I’m late with this entry. I’m discouraged. CNN/Time’s media-repackaging machine coughed our Time Cheapskate blog article back up, bringing with it a piping hot cup of hate. Here are two of my favorites:

fresh hate

I don’t get it. None of the writers of this blog is “an obese pig.” We’re long pig, like everyone else. I don’t think any of us has ever had to use a WIC card, though we’re all glad that they’re available to folks who need them. While I’ll cop to being a slacker of Lebowskian proportions, I can say for sure that Emily is one of the hardest-working people I’ve ever met, determined to eke out a living on the new frontier of journalism. For years, she’s been working the sharp edge of entrepreneurship harder than anyone with a regular office job. As for Cari, I think anyone would agree that being a mom is a full-time job in itself. She’s also a for-real serious writer, another full time job in itself. (Oh, sure, that’s not a real job. Yeah. Go to the bookstore. Pick a novel off the shelf. Do you have any idea how much work went into making it?) On top of that, since the launch of this blog, she’s gone from futzing in the garden to producing a significant portion of her family’s food. I’d be impressed by anyone who can do half of what she does.

Now, it’s obvious that the haters, for the most part, are just rubbing one out with the white glove of sanctimony and moving on. If they were interested in food as much as they were interested in acting superior, they’d post some recipes, and break down their weekly budgets for us. If they were interested in food, but had enough human dignity to leave aside superiority’s Dorito glow, they’d be like, “Oh, that’s interesting. Here’s what I eat.” But they haven’t, not a one.

You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him think, so I assume that, if the hater brigade were to read this, it’d fall on deaf ears. I can also say, with the stats to back it, that most of them don’t read the blog. If they did, they’d know that we’re not about what they assume we’re about. We’re not showing that we’re better than anyone else. We’re looking at how we spend on food, and trying to lower our budgets while maintaining or improving the standard that we enjoyed in more prosperous times. No, we don’t eat a lot of Hamburger Helper or $0.25 ramen. That’s not how we do. We love food almost as much as we love our families. As a rule, we drive little, and we don’t have cable TV. We prioritize our pleasures, and we list food high. If that keeps anyone down, it’s only ourselves. Speaking for myself, far from keeping me down, my love of food has kept me alive. Food is one of the basic necessities. It is also the most reliable pleasure. It is to the reasoned enjoyment of that pleasure that this blog is dedicated.

And if any of you juvenile fucks out there calls one of my co-bloggers an “obese pig” again, I’m coming out there to kick your ass back to grade school, where you belong.

Tags: hamburger helper, haters, pig parts