CHANEL: I feel like the idea of struggling against, and then overcoming, adversity is a really attractive narrative. I remember one of my roommates getting mad at one of our friends because that friend, who’d had a middle-class upbringing, actually wanted to reject some of the opportunities she had in order to fulfill her “dream” of becoming a “starving artist.” She wanted to have “overcome” something to become successful.

AMY ROSE: Can we talk about “self-righteousness” and poverty? Growing up, I oscillated between trying desperately to hide that I was “poor” (so relative) in some circles (hahah like I even could), like school, and owning it when I felt it carried some sense of social currency—contexts where not having money was seen as more “authentic.” I was always really confused by how to act about it.

SUZY: I’ll be the first to admit I’ve been self-righteous about the way I grew up. And really, I can’t help it. Kids bullied me for having Walmart-brand shoes and “bad teeth.” Adults at places I worked asked where I got my lunch or where I got my clothes just to antagonize me. A doctor asked me point-blank why I was at her office if I didn’t have insurance. I didn’t even have it that bad—like I said, my class status has fluctuated some over the years—but I can’t shake my experiences. I don’t really know why anyone should have to play down the things they’ve survived. *shrug*

MAGGIE: I do sometimes feel like everything I do for myself is undermined by the assumption people have that my dad reached out and got it for me. It takes a pretty nasty hit on my pride. BUT, I mean, “pride” is a privilege in and of itself.

SUZY: See, here’s my take on it: People who take pride in having survived poverty or just adverse conditions generally don’t do it just to take a petty jab at rich people. They do it because they managed to survive in a world where they are not supposed to. You should totally take pride in successes you’ve earned, because you could’ve very well taken an easier route with the resources you had access to. But lower-class people take pride in their successes because there are things they were never supposed to access in the first place.

MAGGIE: That was really well said, Suzy. Pride is such an interesting subject. Is it a bourgeois luxury? I remember was some show—Downton? Gossip Girl?—where the noble servant says to the richie villain, “You people. You think you have a monopoly on pride.”


PIXIE: What do you think about representations of class on television these days? Are there any shows that get it right? One of my favorites is The Middle, because the family openly discusses money struggles, and the set design is impeccable. They also shop at a grocery store called The Frugal Hoosier which is too real. By contrast, there’s Modern Family, where EVERYONE is upper-class with one working parent, and it’s normalized as if that’s what every American household is like.

JULIANNE: SUBURGATORY. ALL DAY. Working-class dad moves daughter from New York to essentially Westchester, where they are poorish compared with their neighbors, and both upper-class and working-class issues are discussed in a super-funny way. Shabby chic all the livelong day.

PIXIE: I always notice when shows reuse clothing, and I appreciate the realness of that. It drives me crazy when characters talk about how poor they are and then show up in, like, Nanette Lepore and Marc Jacobs all the time (Rory Gilmore). Lily on How I Met Your Mother had this issue as well, wearing really expensive pieces on a New York City public school teacher’s salary, but the writers finally addressed it by showing that she had major credit card debt.

GABBY: MY DREAM IS TO MAKE A TV SHOW/MOVIE FOR TEENS WHERE THEIR OUTFITS CAN’T COST MORE THAN $50 TOTAL

PIXIE: You know what other show is great on the recycled-clothes tip? The Brady Bunch, of all things. Though I still don’t understand how a nonworking mom like Carol has six kids and a housekeeper/cook and no job? Also, What Not to Wear used to make me so mad, because I understand the idea of “investing in quality pieces” or whatever, but Clinton and Stacy seemed to have no clue that for some people, “investing” in a $500 pair of pants means they can only have ONE PAIR OF PANTS for like two years.

ARABELLE: Malcolm in the Middle was and is my #1 most favorite representation of class struggles.

ANAHEED: RuPaul’s Drag Race! Freaks and Geeks. And, weirdly: The Sopranos.

KRISTA: ROSEANNE.

GABBY: Friday Night Lights was also very good at this.

STEPHANIE: Having just come from the movie, Veronica Mars. That was kind of a shocker to me to see a high school in California that wasn’t like Beverly Hills, 90210, where apparently Andrea was the only person in the history of their school without money. Also, hell yes, Roseanne. That was my first-ever “This show is about real people!” moment.

