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Comment by belugacat | Hacker News Reader

There is nuance to all of this obviously, as with anything cultural, but in short - yes.

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for whom the act of procuring ingredients and cooking is something so distant that it’s essentially alien - it’s been replaced by fast food, gas station food (frozen pizza, box of Mac & cheese), food delivery, etc.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.

View on HN

Yup. Exhibit A, found on this very site [0]:

  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 was scratching my head at how so many people in the thread could possibly believe this, until I realized that they’re probably not actually cooking, but rather buying prepackaged meals and heating them up.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32128893

If your sole metric is price, there is some very cheap takeout out there. And, yes, it may well be as cheap or cheaper than meals in the supermarket freezer section.

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.

Well, we cook at home almost every meal throughout the year. Something I noticed compared to old country that for lot of people here each meal is always about the food they like to eat at that time. Whereas for us that likeness/preferred meal is only couple times a week or so. Most meals are really like rotation of stuff from pantry and fridge.

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.

What are the meals you don't like, and cook anyway? Why do you even stock ingredients for them then? Are they just easier to make, or?

Not the parent, but I read it as, sometimes you're cooking the meal you want to eat tonight. Other times it's "What do I have in the house?"

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."

That makes sense

Like there are bunch of dried lentils we would keep as they don't go bad and we could cook them less frequently.

> 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."

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

Yeah, i think it's a real problem that a lot of cooking writing and education out there is pitched toward hobbyists. You certainly can enjoy cooking (i do!), but it's also fine for it to be a chore that you want to get done as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Read cooking blogs or watch cooking shows and you probably get the impression that cooking is way more time consuming and requires way more ingredients than are really required to put food on the table. But there are whole cookbooks of recipes that use just a few ingredients plus a handful of standard pantry staples.

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.

Absolutely agree with all of this. I think a person trying to dip their toe into cooking could easily get the impression online that it's way more precious and difficult than it really is.

I am still in this journey myself and what's really made it a lot easier is seeing it as a skill that has a lot of opportunity to be improved, with regards to speed/effeciency, ie how many net minutes per week I actually have to spend.

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.

Learn how to make a dish you really like. Expand from there.

Thanks that’s probably good advice

Pineapple fried rice here I come

Man, I've been trying to make good fried rice for like thirty years. Let me know if you figure it out... supposedly needs a lava-hot wok and a gallon of oil or something.

This recipe helped me succeed finally, although I've still failed a few times https://www.seriouseats.com/easy-vegetable-fried-rice-recipe

That looks great, thanks!

While this is a comedy, the actual fried rice is excellent, including the tricks that most Westerners don't get - for example re-purposing stale rice.

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.

Hahahaha, this was fantastic. And educational!

I don't associate fried rice with a lot of oil. Maybe the hot wok. Woks can be problematic on electric ranges. Cooks Illustrated actually recommends using a skillet instead.

Keep an eye on moisture of rice or ingredients too, the less moisture the better to avoid a soggy end product

This[1] is the best method/recipe I've found for making fried rice without a wok. This is the finale in a series where the host is trying to perfect the method for making fried rice, but ends showing you how to make it at home with a cast iron frying pan.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1L5qBMtFXBs

Yeah, I think people try to optimize their budget a little too much. I doubt everybody is barely making the cut to get any food. A lot are just lazy. Me included sometimes. Spend a few extra bucks, and get something that's less likely to give you cancer. The end result can be very satisfying when you're finished making it, and you don't feel like a pig afterwards.

I admit there are evenings when I just don't feel like cooking at all--although a lot of the time I then realize it would be more effort/time to hop in the car and get takeout. I also admit that if I lived in a city and had good takeout options like decent Chinese within a 5 or 10 minute walk, I'd probably get takeout more.

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.

I enjoy cooking a lot (which can be parsed two ways and I mean both of them) but of course I feel like that sometimes too.

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...)

The cost for cooking for one becomes evident when buying meat and produce (things that aren't shelf stable) in units small enough to do meal planing without significant waste.

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.

trick is to get higher quality produce, make multiple services, and lean how to store things. Cheap produce goes back quicker. I live alone yet go to Costco every 2-3 weeks and I expect everything I get to last.

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.

