In Remote Alaska, Meal Planning Is Everything
eater.com
eater.com
This is such a strange phrase to me. I'm in the UK and it is always the case that processed, mass manufactured food is looked down upon. Store-bought hot dogs are a guilty pleasure or something you resort to as a time saving meal. Certainly not something that anyone would call great. Is the US attitude to this generally the opposite?
Large swaths of the US population have been deprived of food culture for several generations now. There are many exceptions of course - Latino family bbqs in Southern California, or Cajun crawfish boils, are examples of food culture that’s well and alive that I’ve experienced personally. But you also have many Americans for whom the act of procuring ingredients and cooking is something so distant that it’s essentially alien - it’s been replaced by fast food, gas station food (frozen pizza, box of Mac & cheese), food delivery, etc. I’ve lived places where you had to easily drive 50-100 miles to find a farmer’s market - something unthinkable in Europe.
Nowhere is this more visible than in schools. In French schools, it’s not uncommon for the people making the food to make seasonal/local recipes, eat it with the kids, maybe even involving them lightly in the process. In the US, school cafeterias often are serving what is essentially gas station food.
(a funny side effect of that is Americans traveling abroad get their mind blown by foreign gas station food - see for example the sempiternal meme of tourists having their mind blown by the very mediocre Japanese konbini sandwiches)
Many have written about this, Michael Pollan is probably the most famous one.
Cooking for one in the US with ingredients that aren’t laced with preservatives is incredibly expensive, especially if you live in a city. I found it to be the case even 6-7 years ago that it was cheaper to eat out every night than it was to cook.
I don't think that's the case.
When a person can have an entire dinner meal at Taco Bell for less than $5, or jumbo hot dog + drink at Costco for $1.25 ... cooking at home is definitely more expensive.
Buying hotdogs, buns, and soda in bulk will probably cost ~$1.25 per meal, if not less. You can freeze the dogs and buns; the latter will still taste great after a light toasting.
$5 for a few minutes of effort vs spending slightly less for usually at least half an hour to an hour when off hours during the work week are at a premium can make that extra spend very attractive, especially if they're single
Rice and beans make a complete protein. You're writing as if people are getting less protein than they expected, but the inclusion of beans means they're probably not.
Maybe, you know, chicken isn't the only thing in my freezer.
And my objection to your comment is I think pretty universally applicable.
Now maybe I'm missing some cultural context for the price of produce in the US but for €5 per person here in Ireland I could make an absolute feast. Say I make a ragu for 4-5 people, here's what my shopping list might look like (checking prices on tesco.ie):
- Pasta 500g (€0.65)
- Ground pork 400g (€3.50)
- Bag of onions 1kg (€0.60)
- 4 bulbs of garlic (€0.80)
- Bag of carrots 500g (€0.60)
- Celery 450G (€0.79)
- Tinned Tomatos (€0.45)
So for €7.39 I could feed 4-5 people and have most of the onions, garlic and celery left over for another dish.
If I had the budget to get 5 people Taco Bell at €5 a head, I could cook that recipe twice over and have enough left over to buy a half-decent bottle of wine.
I know scale changes if you live on your own say, but that's when you save stuff for lunches, make smaller recipes etc. And I live in one of the highest cost-of-living countries in the EU - is the situation really so dire in much of the US as to be drastically different?
* Onions: $1.59 for 2lb
* Carrots: $0.89 for 2lb
* Garlic: $1.89 for 5 heads
* Celery: $3.09 for a bunch (~1lb)
The carrots are cheaper, and everything else is more expensive but mostly the celery. This "basket" of fresh vegetables is $6.67 vs €2.79 (2.4x). Exclude the celery and it's $3.55 vs €2.00 (1.8x)
Cooking is a financial commitment.
I'll also say the first recipe I found suggested 1kg of pork to go with that much pasta and vegetables.
Once you have a decent set up and pantry, it's not bad. But if you need 5 spices to try a recipe, you're looking at at least a $15 home cooked meal. For one person.
