Extreme Couponing Ponderings

[mellowsong]

With absolutely nothing on TV to watch I ended up watching Extreme Couponing. While what they can do is amazing and a few families donated thousands of dollars worth of food to Feeding America, a few thoughts come to mind.

There are no coupons for the products people eating truly healthy need to buy such as grass fed meats, organic produce and fruits etc. Coupons are almost exclusively processed foods.

While I admire their commitment to giving to food banks etc, what nutritional value is 1200 bottles of Lipton Ice Tea going to provide or 50 cases of pasta sauce and thousands of packages of pasta products? Yes, it's better than people going hungry but, it still bothered me.

I have often given money to food banks or brought stuff to church on days they collect. When I have given in the last 5 years, it's been organic tomato sauce, organic soups or bags of quinoa. In the case of the hungry, is quality or quantity more important?

Besides the food bank issues, most of these couponers are obese yet they have carts full of chips and soda and candy and sweet cereal. This really truly bothers me. I'm not "judging" them for being obese, however, I don't think there is really an adult who doesn't know that that crap contributes to the problem. Is a bargain really worth dying for?
Just some things they showed:
An entire basement full of over 4000 2 liter bottles of soda. Hundreds of bottles of stinky laundry detergent, air fresheners and sprays, cleaning products, fluoride laden toothpaste. I could go on and on. Yes, preparedness is one thing but this really exemplified what is wrong with our food supply and our ideas of clean. The whole thing just kinda gave me a sick feeling.

[Reesacat]

I do think some of this extreme couponing is a bit on the obsessive/compulsive disorder spectrum. It is socially acceptable like being a workaholic but not healthy.

[Katee]

I watched some of these programs a while back. There were some of them that really disturbed me. One i remember was that the person most definitely had crossed into psych territory in that she was becoming quite a hoarder. She promised her husband she wouldn't fill the last remaining empty room in their house (a bedroom, i think), and then proceeded to do so.

I also agree with Mellow that the majority of the items bought were things i would never touch and consider to be entirely unhealthy. I wouldn't use even free shampoos, lotions, or other non-food items.

Several of the programs i watched did donate much of what they gained to shelters or the like. And it raised, for me too, the question, "At what point do you overlook the unhealthiness of a 'freebie' to fill bellies?" I don't know the answer to this. I do know it can be hard.

A family we know was having a hard time a while back and i went to the store and got some groceries for them. I probably spent about $75 buying grass-fed ground beef, organic pasta sauce, and veggies. The mother was probably able to make 3 meals from what i bought. I also know that with the same $$ she most likely could have bought (processed, subsidized) items that would have fed her family for 6 meals or more.

There just is no way to know the best. I don't have an answer, but i do know that the food i provided didn't make a dent in their lives overall; it didn't change their view of how to eat, nor did it make a difference in their health, long term. So should i have purchased the cheap stuff that we wouldn't touch? Again, i don't know.

We did an experiment a few months back. One of the newspapers was pushing buying their newspaper because, they said, the coupons sold would pay for the cost of the paper. It happens to be a paper i don't even like, but i thought i'd give it a try. I think we did about break even for a month or so, but then i discontinued it as i don't like the paper, did not read it, and didn't recover enough coupons to make it worth my time. I still purchase a couple items for which they have coupons: Bath tissue, razors, contact lens solutions, and sometimes toothbrushes are about all that we do. I wish i saved more, but frankly the time and effort wasn't worth the cost saved. There are online coupon places, too, but again, it takes far too much time to locate the very few items we buy.

[Islander]

I used to buy the weekend paper because I liked the features they ran on the weekend, and because I figured the insert full of coupons would pay for the cost of the paper. It would have if I actually used any of those products (it's kind of a window on America to see what people buy...none of which is necessary, none!) Since I never used a single coupon (ok, maybe when there was one for batteries) and since they started moving the weekend features to other days of the week, they lost me as a customer. I read no "news" paper at all. If I want local news — any news for that matter — there are reliable sources on line.

TBH, I don't think any minds will be changed, or anyone better educated, by giving them organic, grass-fed etc. Hungry people with families to feed on tight budgets are looking for the most bang for their buck, not what's necessarily healthy. Someone elsewhere pointed out that during the Depression fat people were standing in bread lines. Yes, because what they could afford was carbs, because carbs are cheap...and then, as now, fattening.

[Maurya]

Not to exclude or to denigrate the reality of some sort of psychopathology at work in these matters, but here we have the fine line between the personal and the societal. How much of this couponing behavior has to do with the window on what other Americans buy, and how much of it has to do with what the corporate entities instruct us to want to buy? People do what they are instructed to do, and when one has little money (as most people now have), one does that which one has been instructed is in one's best interest. Finding creative solutions for life in the face of nothing but the rock and the hard place has become almost impossible. I say almost, as we have a few members here, and several other people who I count as friends who have been willing to rage against the machine.

Mellowsong's insights are spot on in this regard. This phenomenon is but the tip of the big social collapse iceberg that we have spreading all over the world. The illusion of "choice" perhaps is the most subtle and most deceptive evil of all.