JULIANNE: The Wire, particularly season four, which is about the education system. It follows the most heartbreaking group of boys who live in varying degrees of poverty (and drug addiction) in the harshest parts of Baltimore. I can barely even think about that season without crying. Poverty simply is not shown that way on television, or anywhere, and that show was basically holding up a mirror to all our faces like: This is what is going on.


AMY ROSE: How did class impact the food you ate and/or eat? Things I remember:

  • Burned frozen-food trays of lasagna, and “BBQ Ribs” from this company whose name was ON-COR (like encore, but cheap as fuck).
  • Having friends over and eating microwaved hot dog buns with ketchup because there was nothing in the house.
  • Saving quarters for the Dollar Menu.
  • My 12th birthday, when my older sister decided I should have a party and shoplifted a two-liter of Sprite, a two-liter of Diet Coke, Cheetos, ice cream, and I think some sort of Entenmann’s from the supermarket a few blocks away.
  • How my dad would take us to any restaurant we wanted to go to when he started seeing us on Thursday nights and Sundays for his part-time custody.

STEPHANIE: Food was one of the big eye-openers for me in terms of privilege. When I was in grade school, most of my friends got free school lunches (and I was actually jealous because I had to bring a bagged lunch). At my new, wealthier school, everyone went out to lunch at this hot dog stand around the corner at least twice a week; I could only afford to join them about once a month. Then when I was a teenage punk and beginning to go vegan, one of my friends who had grown up in a poor family went on this rant about how being vegan was a sign of privilege. At first I was like, “But if you don’t shop at Whole Foods and get the fancy fake-meat products, vegetables are cheaper than steak, and you can make a giant stir-fry for like nothing.” And she said, “Stephanie, vegetables are not cheaper than like the cheapest brand of lunch meat, and they go bad.” It took until then, when I was 17, for me to realize what a privilege fresh food is. So, yes, the fact that I’m vegan is a privilege. It saddens me deeply that we don’t all have equal access to healthy food. It is the thing I most want to change.

JAMIA: I am privileged enough to have had medical testing access to determine my food allergies and to be able to buy the expensive-ass gluten-free, dairy-free, soy-free organic food I eat because I’m allergic to everything. I often think about what a privilege it is to be able to control my environment. I just ate a meal last night where I was charged an extra two dollars to get it gluten free. I can pay it, but what about people who can’t? Are they supposed to just make themselves sick?

PIXIE: I don’t know how to cook anything because we ate everything from a box: Betty Crocker, Stove Top, all that shit. I thought we were fancy as hell because it was BRAND-NAME potatoes from a box, not Stop & Shop brand. I didn’t know until college that Wonder Bread and such were considered “trashy” foods. I just thought it was hecka good bread for grilled cheese.

JULIANNE: I thought Wonder Bread was expensive, relatively speaking? I remember it being a treat growing up. I also might have been confused by the fancy Mondrian-esque design of the packaging.

JENNY: My family never paid for napkins, ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, sugar, half and half, or toilet paper (we always stole condiment packets and napkins from McDonald’s and swiped toilet paper from restaurant bathrooms). My grandmother lined her purse with plastic bags so she could literally dump platefuls of food in her bag at buffet restaurants and take it home. A few times we would eat until we vomited and then come back and eat more because we REALLY wanted to get our money’s worth at these buffet places.

If you ever go to Asian grocery stores, vegetables and meat and fish are often three or four times cheaper than what my family used to call “American grocery stores.” My parents would feed my entire family (me, my brother, my two grandparents) on 100 bucks a month (which works out to 50 cents a day per person!) and we ate meat and good vegetables every day and fish twice a week. We’d only go to white people’s supermarkets to buy two-liter bottles of soda and Cheez Doodles. Fast food like McDonald’s and KFC was “dining out” for my fam, and so were store-packaged cookies, so to this day when I eat like an Entenmann’s doughnut, it tastes infinitely better the doughnuts made from scratch in the fancy-schmacy bakeries down the street from where I live now. I still think those fancy burger joints taste like shit compared with McDonald’s, and homemade cakes taste like garbage compared with the heaven that is a Little Debbie Zebra Cake!