Well, space is something else that is at a premium in a city... I have two 5.5cu-ft freezers for storing bulk stuff that I see cheap on sale... have fun with that in an apartment. And especially if you are doing soups and other liquids, you really kinda want a chamber vacuum sealer, which is a big dealie that sits on your counter with a 1/4hp motor. Even keeping the sealing area very clean (wiping down the foam seals and electric seal strip regularly, etc) I cannot get one of the cheap vac-u-saver vacuum-pump machines to last more than a year, after that the seals on the packets start getting marginal and they leak air and eventually ruin the food. Someone in a new york apartment doesn't have space for 2 cubic feet of vacuum sealer and 15 cubic feet of freezers.

(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.)

Tbh I don’t vacuum seal soups, toss it in a glasslock and freeze. Year later it’s still fine because soup.

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?

Do you have any resources? When I've tried repacking and vacu-sealing bulk meats it seemed like a huge waste in time, plastic, and counter space.

sorry i don't off hand :(. mostly it was trial, error, and googling. If i buy something from costco and it doesn't last i would try different was to store it and if none work just stopped buying it. really only couldn't get blackberries and raspberries to keep long thou.

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.

> 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.

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.

My freezer is fairly well stocked with frozen meat (a good but not overly large chest freezer).

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.

I felt exactly the same until a friend introduced me to vacuum sealers and a big freezer, now I can buy the larger amounts of fresh food, divvy it up and freeze it with little loss of quality for many types of produce

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

Consider the question "how much time per person per meal do you spend in purchasing, planning, and processing?"

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.

the trick is to cook about one and a half servings everytime. this way you eat one serving, store the half and heat up a previously stored side dish (previously remaining half serving)

> I was scratching my head at how so many people in the thread could possibly believe this, until I realized that they’re probably not actually cooking, but rather buying prepackaged meals and heating them up.

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.

https://www.tacobell.com/food

Our household spends ~$670/month cooking for two adults, two children, and an infant (all meals). [1] That's $5.50/person/day ignoring the baby, and we're not trying to minimize costs (fresh fruit and veg, meat, etc). Cooking at home is more expensive if you count the time of the cook, sure, but not if you just compare dollar costs.

[1] https://www.jefftk.com/p/spending-update-2022

Yea I'm not sure how someone can claim "$5 for a meal for one" could possibly be cheaper than cooking unless you're deliberately cooking something expensive?

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?

Those vegetable prices are very cheap compared to a US supermarket--like maybe 1/3 or 1/4 the price?

Checking on Instacart and so including their markup, our local Market Basket has, for the veggies:

* 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)

They look about right from the UK (I'd pay more for the tomatoes and pasta in particular, personally, but certainly available that cheap) - but that has been my experience in US/Canadian supermarkets, that groceries seem expensive.

Those prices seem very low for the US (except for the pork). I also see you're leaving out the salt, pepper, olive oil, red wine, Parmesan, and spices/(dried) herbs. Yes, all the things you left out will last for a long time (except the 1/4 bottle of wine) but they are a huge upfront cost for a single meal.

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.

A woman I knew way back when said that when she cooked for her ex-BF at his place, it always cost her a fortune because he had very few pantry staples. You don't need to go crazy but it's probably a few hundred dollars to setup for reasonable cooking from square 1.

Exactly. And if you aren't used to it, you can easily mess it up. You get things that don't last as long as you expect, or too much of an ingredient.

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.

Your prices are in the same range I'd see here.

Buy ground beef, beans, rice, and tortillas in bulk (or even cheaper, make them yourself—it’s not hard!) and be smart about planning to use vegetables and other perishables efficiently across multiple dishes, and you’re going to be making Taco Bell menu items at home that are far superior to Taco Bell for much less than $5.

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.

There's the opportunity and comfort cost as well though. I can definitely see how one could see spending $5 on a box they can grab from the drive thru and immediately throw away is a better choice than going to the store, meal planning, ensuring there's proper refrigerator and freezer space, making sure the perishables are used, and then also taking the time to clean the dishes used afterwards.

$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

I can really see that, $5 gets you a LOT at Taco Bell (funnily enough, they refused to load any images till I switched my IP to a USA one O.o). I’m actually shocked how much you get. Here in Germany, McDonalds / Burger King (not sure what other fast food places we have) are disgusting AND expensive :D

Cheap (and even not so cheap) "Mexican" food in particular is a great opportunity for the restaurant to bulk up a little protein with lots of cheap filler like rice and beans. With a burger, you have a floor set by a certain weight of ground beef. And, yes, while I very rarely go into a McDonald's or Burger King, my sense is that they're not a particularly cheap meal. And the better "fast casual" burger chains certainly are not.

