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I'm not sure what the situation in many parts of the US is, but is not freshly baked bread, the kind with unsurprising ingredients and that goes stale when you'd expect it, not an option?

The stuff made to sit on the supermarket's shelf for long times has such an odd consistency and flavor, very spongy and very tangy and sweet, you can't spread anything on it without toasting it first. I wouldn't take it as the standard for bread.

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If you want to understand what the average American consumes the answer is whatever is on the shelf of their local Walmart (they sell groceries). The average American may assemble food from time to time but generally does not cook. That said, there are hundreds of millions of people in that country, so this is obviously a generalization, and should be treated as such.

That said Lidl is making aggressive inroads into the country and that MIGHT have an impact long term. They have legitimate and affordable fresh bread.

https://www.walmart.com/tp/bread

This is Walmart's store brand (as cheap as possible): https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Wheat-Sandwich-Bread-...

Ingredients: Enriched Flour (Wheat Flour, Malted Barley Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Water, Whole Wheat Flour, Sugar, Yeast, Contains 2% or less of the following: Soybean Oil, Wheat Bran, Salt, Vital Wheat Gluten, Molasses, Calcium Propionate (Preservative) Vinegar, Dough Conditioners (Monoglycerides, Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, Ascorbic Acid, Calcium Sulfate, Enzymes), Potassium Iodate, Monocalcium Phosphate

I totally believe it, but it is just so wild to me that it has gotten to the point where we can somewhat confidently say that most Americans just do not cook at all.

I just don't even understand how that works, even if you have enough income, how do you have enough space to like store all the trash for the week?

Don't you just get tired of restraunt food at some point?

In the US in many places trash disposal is a flat rate included in your utility bill, rolled up into your rent, or you have a common dumpster area you can throw trash into for free. This isn't Switzerland where you have to pay two bucks for a LICENSED small plastic trash bag. Here you can generate as much residential trash as you want for the same price or for free if you drive the trash to the county dump yourself. You have to call the county to schedule a pickup of huge trash like for appliances if your new appliance delivery people won't take your old stuff.

In most cities there are usually many options for restaurants nearby and Uber Eats for anything further out. For everyone else there's McDonalds and friends: https://www.qsrmagazine.com/content/ranking-top-50-fast-food...

> you can generate as much residential trash as you want for the same price or for free if you drive the trash to the county dump yourself.

They charge a fee if you do that in my county, and the "flat rate" is dependent on the size of your bin, as a proxy for how much trash you generate. If you have more trash than fits in your bin you have to buy stickers for the extra bags to pay for them to be picked up.

Where are you? I'm in the US

It's highly dependent on where you live. Some cities/suburbs find it easier to financially manage flat rate payments instead of usage-based. Many would argue this is counterproductive and they are probably overcharging some citizens, but the upside in logistical billing makes it worth it (for now).

Garland TX, a suburb of Dallas, has a flat rate per bin, with free curbside large item/landscaping waste twice a month. Throw your old washing machine on the curb and move on with your life!

My mother in law, lives about 50 miles outside the DFW Metroplex and pays a flat rate based on the average of her trash usage. She rolls 2 bins up to the curb once a week. She can put more out and they will take it, but if she consistently puts out more trash, they will bill her extra when it comes time to renew every year. The guys on the trash truck keep a rolling tally of your "usage" and then the office works out who needs to pay more if the customer skews towards more usage than they signed up for.

I live in Europe now and moved here last year. I pay $12 PER PICKUP for residential trash here in the Netherlands. The catch? They pickup that bin ONCE every TWO MONTHS. If I want to throw more stuff away, I need to somehow transport all my trash to the local dump, pay a fee, and unload and sort it all myself.

On a more positive note though, recycling plastic is free. Some of my neighbors generate an entire large bag of plastic every day. My wife and I fill up one bag a week. Our "normal trash" bin is usually half full when it's time for pickup.

Pricing for waste is largely dependent on the municipality as well here in the Netherlands.

I have live in 5 different states, 3 had "free" municipal trash, 2 had cheap flat rate trash. Currently, I am in Omaha and if your weekly trash fits in the generous 100 gallon or so bin it is flat rate. If you need a second bin you pay extra for just that bin.

