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Comment by danans | Hacker News Reader

> To keep her family from starving, Annie began selling ham and veal sandwiches for a few pennies to miners passing the front of her house.

It seems like an editor at the BBC missed something here. This should have probably read "To keep her family from destitution" - if they had ham and veal to sell, they presumably had it to eat themselves.

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It’s not the clearest phrasing, but I don’t see anything wrong with it. By selling the sandwiches Annie could buy raw materials to make more sandwiches. A portion of the supply order was allocated to feed the family, the rest became the next batch of sandwiches to sell.

If she had not been able to generate a sustainable income she would not have been able to keep her family fed.

I don’t think she had a big supply of ham and veal. She used the profit to feed the family. Is that not obvious?

Its a peculiarity of the traditional British media that they need to constantly portray rural business owners (particularly farmers) as fighting extreme poverty. Not entirely sure why this should be so, just that it is.

Presumably they were buying the meat at one price, applying a markup, and selling, hence making money to buy food. It was likely not coming off the Magic Veal Tree.

It could be a sustainability thing:

If you butcher an animal, you have X lbs of meat now. Maybe you don’t need all of that immediately just to survive.

If you only need Y < X to feed yourself, you can sell the excess and buy a new animal plus food to fatten it up.

This converts a onetime benefit (killing an animal you have now) into a sustainable way to provide for yourself.

That explanation makes sense, but the author's phrasing still seems clumsy to me.

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