> bulk up a little protein with lots of cheap filler like rice and beans

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.

You're right of course. I'm just using protein in the sense that restaurants often do to mean x grams/ounces of meat, chicken, pork, or fish. But there are obviously other sources of protein.

We do cook at home a lot, but genuinely, if I have a lot of work of just have activities with kids outside of home, it adds overhead I don't want to deal with. I am not even sure it is more of mental overhead or time overhead, but the more I am stressed at given period the less I want to deal with counting and "being smart" about buying perishables.

This is roughly what I do (in the sense that I buy in bulk and freeze stuff), but note that it essentially requires you to not only purchase an extra freezer, but also run it and have the extra space for it. So this strategy does require some capital investment. It's not much, but I have friends that just couldn't do this. (Not necessarily because of the capital required, but because there is just no space for a freezer.)

You really don't need an extra freezer to buy 3/5/10 pounds of chicken instead of 1/2 pound.

Oh okay, you surely know what's in my freezer. I guess my stuffed freezer wasn't actually stuffed and I didn't need to buy the extra freezer.

Maybe, you know, chicken isn't the only thing in my freezer.

So you extrapolate, to the general population, your need for an extra freezer as an obstacle to reducing the cost of buying in bulk but your objection to my comment is that it is not relevant to you in particular?

I didn't extrapolate anywhere. You're making shit up and reading things that aren't there.

And my objection to your comment is I think pretty universally applicable.

The savings really add up at that 10 pound level. Chicken quarters are still under a dollar a pound at Walmarts in that quantity.

No doubt. But in the context of this discussion, it sounds like, for even that size package, the target audience could make room in the freezer they already have by consuming and not replacing their existing stock of frozen tacos, waffles and corn dogs.

in Ireland, as someone living alone, I spend close to 40 euros a week. 4 euros for a kilo of ground beef 4 euros for a kilo of whole chicken 7 euros for a kilo of pork and 4 to 5 euros for fish and 2 to 4 euros for rice and wraps. onions, garlic, fresh tomatoes are around a euro for a pack that's enough for a week. 5 to 10 euros for spices but they last for atleast a month. I throw in a few frozen veggies into rice which again is euro or two. I dont order or eat out, I generally do this to eat clean healthy food but the addon benefit is I notice I save a lot more when compared to my colleagues and I generally look healthier even though I eat a lot more.

When I lived in NYC, I felt this was often true, but my hypothesis was that it was a reflection of the real estate footprint of grocery stores. A restaurant can receive daily shipments from vendors based in the outer boroughs (or further). If I really wanted to, I could have taken the subway to Queens for grocery runs, but that wasn't actually going to happen. But the Whole Foods on Houston takes up a large footprint of valuable real estate, and of course that drives up the price of everything. The choice between cooking and eating takeout weighs the labor of the kitchen staff (ideally low in a high throughput kitchen) vs the overhead of a supply chain which uses more high-value space.

No need to go all the way to Queens for the groceries - just a few blocks from the Whole Foods on Houston you have the grocery stores of Chinatown, and even the produce from the street vendors is decent - and cheap.

This is not true, I’ve never been to a city in the US where cooking is more expensive.

I've been buying fresh ingredients for two years to make the recipes in my Clean Simple Eats recipe book. The shopping would sometimes take an hour, and preparing the food would take about 30 minutes a meal.

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.

I've found recipe books to be the antithesis to meal planning and time/money optimization. To me, "meal planning" is having staples at home--not sitting down on Sunday to write out 7-days worth of meals, going to multiple grocery stores to source all of the ingredients, then prepping for the week. You already know which store, the specific isle to find them, and roughly what it costs.

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.

This is so true. If you actually know how to cook (and I just mean the basics that most people, or at least most women knew in the year 1900, nothing fancy) you feel gaslit constantly when you hear people talk about how hard it is to eat nutritiously and affordably.

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.

If I go to McDonalds, I can get a hamburger for a dollar. At the grocery store I can't get the meat for a hamburger for a dollar.

True, but you should be able to make 20 burgers for less than $20; easily if you already have condiments on hand. McDonald's burgers have 1.6 oz (1/10 lb) ground beef patties, and 80:20 ground beef is about $4/lb in most of the US.

I live in NYC and you’re wrong. If you are cooking with meat and you insist on buying organic, then it is cheaper to go to a food truck than to cook for one.

