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Comment by athenot | Hacker News Reader

> You are investing time and money into maintaining primitive capabilities that are far inferior to the technology-enabled capabilities available to you in the modern world

Except when it comes to food. Growing your own food and cooking it yields far better quality than what you can buy in stores or restaurants. Yes there is time involved, but with practice, your time is recouped in such a way that you're enjoying dishes on a similar level of taste as what you'd pay over $100 a head in a high-end restaurant. And you get to do that multiple times a week.

This holds even for food you don't grow but still cook (for me: meats). The downside of course is that now it is very hard to enjoy food in a restaurant unless it's high-end or in an ethnic specialty I don't master. (raises pinky finger :) )

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Being good at cooking makes it hard not to be a buzzkill sometimes at restaurants. My friends will be all excitedly praising a place and I'm just sitting there mad about how much I paid for something I could have done better myself.

This is essentially how I was raised. My father was a depression kid, and they lost everything. We kids had to learn how to grow, hunt, fish and survive.

I spent the schoolyear like most kids, but summers we worked on the family ranch. Electricity was for an hour a day, only wellwater in a tank, shower with a wetcloth. Most workdays were on horse with one truck to haul equipment, water and food. We went to the store once a month - everything else was grown or stored.

The family ranches were 30k acres in the mountains, so getting hurt or caught in the dark meant required survival skills - medical care, making a fire, etc. Civilization was a 4 hour drive, and the closest phone was an hour though dangerous canyon roads impassible at night (for the sane).

I really enjoyed it as a kid - but I later realized that most people wouldn't want the hassle unless it was a family business of some kind.

I recommend scouting, camping and gardening. Ranching and farming is expensive and a lot of hard work! It's very rewarding though if you can make it a living.

You mill your own flour from your own grains?

Don't cook with it?

EMPs aside (which throw a wrench into any modernly-convenient cooking technique), grinding wheat berries into flour is easy to do at home. (I have a stand mixer attachment I do this with often.) So is growing wheat; it's just grass after all. What's painstaking at home-scale would be threshing and winnowing, but it seems [1] that you can do this by hand too.

[1] https://www.groworganic.com/organic-gardening/articles/grow-...

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