Go Get The Stapler

I love "I'm getting the hang of you" as an expression of a growing friendship.

Danya Michael

Like the guy says, if you are poor, you make choices. Raisins are cheap candy. If candy isn't one of the choices you make, and snack foods in general aren't one of the choices you make, because it would mean buying less actual food, then you never eat raisins, or any snack foods. That's the way it went when we were poor.

I was poor as hell and raisins were the candy I got. So this does not make a lot of sense to me. Sounds like someone who is trying to guess what poor people didnt have.

Aaron Schulz

Actually, I was attacking this from the wrong angle: You can get generic Raisin Bran from the dollar store for a dollar, and raisins are a nutritious and very cheap food. BUT obviously for Brun, they were something she never had because of poverty. So, then: A grape blight from about 1990-2010, when Brun was growing up. Grape crops around the world fail due to an AI-manufactured fungus - or just a fungus - raisins become a delicacy rather than a staple. Hannelore can afford wine ("Wine makes Hanners sleeeeeeepy") and they have wine tucked away for celebrations ("Emergency wine!") but the crops aren't back to where they were before the blight. Thus, Clinton has had raisins, since he's upper middle class, but Brun hasn't. I await my No-Prize. :)

I guess I am "lucky" enough to have lived the gambit. Grew up as lowe income mitority (one of 3 white kids in an all black/hispanic school) til 13, was a foster kid/ward of the state til 18 (due to home abuse neglect). Then spent several years homeless and unemployed living in a tent, then a few more working full time still living in a tent. Then working full time living in a pop up tent trailer in a campground (felt like i was living the good life then). Now I have two homes in two different towns (rent out one to a friend) and general have a comfortable life, mostly due to luck. I like to think A. I got rid of all my bad luck early and b. have a bit of perspective on a good expanse of Privilege. Trust me Brun, try the raisin bread ;) Edit: no matter how many times I spoell check this, it keeps reverting. apologies

Marc Tabor

Try the raisins, Brun! They're awesome! Please!

Jeffrey Nonken

I ❤️ Brun. I too grew up very privledged and am happy Jeph is including this.

Bruce Steinberg

What Brun said is that they didn't have snacks, not that they didn't have raisins. I grew up as one of five kids living on a teacher's salary poor, which is by no means as poor as it gets, but there was food for meals and that was it because we were a hoard of fucking locusts. We ate the sugar out of the sack. We ate cereal dry when the milk ran out. We ate the crumbs out of the bottom of the bread bags. We saved bacon grease and fried bread in it when the margarine ran out. My mother would bring home a bag of groceries and we would eat it. Well, not the actual bag. Not me, anyway, but I was oldest. God knows what the younger kids ate. I do know that they all suddenly got much larger when I left home. It was OK, but you didn't miss much if you didn't go through it. I don't know why everyone gets all weird about having privileges. Privileges are great. All we got from having a certain amount of food insecurity were various eating disorders that took a while to shake, and that we never shook entirely. Trust me, if you missed out on it, you didn't miss much. And we had other kinds of privilege that I am very happy to have had. We didn't deserve them, what with them being privileges, but that just makes them sweeter. The quiet simplicity with which Brun speaks in panel five is pretty sweet, too.

I'm liking Brun more and more.

My mother is old enough that she remembered the tail-end of wartime rationing from her own childhood. It created a certain degree of focus on maximising nutrition from minimum resources. It is something that I think that later and more fortunate generations (and I include myself in this) maybe could do well to learn. Certainly, I suspect that I would have had a much harder time growing up if my mother had not had that focus.

Ben Russell-Gough

I don't know anything about the US welfare program, but in Australia they do offer the unemployed a "pension" such as it is. Subsidised rent in housing commission estates (more or less slums) that gets automatically deducted from the pension. Even with that, though, the couple of hundred left per fortnight (weekly if you have children), goes toward food, bills, medicine (unless it were vital), education and clothing, in approximate order of priority, and under ideal conditions. While we weren't too poor to have raisins, snacks definitely were low on the list. Things like cereals, cordial or juice, and desserts could sometimes be budgeted in, but we could only pick one for that week. The one thing dad was absolute on, was that we had vegetables every day, even if we couldn't afford meat for a day or two. He knew a local greengrocer at the time, who would sell dad, at a reduced price, a box of veggies (generally potatoes, and whatever else he had going cheap at the time). Mashed potatoes has become the staple of our household, even now.

David Paul

I don't think so; The Talk back in Strip 500-510-ish was the only time Jeph has done a serious flashback origin story. However, I can see this arc continuing with Brun and Clinton sort of comparing notes about the differing ways their childhoods sucked - Brun's financially and Clinton's emotionally.

Ben Russell-Gough

Oooo... flashback origin story time?

Andrew

When you're the level of poor that's $10 a year above free lunches, so you're bringing your own? When everything edible in your house is an ingredient as part of a specific meal plan? Broke parent who's not fond of raisins and they don't have so much nutritional value for that to be overlooked? There are a lot of options here.