My household typically throws away 3 or 4 ten gallons bags per week leaving the bin maybe a quarter full. The neighbors across the street are constantly having food delivered and routinely fill two bins.

Maybe its just me, or maybe I've spent too much time working in kitchens, but there is an overriding sameness to restaurant food even if you are considering the full spectrum of McDonald's to fancy steakhouse takeout. Something about the necessary restrictions and specificity in cooking commercially in big kitchens creates certain tendencies around flavors and salt and such that I just personally need a break from if I find myself eating out a lot. But I guess that is extremely subjective.

In the big chains it's overwhelming consolidation and cost cutting that completely eliminated flavor. Sugar and heat compensate for the lack of flavor. Finally, overweight and obese people perceive the things they eat differently than if their BMI was normal (personal experience going from obese class 1 to normal). If the majority of your clientele are obese or overweight, you will update the menu to appease their palate. Forty-one percent of U.S. adults, on average over the past five years, from 2017 to 2021, have characterized themselves as overweight or obese.

> Finally, overweight and obese people perceive the things they eat differently than if their BMI was normal

Besides asking for studies that may or may not be there, what was your experience with this? I hadn't heard of this before.

> what was your experience with this?

Not OP, but I've lost >100 lb. three separate times in my life, so I suppose I qualify.

It affects you in ways that are analogous to overindulging in adult entertainment.

You need higher peaks (e.g. more salt) and, in my experience at least, you gradually lose the ability to pick out subtle flavors.

You start to prefer food that you can scale as you see fit. Lots of rice. Lots of potatoes. Lots of popcorn.

It's wild to you because it's total bullshit.

> Today, 82 percent of the meals Americans eat are prepared at home, a much higher percentage than a decade ago, according to research from NPD Group Inc. cited by Bloomberg.

Uncited comments on HN are frequently confidently incorrect, especially when they are descriptions of average American culture

Maybe if you're a highly paid SWE in California with endless takeout options you never cook but that's an absurd proposition for flyover country

https://www.foodnetwork.com/fn-dish/news/2018/9/americans-ar...

Please, the meals that are so-called "prepared at home" in the statistics are mere assembly of highly processed ready to eat foods. Final assembly is hardly cooking. That said, in general more people are cooking from primary ingredients than in the recent past, I agree.

Haha I see! The more I thought about it, the more it really didn't make sense.. Wouldn't all grocery stores be out of business?

You don't see small grocery stores in the US unless they specialize in the food of a particular ethnicity. They are all huge and serve a massive area.

It really isn’t BS at all. I’m in Ohio and almost nobody I know under the age of 40 knows how to cook anything that doesn’t come out of a can or a box. “Prepared at home” in many cases is just warming up processed foods or combining a couple processed ingredients.

The vast majority of the people I see actually buying produce at the grocery store are older people and immigrants. Almost everyone else is buying the processed crap in the aisles.

There are different degrees of food prep. Microwaving frozen chicken nuggets is considered preparing at home but is a far cry from prepare a meal from scratch. There's also a myriad of options in between.

If you want to understand what the average American consumes the answer is whatever is on the shelf of their local Walmart (they sell groceries).

This is the crux of the matter: we can only buy what is on our shelves. If we have to start looking at ingredients lists, I think we've already lost the plot. Why are these questionable things on our shelves in the first place? Likely because they're cheaper to make, or worse, there's some government subsidy involved. And I don't mean "questionable" as in plain junk food, because even then, we have to decipher labeling like chocolate vs "chocolate flavored candy". It can be hard to try to be reasonably healthy once you leave the the edge of the super market.

I think it's a two sided chicken and egg type problem: we can only buy what's on our shelves but - having personally come from a country that's hardly famous for its cuisine - I think American food culture ranges from poor to nonexistent. The bar for agricultural and processed products that the average consumer recognizes as edible food is shockingly low whether we're talking about bread or what passes for tomatoes here. There is plenty of ultraprocessed rye breads in Europe, for example, that are far more nutritious and produced at similar industrial scales because most consumers would recoil at the thought of eating Walmart's value brand of sugar bread.