But while some planning and a little work is needed, stick to cheaper proteins (chicken/pork), vegetables, and things like rice/beans and home cooking, even for one, can be pretty inexpensive and doesn't need to mean eating the same leftover stew for a week.
I do think a lot of "cooking at home is too expensive" is actually "I don't want to cook at home and would rather just get takeout."
ADDED: And especially if you relax the cost constraint a little bit, there are a ton of meals I can make from unprocessed or minimally processed frozen food in about 15 minutes from freezer to table. Less than $10 for a meal is trivial--and can be significantly less than that.
I've been mostly working at home (or traveling) for years now but when I was going into an office, a had a repertoire of quick and easy weeknight meals--and others that I could make on weekends and give me one or two meals of leftovers.
But once you're into it, that's simple, those are the nights you have leftovers, something from the freezer (made before), or 10-15min pasta & grilled vegetables.
(To be honest my problem is more not feeling like that often enough, so I always make something new and the freezer fills up. Also eating from the freezer comes with the problem of not remembering exactly what you did, if it's particularly good and you want it again...)
Well, yeah, it shouldn’t be a surprise that many don’t like the actual acts of planning, prepping, and cooking, and would rather eat takeout everyday if it was nutritious and affordable enough, or have their meals cooked for them
EDIT: I struggle with this too and am trying to change my mindset to cooking being just something you need to survive, like brushing your teeth, and trying to enjoy it more from that aspect
Pineapple fried rice here I come
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGBP3sG3a9Y
P.S. The owner of the shop also makes the fried rice so you can compare the two slightly different approaches.
As you cook you also learn a lot of shortcuts you can really get off with most of the time. Using lemon juice from a jar is really fine. You don't need to have that sprig of parsely. You can probably get away with using dried herbs rather than fresh for many purposes.
There are so many ways to tweak and "automate" this, much like the effeciency of software development tasks, such as finding pairs of recipes that reuse the same intermediate components, making things in batches that can be frozen and reheated, and just plain getting faster at making something from practice.
There is a lot to be said for making the same recipe many times rather than always trying new ones. Each time you make it you will get faster, and even better, more able to do it without thinking much about it, and keep thinking about something else more useful instead.
If I were to eat only meals I feel like eating all the time it would be too much of mental hassle even if I could afford to purchase ingredients.
There definitely many times when I'm "I should use something from the freezer" or "I need to use this meat cut I bought a couple days ago."
Additionally, unless you meal plan very well, some of your ingredients are going to go bad; you can’t really purchase enough celery for just one meal.
I guarantee that it will be cheaper to cook a meal equivalent to what you get from a food truck yourself. I live in a area whose cost of living is on par with NYC, and have never seen a grocery bill to the contrary.
> Additionally, unless you meal plan very well, some of your ingredients are going to go bad; you can’t really purchase enough celery for just one meal.
Egg salad uses abundant amounts of celery and can last several days in the fridge. Stews and soups also use lots of celery and both freeze/defrost very well.
In my experience, the hardest thing to meal plan around is fresh aromatic herbs. Hard to figure out how to use a giant bunch of fresh tarragon or mint without getting sick of it.
There's some genuine cheap food targeting service and construction workers - dollar pizza, rice and meat places, Chinatown - but you also get, for example, somebody who went to Berlin, saw döner kebabs, and now are charging $15 to make them here...
I'm sympathetic to the issues of cooking for 1, but I'm skeptical that it's really cheaper to eat out and get the same quality and healthfulness that you could get from cooking.
I purchase meat in Chinatown on the regular for remarkably good prices.
There are things like the difference in the cost of a single, reasonable, serving of chicken. Buying a chicken breast is more expensive in price per pound than the family pack of chicken breasts or an entire chicken. Similar things with carrots (I only need 2 or 3 carrots for the meals I have in mind for the week) but instead have to buy the bag for $1 or $2 and rather than one of them for $0.10.
