Eating on a Budget

Everybody Seems to Have a Favorite Struggle Meal

Growing up, my family didn’t have a lot of my money, but my parents sheltered me from this knowledge. The only time I ever suspected that there wasn’t $800,000 tucked away in our attic was when I’d swing open the refrigerator door. We definitely had more food than we needed to survive, but it was rarely choice cuts and salmon filets. Often it was ramen noodles, hotdogs (in a folded slice of white bread), lunchmeat, bread, peanut butter, jelly, and maybe a bag of chips and some TV dinners inside what was otherwise a pretty barren kitchen. The internet refers to these types of entrées as “struggle meals,” things you eat when you don’t have a lot of money.

I decided to reach out to members of the San Pedro community to see if we have shared experiences and what types of struggle meals they ate during times when things were tight.

“We always wanted cookies and stuff, but my mom only bought real food,” said Sheryl Cateras, whose mother followed the same pragmatic plan for buying groceries that mine did as a child.

“My mom did a lot of rice, chicken and rice, neckbones and rice,” Cateras said. “She’s from the south, so they grew up with a big family.

“We never starved, but we would open the fridge and see the same things in there and close it like, ‘Dang! It ain’t nothing here to eat,’” Cateras said.

“Grilled cheese!” exclaimed her nephew Brandon over her shoulder.

Nineteen-year-old Carlos Murray shared his experience with struggle meals.

“Sandwiches bro. Two pieces of bread and some ham, then I’d get some chips and put those on the sandwich too,” Murray said.

“We didn’t really have anything, just eggs and bread lying around and ham, so I was just like you know what? I’m going to make some sandwiches, and I’d eat like five of those a day when I was younger,” Murray said.

I recommend putting chips on the sandwich. Nacho cheese Doritos and Jalapeño Kettle Cooked Lay’s are solid choices.

Being a child and rooting around for something good to eat due to not being able to order takeout or go to the store is revisited in university, if one chooses to take that pathway. I am a college student and work to provide food for myself. This is a big responsibility that I need to budget my money in order to maintain. I find myself in the same place when I was once a small child at times, opening the refrigerator door for the third time in an hour hoping a Wendy’s 4 for $4 will appear if I concentrate hard enough.

I’m not alone in this struggle, however. I met Richard McCarthy, a graduate college student who prioritized cost-effective eating while studying at school.

“Pasta sauce, rice, spaghetti, you can buy 50 friggin’ pounds of rice for like $14 today, so it was even cheaper back then,” McCarthy said.

In any form they come in, God’s gift of provisions is an enormous blessing. Eating rice five nights a week out of necessity is still something to be grateful for. It is just easy to lose sight of why you should be grateful while you are experiencing hard times.

“I had siblings, and my mom had three jobs, so we weren’t really starving but sometimes supplies were low,” said Shanar Williams, a man who reminisces on his upbringing very fondly.

“Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with banana, we had to get creative,” Williams said.

Regardless, though, he expressed gratitude for his upbringing and the fact that he never went without.

“Us and our neighbors were so family oriented that we could go to our neighbors if we didn’t have what we needed. I had a good childhood,” Williams said.

My heart was warmed by his appreciative

ness. I stopped into a 7-Eleven after doing some interviews and began to shoot the blue with the clerk while I made a cup of coffee and grabbed some peanut butter crackers (my struggle meal that morning).

He asked me not to name him, but he told me that the real struggle meals are made inside of correctional facilities. I asked him if inmates really make “spread,” a concoction of soggy ramen, chips, a chopped beef stick, cheese spread, and pickles merged into a loaf. He confirmed this.

“A guy in there taught me how to make menudo with the stuff from commissary,” the clerk said, referring to the store that inmates can access to buy snacks and other goods.

“You take pork cracklings, the shrimp ramen packets, corn nuts, hot sauce and sardines and then mix it up and it actually tastes like the real thing, with some pickles too.”

I didn’t pry into his criminal background but was astonished by the ingenuity employed by people who are incarcerated to use processed foods to prepare struggle meals similar to what they’d eat on the outside by choice.

The United States Department of Agriculture stated that 33 million Americans, including 5 million children, are food insecure as of 2022. This is not right but makes one more appreciative of the fact that they did not go to sleep hungry as a child even if all they had to eat was rice. The types of foods we ate when we had very little shape us in a way. Tomahawk steaks taste better when you’ve come from ramen noodles and sugar bread.