Here in Southern California there are plenty of food desserts that sit adjacent to immigrant enclaves that provide critical mass for amazing grocery stores with a wide variety of higher quality, cheap produce and a diverse collection of nutritious processed and ultraprocessed food simply because that's the stuff that their communities demand. Replacing such a supermarket with a McDonalds would never work within these communities because most families simply don't consider fast food an alternative to their existing diets. These are huge supermarkets that are often similar in size to Costco or Walmart stores (see Shun Fat, 99 Ranch, Zion Market, etc).

We could do with a little more culinary elitism among consumers in my opinion.

The immigrant melting pot, and the food that results is American food culture, at least when you're outside of homogeneous strip malls that the Midwest is famous for. So in Southern California, there's no shortage of immigrants who started their own restaurant or food truck. Next to the 99 Ranch or H-mart, there's little boutiques of food from back home. And then to top it off, there are fusion places targeting the American palate, which just couldn't exist anywhere else in the world.

If you think American cuisine consists of massive chains; TGI Fridays, Olive Garden, Red Lobster, Hooters, Texas Roadhouse, etc, then no wonder you don't think highly of American cusine. But if you branch out from there, there's a ton of food culture, and Southern California's a great place to experience it.

Walmart sells flour, eggs, milk… and it’s doubtful that plastic tube bread is cheaper when you can make a loaf yourself for about thirty cents.

it’s the hidden costs of time and knowledge are a factor to be accounted for.

I don’t believe this is true, it’s a coping mechanism that people use to keep from learning new skills. It’s also a very popular cope to claim “it’s more expensive” to cook at home because you typically have to buy more ingredients than you’d use to make a single serving of some food item.

If people want to stay ignorant and economically and nutritionally disadvantaged it’s not something I pity. I can’t but help feeling disgusted and scornful toward people with these attitudes. Cave people made bread.

I think the problem occurs when you realize its not just bread, it's almost everything at the store. For a working couple with children, they now have to make everything at home, which is not possible if both parents are working.

Of course it’s possible. It takes about five minutes to prepare a chicken.

Also you can prepare a meal in a crockpot and let it cook all day.

You can prepare and freeze meals.

It takes another thirty minutes to do the dishes and clean the kitchen.

So just eat your unhealthy processed foods, no skin off my nose.

I actually cook every day, but I acknowledge that many people don't have the energy to do that.

Although I'm not one of them, I don't think you can call something that many people do "not possible".

Walmart sells fresh-baked bread too. Come on.

But it costs twice as much...

So it costs $3 instead of $1.50? I think people buy sandwich bread because they prefer it and not because of cost.

You also get "more" because fresh bread tends to be thick slices. Even at home, it's difficult to slice a fresh loaf thin enough to stretch as far as sandwich bread.

I do not believe this is a significant factor and if it is you can ask them to cut it for you.

Freshly baked bread can be hard to obtain in many parts of the US. For me if I wanted fresh baked bread every day and not make it myself, I'd be looking at like 40-60 minutes of extra time per day if I drive there every day. The closest grocery store to me is 1.5 miles away up an extremely steep hill.

Shit, fresh vegetables can be hard to obtain in many parts of the US.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert

We've got ~20 million people who don't live near a grocery store with fresh food at all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tub6eEdmjzs

heh... we have over fresh bakery shops IN EVERY STREET so you are no more than 10 house lengths away from one. It has no yeast, around 3% is salt but is made fresh and goes bad in hours so it is consumed HOT. I wonder if stuff like our centuries old tech can be replicated in more "modern" nations?

The problem in the US is housing density and dependence on cars. In the average US city a street may have an order of magnitude fewer people than a moderately dense city.

Zoning laws generally exclude businesses from opening in residential neighborhoods. So no neighborhood bakery, butcher, produce, pub, etc within walking distances. Change the zoning laws, change the car dependencies.

This is also a major shift in culture and is likely to have unexpected side effects. Maybe those side effects are good, or bad, I don't know but zoning is a big deal and complex to the point of having emergent properties that should be considered.

Why not have a "shopping area" in every locality, say in every block of houses? That way you would be employing people and people would just "walk" to get everything.

Hyper-Local stores would only keep most essential in demand products while you'd have to go out and buy from big stores something niche.

In the US you can literally purchase a bread machine for $60 and as long as you have the ingredients on hand, you can have a hot loaf of bread any time you have 5 minutes to measure and add the ingredients.