PIXIE: I’m always disappointed when I bite into a fancy-ass cupcake and I’m like, “I could have bought four cans of Funfetti frosting instead of this. What is this? Whipped cream cheese? Get out of here.”

JENNY: OMG Duncan Hines canned frosting…salivating.

PIXIE:

AMY ROSE: My mom would get us fast food sometimes after work as a treat, and on one such occasion, my then-boyfriend was over. He came from a well-to-do household where, if we wanted food, his mom called and took our PARTICULAR orders and executed them perfectly. My mom did not do this. When she called to ask us what we wanted from Wendy’s, he gave her his specific order, but she brought back like mad dollar cheeseburgers and two large fries, which she dumped into a bowl for everyone to share. My boyfriend was HORRIFIED that everyone would have to share with their fingers in the same place. He bitched about it for like two hours to me afterwards in private. What a dummy.

DYLAN: Most of my kneejerk judgements and biases come from the way people eat. It’s the final frontier of dealing with my own insensitive class-based judgments. My mom is an incredible cook, but she is ALL ABOUT that gourmet-food, wine-country, country-club-tennis life. I understood fast food to be “trashy” as well as unhealthy. I do sometimes, out of desperation or for, like, the novelty going to In-N-Out, eat meat from a fast food chain, but it still can feel weird to me because of deeply ingrained class-based bias. I’ll admit it, but I’m not proud of it.

The first time my freshman roommate cooked Spam musubi, it blew my mind because I couldn’t fathom anyone willingly eating Spam! Now I know it’s a special treat in Hawaii, but back then it was just a bias I held because I was a spoiled gourmand baby.

And the other day, I went to the corner market to buy a few pounds of tangerines for props for a video shoot. I wouldn’t have gone there to buy my own produce—I annoy myself with my pickiness even about organic fruit and the like. So I was just going there for like throwaway art material, and I saw families buying pounds of mushrooms and children joking around with one another in line. The woman next to me was clearly stocking her pantry. Meanwhile, the store smelled really intense and the butcher’s case was swarming with flies, and I was squirming to get out of there.

JENNY: Dylan, I love what you wrote, and it made me think of the ways in which there is a total caste system for food and how that further reveals how class is complicated and inextricably tied to race and ethnicity. In the past few years, I’ve noticed trend pieces on “upscale Asian dining” or “upscale Latin dining”–how restaurateurs are bringing a “touch of refinement” to these cuisines that generally are thought of as greasy takeout. On the flip side, an equally vocal foodie who is adamant and militant about how the only good, AUTHENTIC ethnic restaurants are hole-in-the-wall places that are “under review” for not passing health and safety inspections. Both views marginalize these cuisines and cultures, but in slightly different ways.

Other random thoughts: the longstanding relationship that poor black communities have to cheap-ass Chinese joints in their neighborhoods, “Mexican” restaurants staffed by Asian folks and “Chinese” restaurants staffed by Latinos. How when you see a Thai or Japanese restaurant pop up in your neighborhood, you know rents are gonna be a-rising and that the neighborhood is a-gentrifying. If an Asian-fusion restaurant pops up then it’s basically sealed in blood that your neighborhood is no longer cool and likely overrun by finance guys who thought they were being cool. How have these specific ethnic cuisines become markers of income?

JULIANNE: I recently ate at the [popular Thai restaurant] Pok Pok on the Lower East Side and found it really othering. Like, it was all white people in there working and dining, in this very studied camp decor with Thai records hanging everywhere as decorations (but only the ones with the most Westernized/1960s-French-looking covers) and Thai pop music on the sound system. P.S. THE FOOD WAS NOT THAT GOOD. P.P.S. I AM SO RELIEVED THAT EVERYONE HERE HAS BEEN SO REAL. This discussion is unlike any I’ve ever had about class. I really love you guys.

AMY ROSE: Yes, this conversation was really honest, which I think is tough when you’re talking about $$$$$$, and I appreciate it a lot. Thank you all so much for doing this, my thoughtful prohncesses. To me, you are all young money millionaires. ♦