Next there's the issue with single meal variety. Back when I was living with my family, a meal would consist of several different items - some beans, a meat dish, something else. Cooking alone I can't prepare a wide enough variety for a single meal and hope to eat it all (and have the portions be something that is healthy to eat). If I want mashed potatoes to add some variety, I can't make it in the quantity that brings down the price to that of a potato... and so I'm getting single serving cups of instant mashed potatoes. The five pound bag of potatoes is difficult to eat before things start getting funky and buying potatoes in in the "select and bag" tends to be the organic variety which is much more expensive than that 5 lb bag per unit weight.
When buying meat and produce in units that a single person is going to cook before food waste occurs (and causes the effective price to go up) gets to the point where prepackaged frozen (and even weekly delivery!) meals become competitive on price and start having more of an advantage on individual serving variety.
This is something a freezer handles very well. Chicken that's been frozen before cooking isn't quite as good, but it's very nearly, and for many dishes you can't tell.
A whole chicken doesn't freeze as well as chicken parts. And chicken parts, if not vacuum sealed don't have quite the freezer stability as those that are vacuum sealed (and we're back to the individual portion problem).
When I do get raw (not frozen) meat, I've got to have a corresponding meal plan to use it all within a reasonable amount of time.
Realizing the "I am again paying a little bit of a premium here" I've ordered from an online meat company that does have individually packaged units of meat that are delivered frozen and then went right into my freezer and have been thawed as needed.
The main issue is that when buying in a grocery store, purchasing in units that a single person can reasonably cook without waste is higher price per unit than if one was purchasing in family sized units. Purchasing in the larger sizes requires an additional amount of effort and planning for meal planning, saving of ingredients so they don't spoil, and an increased tolerance for half serving leftovers.
Meat is split up, vacpacked and frozen. produce is put in the fridge in containers that best store them: some lined with paper town, some not, some with lids, some not. I have 2 week old tomatoes peppers cucumbers romain for salad that is totally fine. Onion garlic and potatoes go in burlap in the pantry. Rice and grains are put in sealed containers. And so forth.
And when I cook it’s always multiple servings. Today and tomorrows dinner, 5-10 servings of soup and I freeze most.
Storing food so it keeps is a skill.
150-200$ every 2-3 weeks, much cheaper and healthier then ordering in or frozen.
(do you need the chamber sealer, no, but they do a much better job, if you're doing tons of bulk food prep and sealing they're really a nice tool for it.)
I live in an apartment, have a good commercial sealer, but it sits in my office, and just my fridge and a 7cuft (upright being key) freezer that’s in a closet. It’s more then enough space then I need to buy bulk from Costco, have a wide selection, and space for portions. 15 cu ft seems like way more then you need to just buy bulk and freeze?
suggest getting commercial food storage bins, they stack and can seal in moisture, great for storing something like sliced peppers. Don't just toss everything in with the package they came in, do a little prep and get them in better containers. If things go moldy paper towel does wonders to manage moisture.
as for vacpack i got a good commercial one, and then put it in another room out of the way. i prep in the kitchen then i take it over to seal. it would be a lot of counter space but its not so bad in the corner of my office. Also i only use it for ingredients like meat. soups and sauces i just toss in glasslocks and freeze as they seem to do just fine that way.
3rd party vac bags are inexpensive on amazon
For thawing, I throw the frozen vac-pack into a sous vide set for 0C/32F - the circulation thaws very quickly. Rarely cook in the sous vide much anymore, it's become my thawing machine
For things like carrots, I freeze them in vac bag in an orientation where I can remove just a couple of carrots and then have enough space to reseal the bag in the vacuum sealer to save on plastic waste
This is where, for me, the amount of effort to try to minimize the per meal cost begins to falter.
My "ok, this is how I do it" is to have two different prepared meal services (one microwave, one conventional) that gets to about $25/day for three meals (my breakfast is cheap). This does have a higher cost, but makes up for it with variety that I otherwise wouldn't have combined with portions that are appropriate and no food waste. The corresponding time savings (about 5 min of prep per day) is also a consideration for me.