Add the ingredients in the evening and enjoy fresh bread in the morning.

Freshly baked bread is available to _everyone_.

Buy some flour, take a cup of flour, mix some water, maybe some salt, squish it some and bake it.

The downfall of society will happen within arms length of wisdom and knowledge.

Predicted in the Foundation series, except we don't get cool spaceships and such.

Most people prefer leavened bread, which is far more involved that your recipe.

That’s a myth: leavened bread doesn’t need much more than that recipe. “No knead bread” was a craze 20 years ago in some circles when people (re)learned that all it takes is a bit of time to rise.

There's a reason bakeries are so prevalent in many areas. That "squish it" part is a lot of work, and you have to wait long enough that it's not available for breakfast. Making it yourself counts as hard to obtain every day.

I bake my own bread. It's very little work. The problem is the time commitment.

You need to be there for a large part of the process. The first mixing and kneading takes the longest, maybe 5 minutes. After that every 20 minutes you need to come and fold for a minute 3 times. After that, let it rest for 8-16h (depending on dough temperature, amount of yeast, environment temperature). Then you do another 2 minutes of work. Half an hour later preheat the oven. Half an hour later put it in.

Doing this over night you save a lot of time. I.e. you can start at 8pm and finish by 8am-9am if you wake up at 6am. But a lot of people can't stay home that long in the morning.

So it's very little work in essence, but it's spread over a whole day. Perfect if you work remotely. Takes less time than most coffee breaks. But you need to be home.

There is a compromise that you can do if you are short for time. Buy a bread maker with a timer. You add the ingredients before going to bed and it will bake overnight and will be ready in time for breakfast. It is not the same thing as hand made sourdough but it is a good compromise.

Yes, I recommend this, too, if you're in some American bread desert and short on time.

If you have time on the weekends only you can do amazing bread and freeze it. I prepped it on Friday or Saturday evenings, baked it the next morning. Cut and froze it and had enough for the week. That's how I survived in Canada.

I have a mixer. I made pizza dough the other day in about 10 minutes. It takes a while to stretch into pizza and add toppings but, if you're just making bread, that'd be ready to bake by morning. Are you actually trying to argue that bread, ine if the simplest things to make and the bedrock of civilization for thousands of years, is too difficult to make?

I didn't say too difficult, no.

But there are so many super-local bakers around the world. Single neighborhoods are willing to pay full-time wages to a baker just so they don't have to make their own bread. Explain why they do that if daily bread-making isn't a pain in the ass.

Or is this just that you don't think I should use the word "hard" to mean "pain in the ass"? It comes out of your money/time budget either way.

There's a bit of a conflict between your post and it's grandparent.

> Freshly baked bread can be hard to obtain in many parts of the US. For me if I wanted fresh baked bread every day and not make it myself, I'd be looking at like 40-60 minutes of extra time per day if I drive there every day.

and

> But there are so many super-local bakers around the world. Single neighborhoods are willing to pay full-time wages to a baker just so they don't have to make their own bread. Explain why they do that if daily bread-making isn't a pain in the ass.

Which I have two thoughts on, first, I'm pretty sure most people are buying bread at the grocery store. So, the availability of fresh bread (which is also frequently available in the grocery store bakery) has more to do with lack of demand than it does with lack of availability. It seems like the convenience of pre-sliced bread that doesn't go bad in a couple days is just vastly preferred over fresh bread.

As for the local bakeries, I'd argue that those bakeries exist because they bake a variety of bread (and cakes) that are more involved than simple bread. I'd be shocked if the majority of the money they make wasn't from specialty items with wide margins.

The top level point I'm trying to get across has to do with the article and top level comment though, fresh bread is available to anybody with an extra few minutes every couple days. And, frankly, if you're doing any amount of cooking during the day, you can do it at the same time. There's usually some down time in a recipe that you could sneak in throwing a few ingredients into a mixer. Or put it together while watching whatever netflix show you're watching or podcast you're listening to.

Bread was certainly much more work but a stand mixer is not that expensive, especially compared to the amount of time it will save you if you cook semi-frequently (and even better if you make the bread you eat frequently). There are a plethora of modern conveniences that make bread so much easier to make than it used to be (and it was already pretty easy...).

