Last week, I had dinner from a take away fast food restaurant twice. I wasn’t very happy about that, but I didn’t really have much choice. My work day, while only five hours long, ran from 2:30pm to 7:30pm with my bus home at 8:40pm. I’d get home at 9pm or perhaps a little after. When was I supposed to make dinner?
It’s mostly these low level, minimum wage sort of jobs that have these late, erratic hours and if somebody’s working in this kind of position long term, their diet is going to have quite an impact on their health. Imagine, for example, a parent who finishes work at 7:30pm and then has several children who will need to be fed. Are they going to make a healthy dinner, which they’ll then all eat at 10pm or later (and which will effect their sleep) or are they going to pop into a take away and pick up some chips? It’s the latter.
When you think of it like this, working late suddenly seems even worse than it did previously. After all, there’s already the fact that most people are free in the evenings (and not the morning/afternoon), which mean that late shifts essentially eliminate social lives. Having had to work late recently helps me to realise that the people “at the bottom” (or at least, near the bottom) who have to work late shifts at their job, are having their health impacted quite a lot by being pushed towards unhealthier food-options and its quite frustrating.
