Hacker News Reader

Comment by _Codemonkeyism | Hacker News Reader

What astonishes me, is how often poor people go eating in a restaurant (e.g. breakfast in the first paragraph) when making breakfast at home (or lunch) is so much cheaper (as a fun exercise we often calculate the prices of our home lunch).

Although I have a nice income, 80% of the time I bring my own food to work because restaurants are too expensive in my opinion to regularly use them.

As a side note: I have the suspicion I'm addicted to fast food (McDonalds/Burger King). When I don't go there for some weeks, I have no urge and I'm fine. But as soon as I eat there, I have the urge for days to go back and have another burger.

View on HN

Cooking for yourself is only cheaper if you've already spent the money to outfit your kitchen. There's a big up front investment in terms of ingredients and tools.

You can spend $50 up front, and then eat for $3/meal by cooking for yourself...

Or you can just spend $6/meal at McDonalds.

If you only have $10 in your pocket you really don't have much of a choice.

This is, I think, the most important thing to understand about poverty in a capitalist system. It is much more difficult to make good investments when you have very little liquidity.

S/He also ignores the time invested in cooking. What must your hourly wage be, for the $3 saved by cooking to be worthwhile?

Also, cooking for only one person seems to me to be more expensive, because the ingredients don't really come in the size for only one person.

Even with 2 people - most ingredients I purchase are assuming 3-4 eaters the "large sizes" assume 6-8. If you don't eat leftovers it can get pricey or you end up eating more than you probably should...

The other issue I run into is that most of my food goes bad before I even finish it coupled with the fact I refuse to even have "leftovers". I either buy too little of what I need (smaller amounts/sizes) and end up spending more money for not purchasing bulk, or I waste money by throwing away surplus after it has expired. It's a fine balance to try and get "just the right amount". I often find myself throwing away 1/2 a loaf of bread, several meals worth of lunch meats, rotten fruits/vegetables, etc. And that's keeping some items a while after the "use by:" date...

An example of my problem:

1 gallon of milk is often too much. ½ a gallon of milk is often too little. It is cheaper (both economically and time spent going to the store) to buy 1 gallon of milk and dump it when it goes bad than to buy ½ a gallon as I need it.

I have no problem for cooking for two people. But perhaps this is specific to Germany.

"throwing away 1/2 a loaf of bread"

I buy 1/2 not a whole bread then.

About the milk: Not sure if you buy fresh milk from the farm, otherwise milk in the fridge does not go bad for days.

Today we had a delicious lentil salad with feta and rucola and a vinaigrette of lemon and tomatoes. The base salad can easily be used 2 days in a row with different toppings with capers and olives and a different dressing. Should be around $3 per meal, whereas McDonalds is >$6 in Germany (the only way to eat cheap at McDonalds is having 3 hamburgers for $1 each).

In the US bread comes pre-sliced in a plastic bag. You can pick up this kind of bread nearly anywhere, from a convenience store to a fill-up station or a pharmacy. Bakeries which put out product that Europeans would consider bread are almost exclusively found inside grocery stores. This bread is slightly more expensive per weight. Grocery stores, like most commercial establishments in the US, can be hard to get to without a car, and public transport, if exists outside the few major cities, typically has low frequency and poor coverage of residential areas.

UHT milk does exist, but most people don't know about it, and it's expensive. Most milk sold isn't shelf-stable and needs to be refrigerated the entire time.

You make a good case with the salad, though.

I don't think the OP was referring to UHT, but rather ESL milk (also known as HTST). Most milk sold in Germany is now ESL, and you can keep it in the fridge for 2-3 weeks. It's also sold in units of 1 litre (a little over a quart) and if you want more, you just buy more than one.

The 1/2 loaf probably costs 3/4 of what a full loaf does. That addition 25% is pure margin for the retailer - they thank you for your willingness to pay more for the same product.

>The 1/2 loaf probably costs 3/4 of what a full loaf does.

Correct. I'm not going to pay more for less which is why I end up throwing away surplus. I hate being wasteful of food - but I hate being wasteful of my money (and my time) even more.

In addition to that, in the U.S your size options are "buy a whole loaf" or "buy a different brand of whole loaf". Bread comes pre-packaged in a twist-tied (or clip-on) bag as a whole loaf. Unless you visit a bakery or the grocery store you visit has a bakery section.

This assumes you can work 24h a day. It could be extended to every free hour: What must your your hourly wage be, that it's worth watching TV.

