>> While homeless, my sons and I routinely tried to find out-of-the-way public tables.

> Food at restaurants is marked up thousands of percent to cover costs of buildings, rent, power, human capital. The raw materials to make your food are pennies and are available to the average consumer.

If you're homeless that's not an option, since you probably lack equipment to cook from scratch.

What about cold cuts, sliced cheese, a loaf of whole grain bread?

This sounds like a cool backpacking story that I've also done for a few weeks / a month.

Now try only ever eating shit food like that for months, years on end, and you're not on holiday wandering around a cool city, it's your life.

and where, exactly, are you going to keep "cold cuts" and sliced cheese from spoiling, when you're HOMELESS?

Split between 3 people, those 3 items can comprise an entire meal, thus no leftovers.

They can last days safely. I regularly packed freshies when backpacking.

This is "straight BS".

Typical COGS on food at a dine in restaurant is 30-40%. It certainly isn't marked up "thousands of percent".

>There -are- people that truly have issues that lead them to a homeless condition, but this person is not one of them

Interesting that you determined all that from reading a single blog post and have no ideal what her diagnosis is. Very classy.

Constantly eating out would cost me as much or maybe more than my rent. So I can relate to the feeling of this coming off as a rant of a crazy person with self-image issues.

Try to imagine the calibre of restaurant that would even serve homeless people. We're talking about the very, very low end.

So, in no way is it comparable to your hypothetical of eating out all the time costing as much as your rent.