While I've got space (and a chest freezer), many single people who are living in apartments have more difficulty with trying to buy larger amounts and limited freezer space.
As an aside, I tend to cook more (slow cooker and a stew that is ~3 meals worth - dinner one day and lunch and dinner the following) in the winter. It may be my appetite preferences or the "I don't want something cooking in the summer", but that's just how my meal preferences tend.
They started a prepared meal service for $12 a meal, which was really pushing my limits on what I'd be willing to spend to avoid having to do all of that work and spend all of that time. Then I found the "double portion +$2" button. The food tastes similar to how I made it. But now instead of spending 30 minutes a meal, I spend 90 seconds and spend almost the same amount of $$. I don't have random scraps to fashion into meals for my kids anymore (they won't eat the diet food I make), but for now this seems like the best choice.
When cooking from a recipe the whole point is that there's a bespoke ingredient or technique. Sadly, I don't think there's a lot of resources on optimizing your kitchen out there. I think because it's not clearly defined and staple foods are very cultural and personal.
I do think people underestimate the upfront cost of getting the knowledge and skills to run a home kitchen. Once you do it, it's amazingly cheap compared to ordering out and the food is already there. The closest I see is reverence for grandmothers to whip something up or always have things on hand. You can vary the time/costs with your tastes; yogurt, muesli, and whatever fruit is handy or pour cereal and milk. That sounds like way less of a headache to me than going out or having something delivered.
Different things work for different people at different points in their life. I'm glad when people find systems that work for them--it sounds like you have. I just advocate for a low-maintenance system for cooking at home.
You can see this with the inflation discussion -- you can tell immediately if someone can cook by if they complain about the current inflation in the context of food or not. If you truly cook based on commodities, it's barely noticable. If you eat out or use mostly processed and premade "ingredients" with big brand names, yeah, it's a lot more expensive.
What corporate america did to US food culture in the 20th century is comparable to the enclosure movement in preindustrial England. There was a common resource that belonged to and was highly valuable to all (cultural knowledge of how to prepare cheap nutritious palatable food from scratch, using time effeciently), and it was destroyed and monopolized by a small group. Crazy as it seems to those on the outside, there are entire generations of families in the USA who have inherited nothing more from their ancestors in terms of food culture than preferences for certain brands.
The irony is there's never been a better time for the every day worker to be able to cook for themselves with limited time and budget, thanks to modern appliances like instant pots, dishwashers, microwaves, and freezers. A homemaker from 1900 would be flabbergasted and overjoyed. What's missing is the operational knowledge and habits.
Consider that in the US, wages for lower income families haven't kept up with inflation for decades. That means even when a family consists of two parents, there often isn't enough money to make ends meet, and one or both parents often end up working a second (or third) job. When you have both parents working more than 40 hours a week, are you really surprised that they don't have the energy to cook from scratch?
Even in the case of "broken" families, a mother and her children that escape domestic violence are probably still better off overall, even though it's harder for them to make ends meet. I'm sure you wouldn't advocate that they stay in a harmful environment just to maintain the family structure?
Finally, and perhaps most important, many people live in food deserts. --They don't have easy access to reasonably priced raw ingredients. In some neighborhoods, the corner store is only place for them to buy stuff, and processed foods are often cheaper than the meager selection of raw goods.
I think you're reading into GP's comment a lot that isn't there. I didn't even see a value judgment in their comment, let alone a suggestion that a mother and child subject to domestic violence should stay in that environment purely for maintaining the family structure.
Yes, because cooking costs like zero energy. The physical activity consists of standing for some 20-30 mins.
If I had to guess, I would relate it more to "culture of working long hours or multiple jobs and culture of traveling a far away for work every day" might be more of the cause.
Before when we both worked out of the house we lived close to work (did so intentionally, gave up better opportunities).
We tend to use a crock pot, put it in before work in the morning. We also will prepare the food the night before and put it in the oven at 4pm so we can eat at 5pm. It’s a lot of work and you have to give stuff up, but we think its worth it.