Also if you are poor and have no money, and no opportunity to earn more, and perhaps already have a second job, then $3 saved a day makes a huge difference. Though I'd say savings for 3 meals (lunch and breakfast and dinner) should be around $10 not $3 (at least from my experience comparing prices for cooking and going to McDonalds)

What equipment are you thinking of? Don't most homes have stoves? A pan or pot is maybe a couple dollars from a garage sale.

You won't get very far with one pot or pan. I live alone and cook for myself, and my kitchen probably has a dozen. For anything beyond the very basics you'll need a variety of mixing bowls, mixing spoons, measuring cups/spoons, spatulas, etc. Knives and cutting board to chop ingredients. Not to mention the need for a basic assortment of spices, butter, oil appropriate for cooking, etc.

Sure, you don't need all of that to get started cooking, but making do with a minimal kitchen is going to make cooking more difficult and is likely to also affect the quality of your food.

I guess it depends on your standards. Back in college I cooked a ton of meals in just one pot. Cook some ground pork, drain, cook rice, add pork and frozen veggies. Probably costs $10 to make 5 or 6 meals.

You're correct. It's sad there are people voting you down with no explanation. I cook every meal I eat (4 a day) in a single frying pan, a single cooking sheet, microwave, and a rice cooker. For seasoning, I have salt, pepper, and some Ms Dash. I don't know much that I can't cook with those items alone.

I think those of us with fancy kitchens don't really consider how much of that is just convenience (and which percentage of the equipment just sits there, unused, 99% of the time), and how much you can achieve with very simple tools.

Good point.

I'd argue the up front cost is much less than $50. However, using the numbers as provided, the break-even is still less than a single week.

In the breakfast example, you can buy a single McD meal or buy a dozen eggs with a container of quick oats - both are ~$6. The latter is much better for liquidity.

Not to mention, the eggs and oats is easy to cook, requires little 'ingredients and tools', is healthier, and will last multiple days (helping w/ liquidity).

Go ahead and try to plan out a week's worth of meals while building up the list of staples and cookware that you would need to support it.

I've done it. I think $50 is pretty conservative actually. It would be easy just to spend $50 on some fats and spices.

If you are talking about avoiding McDonald's to save money, it starts to get easier.

Plain pasta. Plain potatoes. Rice-A-Roni. Hamburger Helper.

Now, should someone stick to that diet for years? No. Will the savings compound at a fantastic rate using that diet? Yeah.

If it is sufficiently horrifying, a person could even limit themselves to the above for ~1/2 of meals.

To make food at home, you either need fresh, perishable ingredients and/or time to prep and cook. Even accessing fresh ingredients may be a hassle (see: food deserts), so eating off the dollar menu often feels like a better use of your money than making the trek to the grocery store to buy some perishables that you then have to cook before they go bad.

It's similar to why poor people buy poor-quality shoes more often, as opposed to one high-quality pair once a year.

EDIT: or cars. Poor people buy cars that are in poor condition because that's all they can afford, and they spend more money on it overall than if they could've gotten a better-quality car instead. It's expensive to be poor.

And just to add on to this, it's worse when you're cooking for one, it's far too easy to let ingredients go to waste.

People never think about anything but the cash register price when making this comparison for some reason...

I agree cooking for one is not supported by - at least here in Germany - most super markets. Packaging is too big. The trick when I was cooking for myself is cook larger portions and put these into the fridge. Vary them when eating and don't try to keep raw ingredients instead of cooked food.

Cooking for two is no problem though, especially if you cook the right things. Cooking for more then 2 and you really have no problems with ingredients going to waste.

And you can buy some ingredients for cheap that last, e.g. I buy Japanese rice in 5kg or 10kg sizes, easy to keep in good condition for a long time and much cheaper than 500g from the super market.

> It's similar to why poor people buy poor-quality shoes more often, as opposed to one high-quality pair once a year.

Haha man I can hardly count the number of $15 pairs of sneakers I bought at the market as a kid, with the glue visible on the sides. Eventually the soles would inevitably come off, partially cause of the crappy shoe and partially because I was always playing football (soccer) with them.

The notion of buying a decent pair of shoes and another specialised sport-shoe just never even came up as an option in my mind, to drop $250 total on two pairs of shoes.

I genuinely don't know what point you are trying to make here.

He's agreeing with the person he's responding to and noting how the point that person made resonates with his own experience, whilst adding a little background color.

