Yeah it’s kind of rural, but also people don’t talk around here. I don’t know any of my neighbors names, and I live in an apartment. Also, save money was really a polite way of saying pay bills or eat. Like, even now they don’t use heat in the winter which isn’t a big deal. But they don’t use a/c in the summer. Which here is incredibly dangerous. In the summer the temp regularly gets above 100F and the average humidity is around 75%.
Now things are better. His dad drives down once a month and takes them food shopping, and buys them stuff. But that still means most of the month is no fresh fruits, or vegetables, or milk.
The scurvy thing was just something that happened due to poor diet. Like, sure, looking back it’s easy to say “I’m getting scurvy. I better eat some vitamin C.” But the reality was they didn’t realize that they had scurvy until it was serious enough to have symptoms. After all who thinks about scurvy in 2017.