foods. Foods that cost more than 99 cents and won't kill you. You go to these parties and eat all you can. You load up and if you're lucky, the hosts send you home with a doggie bag.
My bad food habits carried on into my adult life, where I had no excuses. I continued to eat bad and it caught up with me. I moved to LA and became really broke and really hungry.
When you're lonely and looking for a career in Hollywood it can get tough to stay above water. Basic survival becomes an everyday struggle. You work day jobs and spend the rest of the time being broke and auditioning. The things you took for granted at home become little laughing demons following you around, dancing all over your hopes and dreams, while forming your fears. You can come close to or actually sleep in your car out there if you're not careful. Cheap eats become not only a comfort, but a means to survival.
In LA, fast food joints are on every corner. I do mean every corner. It's an epidemic out there. I think more people die of drive-thru than drive-by. The streets of Hollywood are slick with vegetable oil. The list of places is endless, with any kind of cuisine you can imagine. Hot dogs (including fried and chili). Pizza. Mexican. Burgers and Chinese (sometimes in the same place). The burgers are the best, though. LA reigns supreme for burger joints. Carl's Jr. McDonald's. BK, but most importantly, the infamous one-two punch of In 'N Out and Fat Burger.
The menus are undeniable. You can lunch for $3 on these value menus. Dinner can $2 or $3 or $4 if you wanna splurge, and why not? It's a buck! You can get full on this. It's quick, tasty and easy on the wallet. I like my fast food like I like my women. Not to mention, it fits the constant on the go lifestyle. Nowhere else have I experienced such a go-go-go way of life. Work. Auditions. Meetings. Maybe some social life if you're lucky. When you're in traffic, and late for something, a 69-cent burrito sure does the trick to keep you going. It's the kind of fuel you need. The kind you opt for most days.
This isn't just for on the go fast food eating. Even at home, when you're broke, you eat like crap, like we did when I was a kid. Many a night in my small, shitty studio apartment in the middle of smelly Hollywood, did I eat pasta, and pasta and more pasta. I have eaten more pasta than an Italian living in the mountains of Florence, Italy. Pasta = carbs, which = fat. You can get it cheap though, and lots of it. It's like 80 cents a a pound. That one box is your lunch and dinner most days, or if you're me, just lunch. Lunch #1.
You become inventive, too. Take a 10 cent pack of Ramen Noodles, some stolen packs of soy sauce from the Chinese joint, and fry that shit up. Bang - you got welfare Lo Mein.
The Ramen is the best deal. You can eat 2 - 3 packs per meal. You can buy in bulk too. I would hit the Smart and Final every few days for my $6.00 case of sodium.
There's all sorts of cheap eats at the supermarket that will kill your insides. Fifty-nine cent mac & Cheese. Ninety-nine cent two liter bottles of generic sugar-filled soda or shitty-tasting diet.
Notice there's no greens or real protein. That shit is too pricey. That's some Whole Foods country club shit, yo.
While this food is cheap and fueling, it's killing you. Between all the sugar, sodium and chemicals, it's putting on so much weight and handing you every other disease you can imagine. Also, the food makes you so depressed that you don't wanna go on some hike or go to the gym. Gym? If you can't afford good food, you can't afford the gym.
One of the opportunities you have to eat well is at someone else's house. Dinner parties are always good for some healthy, clean foods. Fun foods. Foods that cost more than 99 cents and won't kill you. You go to these parties and eat all you can. You load up and if you're lucky, the hosts send you home with a doggie bag.
I know I can figure out ways to eat better, and maybe I have been eating like shit as some self sabotaging thing or some weird connection to my mother. God knows I have tons of those kinds of issues. The bottom line, like with all these problems and demons, is that I need to figure out ways to do better. To be better. A better me in eating and all things health. As much as I secretly like cheap eats, I like living more.
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