Add poor money-management habits on top of that (which eg going out for breakfast exacerbates), and it's a recipe to further entrench you in a poor lifestyle, unfortunately.

I agree if people have no time. I don't watch any TV, but many people do watch a lot of TV so the "no time" is more a prioritization issue for many, watch TV or prepare food.

"It's similar to why poor people buy poor-quality shoes more often, as opposed to one high-quality pair once a year."

On the contrary, poor people buy poor shoes because they are cheaper and they don't have enough disposable income to afford good quality shoes.

* more often

"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness."

- Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms: The Play

I immediately thought of Sam Vimes too. Well done!

Adding to this; there is also economy of scale.

Restaurants can buy in much larger quantity and receive a discount for doing so. It is more /resource/ efficient for restaurants to make meals as they disburse labor and ingredients over many households in one day, instead of a single household's resources and labor trying to use perishable items before they expire.

The main issue that comes to my mind is of the more perishable items: greens, vegetables, fruits, and baked goods.

I can, if I like, make my own rice at home, and bring in some fish to make sushi with. By the time I factor in labor and other costs I'm not actually sure that I've come out ahead of just going somewhere. For more complex dishes I don't think I do come out ahead.

The simple dishes, like a sandwich, I would honestly like to be able to make my self, but that doesn't scale down well. A family, sharing the bread, meat, and greens, is really required to make that more economic.

It would be so much easier if there were not-for-profit (or for very limited profit) places to buy freshly made things from.

What kind of cost-effective not-for-profit "freshly made things" store do you imagine?

Bear in mind that most restaurants and similar food-production outlets are practically not-for-profits or "for very limited profits". As are most grocery stores.

>The simple dishes, like a sandwich, I would honestly like to be able to make my self, but that doesn't scale down well. A family, sharing the bread, meat, and greens, is really required to make that more economic.

Seriously? You buy a loaf of bread and some cold cuts (or rotisserie chicken or whatever), mustard, mayo. Absolutely no trouble getting a week's worth of food for one person.

Yes, you can absolutely cook at home. I admit that I don't have access to good ethnic takeout or restaurants, so I'm inclined to cook, but I'm pretty sure that I save money as well.

Dunno what sandwich shop you are going to that doesn't have any sandwich fixins or cheese. I only eat sandwiches that are full of veggies. The sandwich shop I go to bakes their bread daily. To recreate that at home I'd have to get around 10 components and chop them all. On top of that I'd have to stop by the bakery every day I wanted a sandwich.

Yes, you can cook at home, doesn't mean that by definition it is cheaper. Depends on what you eat and often how often you eat, if you have family, or if you prefer variety or stick with the same few meals.

Having been poor, its very cheap per hour as a luxury, something you saved up for. Compared to going to a movie, or a bar, its very cheap both in an absolute sense or per hour. I'm not sure where one can go out for an hour while having dinner that's cheaper.

One issue is due to income inequality most of the population is poor. Perhaps 19 in 20 of their meals are eaten at home, but that 1 in 20, multiplied by most of the population, equals very full McDonalds. Middle and upper class people have this weird idea that most poor people meals are eaten at McDonalds but some simple math about restaurant seats per sq mile just doesn't work. Even poor people like the occasional luxury, its just theirs is a hamburger as opposed to a cashmere sweater or a new car.

A second issue is the usual middle/upper class disconnect from poor people combined with a lack of prediction or creativity. Why if poor people can't afford to cook at home and thus "have to" eat at restaurants all the time because thats so much cheaper, then the restaurant business in Somalia or Haiti must really be booming. What did people eat before fast food in the 70s?

The urge that you report is sugar related. Everything is drowned in carbs, mostly HFCS. Buns today taste sweeter than Hawaiian sweet rolls did when I was a kid. I suspect Hawaii rolls are no longer sold because its impossible to add more sugar to sugar saturated regular 2016 dough. I eat pretty low carb normally, and I feel the same way about cookies or anything else sugary, suddenly three days later I gotta have another chocolate chip cookie. Sugar is addictive.

Finally its a HN trope that home cooking is too expensive and impossible and no one on the planet does it. I donno its like automobile analogies on slashdot or something. Its just a belief, and you show allegiance to the site and its mores by social signalling your agreement with it. Yes yes we all know the numbers don't add up, but like I wrote, its a belief, and nobody ever reasoned themselves either into or out of a belief.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com