So what's in my car when I get it back? A 7-11 pizza slice container. This guy doesn't cook -- at all. The guy who connects his own sewage line, who is so obsessed with relying on his own understanding and judgment that he won't go to the doctor, will put anything into his body, from any source, without question, as long as it's an easily recognizable form of food.
I wouldn't put too much stock in traditional foodways, either. The people who practice them are happy to do so on weekends and special occasions and are grateful for the easier option that fast food and frozen food provide them, because traditional foodways tend to assume that the people executing them are not working full time.
Traditional foodways that are resistant to change are a small step up from fast food anyway. With few exceptions, they're just as deadly to people who have sedentary lifestyles. The physically strenuous lifestyles and financial restrictions that made them make sense in the past are mostly gone.
However, when I lived in the cities, the bad school food you mention was endemic.
There is quite a lot of local cuisine and food culture around the US, most people don't bother to find it if they are just passing through.
The inflation part was instantly forgotten due to the "food" itself. The picture pretty much contained none. A carnaval of over processed food, carbs, sugars, supplemented with giant containers of sugar water. Not a single fresh thing, not a single high quality thing, not a single ingredient, nothing of any solid nutritional value.
And she has a family. This is what their two young children also eat. Nothing but garbage.
I'm not at all elitist, I enjoy junk food in moderation nor am I anything more than a reasonable cook. But I consider the above example of this culture an extreme case of neglect to the point it is actively harmful to the entire family.
It makes me mad because there's zero reasons for it. Every adult should be able to cook something basic, even more so if you have children. Surely it can't be rocket science to buy basic things like an egg, potatoes, veggies, rice...whichever, and prepare something semi-fresh? It costs less time than eating out.
If even that is too difficult, Youtube tells you how. If even that is too much effort, there's services dropping fresh ingredients at your home with instructions on what to do with it.
But agricultural and transportation revolutions in the 20th century have lead to promises of any food whenever you want. This isn't all bad (I personally love getting a December-January fruit season from Argentina), but the expectation has lead to cutting costs, revising recipes for practical purposes, and introducing one-formula-fits-all preservatives and other ingredients. To suggest otherwise - that a Dominos pizza has nothing in common with nineteenth century Italian flatbreads or that the supermarket tomatoes pale in comparison to more expensive Farmer's Market varieties - immediately makes you a snob. There are clear and dangerous consequences to this mentality, but any scientific argument is muddled and overshadowed by customer's demand for convenience over anything else.
It's clear that taste is losing to convenience in this culture war, but I have no clue what can change. But it is curious how cuisine gets blander and more predictable as food becomes more accessible.
On the other hand, anyone with the slightest interest in food quality and variety would be absolutely horrified to be transported back and forced to do all their shopping in a 1970s US supermarket. Yes, near major cities, you had farmers markets, butchers, fish markets, bakers, etc. My mother would go to the nearby farmers market that had all those things every Saturday morning. But supermarkets were pretty limited by today's standards.
UK food (with the exception of dishes imported from India) is some of the blandest cuisine I have ever tasted. I would probably prefer store-bought hotdogs, and boxed macaroni and cheese.
The incredible umami depth of a beef dripping gravy, the intense burn of an English mustard, or the creamy tang of a good mashed potato with butter and sour cream, sprinkled with crunchy sea-salt. It's not delicate food, but dang it hits the spot sometimes.
This from the country that brought us beans on toast? Maybe this is more of a middle class phenomenon, but the UK isn't exactly known for its food.
Hotdogs and pasta salad sounds like something a desperate college student would cobble together. Not something the average american would consider eating. Given how well we assimilate different cultures in the US, the food is one of my favorite things.
I can drive less than a few miles and literally have the best food of any number of cultures from any corner of the globe, and if I wish to cook it myself, any number of ethnic grocers to choose from. Not even to mention the food that is purely US in origin.
There are many criticisms of the US but food isn't one of them.
