Not knowing how to cook isn't the main problem. Really poor people don't have time to cook and don't have any disposable income to buy a luxury like a pressure cooker, so this is fantasy. Really poor people are on SNAP (which doesn't cover a lot of fast food) and food banks (which provide random/useless stuff like unhealthy ultra processed food, dented canned food like canned corn and tomatoes, and random produce that requires a lot of time to use).
I think this really mischaracterizes the modern poor, especially in developed countries. It's not uncommon to see poor families with things like recent model phones worth hundreds of dollars, designer clothing/shoes, and the like. In many ways these are the sort of traps that keep people in poverty. Or referencing this article itself, apparently they decided to go eat at McDonalds and managed to spend $20 on two coffees and one coke. I mean that'd break the budget of just about anybody outside of well into the upper edge of middle class.
And a pressure cooker is not a luxury, nor is it something that's outside anybody's price range. On Amazon it looks like they start around $20. And the whole point is that it takes basically 0 time, and saves a ton of money, and even time, relative to things like eating outside the house.
A good microwave oven is extremely cheap, about the same as the food for a few weeks.
I eat only food cooked by myself from raw ingredients, in a microwave oven. Previously I was cooking with traditional methods, but some years ago I have eventually discovered that I was misusing a microwave oven only for reheating, when it can be much better be used for cooking.
In most of the cases, I cook everything that I eat immediately before eating it, which rarely needs more than 20 minutes for cleaning/peeling/paring/slicing vegetables, cooking in the oven and washing dishes.
This is short enough. If I would go out to eat somewhere, I would loose much more time than that. The only thing that I do not cook immediately before eating is meat, as depending of its kind it may need up to 30 minutes of cooking in the oven, so I cook all the meat for a week during the weekend and I just reheat it and combine it with the garnish in the other days. When you cook for a large family, you can cook all the food for a week, for a few hours during a weekend day, and you can reheat the food in less than 5 minutes in all the other days.
You can even bake bread very quickly and with excellent results in a microwave oven. When I want bread, I bake it immediately before the meal. Cooking at home and using only raw ingredients results in a cost for food that is frequently even 10 times less than a similar dish would cost from a supermarket, while being more healthy due to the use of high quality ingredients without any dubious additives. Even for bread, home-made bread is about half of the price of supermarket bread. Eating in a restaurant is of course much more expensive than buying processed food from a supermarket, so the difference in cost is even higher.
Therefore I agree that most poor people spend too much on food that is also unhealthy, and that is because they do not know how to choose wisely what they eat and how to cook that quickly and inexpensively. I believe that these are essential survival skills that should be taught to everyone in elementary school, but, even if I had a much better education than most, that did not help me, so I have learned most of them only when old and after a lot of failed experiments.
You can use a traditional recipe, e.g. wheat flour + 75% water by mass + salt + either yeast or baking powder (e.g. for 500 grams of flour either 7 grams of instant dry yeast or 10 grams of baking powder), then you knead the dough for a few minutes (until the dough becomes homogeneous, elastic and sticky; after you do it a few times it becomes very easy to recognize the moment when you have kneaded enough) and when using yeast you leave it for an hour to grow.
Then you bake for a time depending on the oven and on the amount of bread. I normally make breads from 500 grams of flour, which need about 13 minutes @ 1000 W. The advantage of a microwave oven, besides the short time, is that after you have determined the right time through experiments it will be always correct.
For baking you must use a glass vessel with lid, to prevent the bread from being too dry. The vessel must be much bigger than the dough, at least twice bigger, because the bread will grow tremendously and it will be very fluffy.
The alternative to traditional bread is to make unleavened bread, which can be made even faster and I actually like its taste more.
Even with a traditional recipe, unleavened bread will grow a lot at microwaves, due to the expansion of embedded air and water. It can be made to grow more, almost like traditional leavened bread baked in a traditional oven, by increasing the amount of water in the dough. Instead of using 75% water as in traditional bread, you can increase the amount of water to around 120% by weight. With so much water, there is the additional advantage that the dough becomes very thin, so there is no need to knead it, you just have to mix it very thoroughly for a few minutes with a spoon or with an electric mixer.
Such an unleavened dough with excess water can then be baked in a glass vessel without lid, also for 10 to 15 minutes. With unleavened bread, you can have delicious bread in less than 20 minutes from start to finish.
For improved taste, you can add to the dough various spices or seeds, either whole or ground. You can also add a sweet filling when you desire it.
Microwave-baked bread normally does not have the burned crust, but if you desire it many ovens have an infrared lamp that can be used for this purpose.
Unleavened bread is trivial to make in this way. You weigh the water and the floor in the baking vessel, you mix them, then you bake.
Leavened bread is slightly more tricky, because you need to know how to knead.
For kneading dough made from 500 grams of wheat flour (high-protein flour, which is usually sold as "bread flour"), I use a big glass bowl and I knead with a single hand, while keeping the bowl in the other hand. This is much less messy than when kneading in the way used for big amounts of dough.
At the beginning, kneading consists mostly of opening and closing the hand through the dough, while at the end it consists mostly in pulling the dough upwards, which becomes very elongated while one end of it sticks to the kneading bowl, then pressing again the dough into the bowl.
At the end of kneading, the dough becomes extremely sticky, so I keep ready a so-called "pie server" that I use to remove the dough from the hand that has been used for kneading, and for aiding in the transfer of dough from the kneading bowl to the baking vessel. The same pie server is also useful after baking, to detach the hot bread from the baking vessel.
Are you interpreting "poor" as "unemployed"? The OP was talking about people who are employed full time but at a low level job (at a shop, or as a janitor or something like that).
