Read the book MIG Pilot by Viktor Belenko. As a boy, he was shown photos of Depression era food lines. But he always wondered who owned all the cars on the streets if everyone was that poor.
When he was brought to America, he thought the CIA had a fake grocery store because no one was waiting in line for food. It was only when he was able to roam America on his own that he found out how prosperous America was.
He bought some tinned meat. He couldn’t read what it said. He ate it on crackers. Friends asked him when he had gotten a cat because the tins were cat food. He kept eating because it was better than the human food in the USSR!
I’ve read that book several times. It should be required reading for every 9th grader and again as seniors. And probably again before graduating college wouldn’t hurt anything.
Years ago I worked at the Chicago Board of Trade. A big bond trader and his brother had a Chinese doctor and his wife as their guest. They brought them on the trading floor and showed him around the different trading pits. Later that afternoon they went out to lunch at a nice restaurant then took them to a Cubs game. At about the seventh inning the two brothers went to the bathroom and when they came back the doctor was picking up discarded buns, hotdogs and other things that were thrown on the ground. He was picking then up and putting them in his pockets. When Charlie (the trader) and his brother came back Charlie saw what he was doing and said, “What are you doing? That’s garbage. If you want a hotdog I’ll buy you one, you don’t have to pick them up off the ground, throw those away” The doctor looked at Charlie and said, “In China there would be no garbage like this on the ground.” I never forgot that story. Here was a doctor from China picking up discarded food on the ground in front of his wife.
Without getting off on a tangent about the overall impression of the place, the monopolized food services at the place, as someone intimated to me, was contracted out to the low bidder. It was... bad. Which to Americans means marginally edible if you're hungry but nothing more. And monopolized, with no competition and no choice except bring your own.
So I'm in the place at lunchtime one day, and these very conspicuous looking dudes come in to go thru the line. Turns out they were non-English speakers - Russians. Russian engineers there to visit and to learn and/or exchange, whatever nuke people on exchange missions do.
These guys were in hog heaven. They stood at the line and had their plates piled up like that was their food for a week. One guy got industrial chicken, or whatever, and then I particularly recall, he's standing there, not able to speak a word of English, but pointing at the industrial hamburger patties swimming in broth waiting to be put in cheeseburgers, and motioning with his hand that he wanted that on top of all the other stuff he had on his plate.
The person behind the counter was kinda dumbfounded, but picked up on what he was getting at and said "like this?" picking a burger up with tongs and reaching it toward his plate.
"DA! DA!", the guy exclaimed.
I recall thinking to myself, this guy's got to go home to a place where something like this doesn't even exist.