Bonnie Doolittle

<a href="http://casaonandofftherez.blogspot.com/2017/05/government-cheese-and-powdered-eggs.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://casaonandofftherez.blogspot.com/2017/05/government-cheese-and-powdered-eggs.html</a> &lt;&lt; for some more on the food subsidies for the very poor.

Kaz Redclaw

This baffles me. When I was growing up and my family was so poor that we were taking the lowest of the low in food subsidies that the government gave out, I clearly recall that one of the things they gave the poorest of the poor, along with the Government Cheese, Powdered Milk, Butter, etc, was Raisins in plain white boxes. Basically every food that the government had a depression-era stockpile of was given out for free to the poor, and raisins certainly qualified for that. It wasn't until very recently that the government stopped confiscating raisins from farmers for the stockpile.

Kaz Redclaw

I'd argue she was flirting clearly yesterday when she offered help his father have a harpoon incident.

...or be incredibly poor

Fart Captor

Beat me to it! Excellent!

BobC

That's why it's good for people to go to a Third World country. Spend a month in Haiti, or Peru, or central Africa. See what it's like to have nothing... to wake up in the morning and wonder if you are going to eat that day. Even if you thought you were poor by American standards, it will give you a new perspective on what little you do have. And if you are in the Middle Class, it will give you a new appreciation for those who have less than you do.

awgiedawgie

Definitely a new level of poverty if raisins are a luxury. It's almost like a setup for the Yorkshiremen sketch.

Brent Catherman

Completely sincerely: No, Clinton. You can't. That's what being privileged is all about - not actually comprehending the situation of people who lack your socioeconomical advantage.

Bagge

Clinton’s dad is sufficiently similar to my dad that I almost started crying. My brother and I recently had a heart-to-heart about how we both eat in secret (we’re in our 40’s), which has mostly to do with our mother, but also the way Dad controlled the pantry. ($ wasn’t at issue FWIW)

KCkittysnores

I think maybe she's saying something like that would have a lower priority on what her family bought because being that poor often means having to go without even simple things most people take for granted. So, technically, they probably could have afforded a box of cereal, but their money was spent on higher priority things.

Celine Chamberlin

Clintonnnnnn food deserts are a thiiiiiing. *Marge Simpson noises*

First world folk take for granted the assortment of choices that seem common place that are not in other parts of the world. There are better and worse places to be poor even in the States. Even then 'poor' here means something entirely different than poverty seen in other places. I can swap stories with anyone about shitty childhood poverty, but I've also seen a lot worse.

Chris Gallaty

Once upon a time. Now they aren't allowed to cuz they're all exposed and stuff and only sealed in cardboard so it could have razor blades and anthrax and other nasty things, so no more halloween raisins that we never ate until everything else was gone and then traded at school with that one weird kid that actually liked raisins, especially by the time we got around to them and they were just one solid ball of stuck together dried fruit.

We were poor as dirt growing up, and raisins were one of my mom's favorite snack foods. She'd get raisins by the bucket and apples by the bushel from the farmer's co-op. Nowadays the only way I like raisins is in cinnamon raisin bread/bagels and oatmeal raisin cookies :) (Not ragging on the comic at all! Just throwing some personal anecdata out there :)

Stephen B.

Brun is finally getting the hang of Clinton? Encouraging, I think.

I hope Clinton realizes that Brun is actually flirting with him, in her limited way.

allanfranta

Your* mom never :)

It's not about the raisins, it's about Clinton's reaction. And I don't appreciate your tone.

Jeph Jacques

Store brand raisin bran is definitely a poverty staple. It's even on the WIC list in some states. Could be that her family just didn't like it, of course.

Adam Friedlander

Grits and eggs and sometimes eggs were too expensive.

Gary Walker

Being able to have raisins is somehow a privilege thing? What? I grew up poor and my family could afford them. Come on. That connection is weak at best. You're better than that Jeph.

The stapler is for Clinton's lips?

ysth

Like Clinton's dad?

Joseph Houk

Some people apparently have a real emotional dislike for raisins...

MikeT

Good, keep it that way.

JD

SHIP!!!

Abhayakara

There's always that house that hands them out on Halloween! Every child knows it is inevitable!

Grace Kieser

I've never had them either and I don't intend to!

One would have to work pretty hard at avoiding raisins throughout childhood.

Zach Elwyn

I, for one, envy Brun's ability to have avoided the ghastly raisin for as long as she did.

Dan Orlowitz

It is literally impossible for an American child not to be able to afford Raisin Bran. Not to get any, yes. Unaffordable, not if she could afford bread.

Carl Fink

That’s it. I’m taking my lower middle class ass to the grocery store for some night raisin bread

William Hanna

God damn it, Jeph, why must Brun be identical to me in practically every way possible except for gender? Yet another commonality (though I had raisins a lot sooner than she did).

Will Weaver

Are we stapling bread now?

Nicholas Lopez