This is just.. not true? These are typical picnic foods.
Posts removed for saying OP's statement that "UK isn't exactly known for its food" is both outdated and prejudiced!
Explanation needed methinks.
Like the phrase "make pancakes from scratch". Yeah… what else do you make it from? Oh, you have your own chickens and… oh… oh no don't tell me it's normally ready made batter from the store.
Even pancakes. Takes no time at all to make, even for a kitchenly challenged person such as myself.
Probably not.
U.S. Mail to Bush Alaska is heavily subsidized, through a program called "bypass mail".
In the past some people have seriously abused this program (e.g. mailing enough concrete blocks to construct an entire building).
>Sam Krogstad of Bush Consolidators, which specializes in sending construction materials via the mail, says the Postal Service’s losses are partly self-inflicted because the postal system pays 10 times as much to send the building materials by air freight as it charges Krogstad to mail them.
Making a profit is not the point. Ensuring that every citizen has access to the communication network as a right is why the USPS does this
The US constitution merely allows congress to establish post offices and post roads. In a wider interpretation, it gives congress the right to regulate the postal system. But that seems to be a right to do something, not an obligation.
And it certainly doesn't read as an obligation for the government to run a postal system themselves. They merely chose to do so.
Even applying the idea of profit and loss to the post office is using a paradigm against it that does not fit the reason for its creation
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_Post
Postal systems were initially brought under government control as a cash cow.
> The Postal Clause was added to the Constitution to facilitate interstate communication as well as to create a source of revenue for the early United States.
I would need to be given some sort of argument that this was a cash cow and not a service that is absorbing a massive amount of risk by giving a static price in the face of a constantly changing business world.
Every company I’ve worked at has been massively adverse to any risk because that can scale to infinite. Offering a service for a static price sounds exactly like something that is ignoring the idea of profit and loss as a metric to compare itself to in exchange for making sure everyone has access to the service
> Offering a service for a static price sounds exactly like something that is ignoring the idea of profit and loss as a metric to compare itself to in exchange for making sure everyone has access to the service[.]
The Penny Post was a profit driven private enterprise. There might or might not have been a more profitable pricing strategy for them, I don't know. Neither me nor business people have perfect knowledge (and don't need it to make markets work).
Compare to how Coca Cola cost a Nickel for 70 years. See eg https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/11/15/165143816/why-...
> Every company I’ve worked at has been massively adverse to any risk because that can scale to infinite.
Keep in mind that prices under a gold or silver standard were more stable in the long run than under modern-day 2% inflation targeting.
(The short run was not necessarily as stable as today.)
> I would need to be given some sort of argument that this was a cash cow [...]
How about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Penny_Post#Takeover_of_... ?
> [...] and not a service that is absorbing a massive amount of risk by giving a static price in the face of a constantly changing business world.
Huh? It's not like the penny post would have been subject to sudden denial of service attacks from the Internet..
They always had the option of raising prices or turning away customers, in case they had temporarily too much demand or their costs would rise.
What's odd is anyone's expectation that they would pay similar prices.
I'm Canadian and know some people who've spent time in Nunavut and life there seemed cold, lonely, dark, and expensive. My understanding is that once you're in Iqaluit, you aren't even able to drive to any other towns, they're generally not connected by real roads, nor would you be able to bring enough gas. Life in Alaska, especially near the cities, seems much more like the rest of rural Canada by comparison.
anchorage and fairbanks have normal road links to BC and the rest of the continent, albeit long and costly for fuel.
very different cargo movement situation from what's categorized as a "fly in" community which is accessible only by airplane during 75% of the year and ice roads during the other 25%.
the remote fly in communities in alaska are closer to nunavut in terms of cargo movement costs.
foods last a lot longer than you think . eggs last 6 weeks , milk lasts a month and can be converted to yogurt to last another 6 -8 weeks. fruit can be jammed or frozen . veggies cooked and frozen in preparations
it doesn’t take planning so much as being creative and changing the habit of needing to shop frequently