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.

Is your food truck really using organic meat? The US has a very interesting food truck and street food culture. You get chefs who are saving money on rent, but the food ends up costing as much as a brick and mortar quick service restaurant. (~$15 in NYC these days, creeping up with inflation.)

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.

"Insist on buying organic" is a big qualifier. That food truck isn't cooking organic.

I purchase meat in Chinatown on the regular for remarkably good prices.

There is also a great appreciation for people who cook at restaurant / food truck etc. I have cooked very decent meals for family and friends, putting great deal of effort, attention and love and all people could say was "yeah, not bad". Same people will go to restaurant eat a rather bad meal for good money but show deep respect to restaurant.

Yeah, if you’re buying wagyu, sashimi-grade fish, and heirloom vegetables, it will be more expensive per meal than a Halal Guys truck.

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.

It's amazing how strong this mental erasure of food is, to the point of overriding individual tendencies. I recently lent my car to a guy who is the epitome of do-it-yourself. He lives in a tiny house that he built himself, complete with electricity, running water, and sewage. He drives ancient cars because he would rather know how to fix every part of them than have an actually reliable car. He doesn't cut his own hair, but he does odd jobs for a friend in exchange for amateur haircuts. He works construction because making commitments longer than a month or two out undermines his sense of independence. He avoids getting medical care because it's something he doesn't understand.

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.

Does he know that that’s what you think about him? I’m wondering how he’d react if he read this post and this characterization of him.

I think this has more to do with the breakdown of family. My family growing up (and now as the parent) ensure we sit down and eat together for breakfast and dinner. Home cooked from scratch 3-4 times a week fresh and left overs the other nights. I eat totally different foods than my parents cooked, but the community is key. My Wife and I got really good at making a few dishes from various cultures (Greek, Mexican, Irish, French). It wasn’t our culture matters, it’s the idea of making and sharing a meal.

More broadly I point to the disappearing stay at home parent. It turns out young kids need to be in bed between 7:30-8:00 for enough sleep. Good luck cooking from scratch when neither parent is home before 6:00. (Ask me how I know)

Yeah, I agree. My wife and I stay home, switching who watches the kids at home every other day.

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.

Afaik multiple countries with "food culture" have higher divorce rates then USA. It is no only factor how you measure "breakdown of family" of course, but it strongly suggest the reason will be different.

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.

Blaming "the breakdown of family" is a rather privileged view.

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.

> 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?

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.

I don't know anybody's advocating for people to stay in abusive relationships. Maintaining the family structure means keeping a close bond with the people you love as much as possible. If they don't respect you enough, and you can't work it out, leave, and find someone who does respect you. And build a family bond there.

"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?"

Yes, because cooking costs like zero energy. The physical activity consists of standing for some 20-30 mins.

Have you ever been to a WaWas? It's like 711 in China. Gas station food is awesome in the U.S. As much as I love old country, for their wonderful culture, manners, and accent, but the worst food I ever ate in my life was in England. It's no wonder they chose an Indian dish as their national meal.

Exactly this, I know many adults who almost never buy raw ingredients to cook for themselves. It is common & accepted to consume exclusively frozen food, packaged snacks, and takeout.

Not representative I'm sure, but early in the pandemic with offices closed, I saw more than one "Woe be me" comments from large tech employees bemoaning how they were going to manage with their office cafeterias closed.

It just seems like the end result of a culture that believes it has conquered food scarcity. Gourmet develops in response to different environmental restrictions; coastal nations eat more seafood, temperate climates have "hearty" meals for winter, dispersed communities recreate treasured recipes with local ingredients.

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.

>It's clear that taste is losing to convenience in this culture war

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.

Recently on Twitter a lady was complaining about inflation. She posted a photo of about a week's worth of groceries and its combined new price, as this was what she typically bought every week.

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.

FWIW, when I lived in various parts of the rural US, the schools frequently served seasonal ethnically-congruous cuisine from local ingredients. By "ethnically-congruous", I mean reflecting the historical ethnicity of the population. When I lived in a small town in the middle of the US that was ethnically Czech, a fair bit of the food at school was also ethnically Czech, even though none of them were immigrants. Often made by local grannies. Same situation when I lived on the Palouse, where the local schools often featured the local agricultural ingredients. Notably lentils and peas; not common in schools generally but ubiquitously grown in that part of the Palouse.

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.

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