[Islander]

Well said, Maurya, and television has been the medium that delivered the message. I've had friends who learn that I have no TV ask me, "What do you DO in the evenings?" I almost didn't know how to answer...there are so many things to do! I READ. I watch my chickens & pigs at play. I visit with neighbors. Water the garden. Refresh the bouquet of flowers on the kitchen table. Take in the wash. Go for a walk. Answer e-mail. Do the dishes. Check HH. Check FB. Garden...one day my neighbors asked, "Where were you last night? Your car was there but the house was dark!" I was in the garden. No you weren't, we looked there. No, in the other garden, the Painted Mountain corn. I was there until 9 o'clock when it got too dark to see the weeds any more.... Maybe watch Netflix after dark. Eventually, take a book to bed & read myself to sleep!

Moral of the story: I am virtually untouched by pop culture. And I do no one's bidding!

[highlander]

I knew you all would see this problem. I've been complaining about this since I was a teenager. Is cheap, processed food really food? It's certainly not nutrition. Is there a line where it's better to not eat at all? It's definitely a challenge to feed a family when there's not enough money. I think in general it's better to have less food that's of higher quality but even then it's a matter of degree. Where will the compromises be made? What do you buy if you have $150 or less to feed a family of four for a week?

This is also one of the reasons I get really angry at people who are cruel and judgmental towards overweight people. They don't seem to understand that obesity is a symptom of a metabolic/hormonal malfunction that seems to usually start with crappy food or a stressed thyroid. They just get labeled lazy gluttons when I know for a fact that many overweight people eat fewer calories that many thin people. Some are very active; but then how could you blame a person for not having energy when they're packing around an extra 50 or 100 pounds or more? I'm going to stop now before I get carried away.

[Islander]

The other side of that coin is that a whole lotta people truly don't KNOW that there's a difference in foods. Very likely they were not raised on fresh fruits & vegetables and consequently never developed a taste for them — but beyond that they assume that if the food is available, in the supermarket, restaurant, ball park, cafeteria, it is perfectly ok to eat. Or they think that "eating healthy" means nibbling on rabbit food... No thank you. We are seriously uneducated about nutrition in this country, and a post elsewhere today, about the nutrition blogger who's been labeled a criminal, is an excellent example.

[Julieanne]

We don't have a coupon system in Oz, but it seems if people had the money, most would probably buy all that crap anyway!

[Maurya]

As usual, we must ask "who benefits" and must "follow the money". Whose bread gets buttered in the case of fat, starving people having been persuaded to continue to try to nourish their brains and bodies with greater quantities of low quality food? I have known quite a few wealthy people in my life, and totally would doubt that any of them live without ample quantities of fresh meat, fresh vegetables, fresh fruit, etc.

As an example of the average person's profound ignorance, try explaining which food products contain wheat (forget about explaining gluten or gliadin), such as bread. "But you will have some of my delicious pasta salad, won't you?" Then, after the long list has been spoken, the inevitable question emerges: "But there is nothing left to eat! Do you just eat nothing but lettuce?" Now try to imagine how to explain a fully rounded, healthful diet, containing foods beyond that person's comprehension, and not containing soda pop or pizza. Voila! This is how ignorance willfully has been encouraged.

Each of us can do what we can do to have individual, intelligent conversations with people we know, but who is able to compete with the misinformation doled out by the mass media? That is why it is called the mass media.

[mellowsong]

Thanks for your thoughts all I agree that most don't know there's a real difference in food BUT anyone knows that gallons of soda, bags of chips, bags and bags of candy are going to cause weight gain. I think that was what got me more than anything else....that they were proud of scoring junk. I don't judge the obese because I've been obese most of my life. I'm one of those people that got fat eating almost nothing. However, to see someone weighing probably 200+ lbs giggling in glee as the crap is rung up (or down in this case)...well that's what really made me sick. They have to know better! I have the TV on mostly for background noise. I do like to watch competition shows on Food Network, lol and some mystery/crime shows. Don't pay attention to the ads. Sometimes one breaks through and most of the time I'm appalled.

I guess I'm happy that I"m having a small impact via Facebook. People are starting to pay attention, like, comment and even share a few things. Nobody has un-friended me for a very long time, lol. I thought about posting this pondering there and seeing what the average sheeple had to say.

[Pattypans]

Everyone has expressed the truths of the matter so well here, that I can't think of anything left to say. Well, maybe one thing: Some food habits were probably started when the person didn't know better (soda pop and processed foods in early childhood, for example) and then became addictions which can be very difficult to stop. And some people have other serious addictions on top of those. What a sad, difficult, complicated situation.

[highlander]

Good point about addictions Pattypans. Some people are very susceptible to them and I wouldn't wish that off on anyone.
I was reading an article written by a man who coaches women who compete in bikini, fitness and body building contests. He was addressing the diet (which is pretty strict -- especially when leaning down for a contest) and he said 99% of his clients cheat. The most common cheat foods are peanut butter, ice cream and potato chips. It made me feel slightly better because every time I work out I end up craving potato chips. My point in all this is that even people who really know better still give in to cravings for junk food.