> Which I have two thoughts on, first, I'm pretty sure most people are buying bread at the grocery store. So, the availability of fresh bread (which is also frequently available in the grocery store bakery) has more to do with lack of demand than it does with lack of availability. It seems like the convenience of pre-sliced bread that doesn't go bad in a couple days is just vastly preferred over fresh bread.

No my point is that going to the grocery store daily or near daily for fresh bread adds like an hour of time to my day, because there's no very close grocery store. Not even talking about a dedicated bakery

Right, where my wife grew up she could just walk out the front door and go like a block or two, and there'd be fresh everything - produce, baked goods, whatever. That doesn't exist for a lot of people in the US.

I do sympathise: not only is kneading by hand something I can absolutely believe people can't be bothered with after a long day at work, but also I can't even remember when I last tried even though I have access to an electric mixer.

That said, a DIY/health POV, what's given here (no yeast) can be relatively quick.

Bread probably isn't very healthy anyway, so it's okay to cut it out of your diet.

I can only recommend flour, water, salt, yeast by Ken Forkish if you want to get amazing results.

However there is some amount of time commitment that I think might be hard if you don't have the luxury of working from home or being/having a stay at home partner.

The second best thing might be using a bread baking machine, that takes most of the work from you. It doesn't taste as good, but it's similarly healthy I'd guess.

Bread takes hours to make and lasts for one day. So unless you wanna wake up at 3 am (or have a dedicated stay-at-home person making bread every day) it's not really a realistic option for many people.

Real bread lasts a week, if stored appropriately. Though self-baking with sourdough is definitely not an option for everyone.

You can mix this recipe and "bake" in in a frying pan in minutes.

A tiny bit of practice and perspective change to get something you like and you can have fresh bread daily for the rest of your life.

You can buy fresh products at a reasonable cost in the USA, just have to make the effort to look.

Talking about processed bread, here is an example from Sam's Club [0] for sourdough boules, at $6 for four (about 1kg total). The ingredient list contains nothing ultra-processed.

[0]: Soudough boules at Sam's Club https://www.samsclub.com/p/members-mark-sourdough-boules-4-c...

What's a reasonable cost depends on your means. And I can get an (ultra processed) 800g sliced wholemeal loaf for less than 2 USD. There are other cheaper ones too.

> just have to make the effort to look.

That is the problem, people aren't going to take the effort to look.

Agreed. I just can't eat the bread in stores (for me to too sweet) and I'm a big bread person.

It's remarkable easy to bake your own bread (as many tried in during the pandemic). Yeah, it takes time, but it's a good way to reduce your carbs intake. i.e. if you don't bake it, you can't eat it.

Counterpoint to the carb reduction is fresh baked bread is so delicious and scaling bread recipes is easy so you end up eating twice as much bread compared to store bought.

Yeah, my wife bakes bread and it's usually just her and I. Can't leave that bread overnight, so I end up eating half a loaf of bread instead of the two slices of store bought bread that I usually have each day.

The freezer is you're savior! :)

Each bread I bake is cut in half (even before I taste it) and put in the freezer for next soup time.

> Can't leave that bread overnight

Is that a climate thing? In my (temperate) experience, bread lasts for several days, even in summer.

The time ROI of using a bread-making machine and the 3 or so ingredients placed in it could be positive when compared to the trip to the grocery store.

There's bakeries with fresh baked bread all over the place in m y area, but most people would rather just get their bread with the rest of their groceries from the grocery store, where of course they're going to add preservatives. For those that want fresh baked, it's available, just not as convenient.

In many places it’s either not an option or not one that you’re going to find almost anywhere most people shop. As far as I know in my city the only place to find real bread is Whole Foods (where the inventory is limited and inconsistent) or the one independent bakery that happens to sell sliced bread. And it’s a Japanese bakery, so I would guess almost nobody would even think to look there. Almost every other bakery is selling bullshit like cupcakes.

It also costs $5+ a loaf when you can get the cheap stuff for $1-$2, so a lot of people just wouldn’t spend the money anyways because they don’t know or care about the difference.

Supermarket bread is the norm, good bread is the exception. I live in downtown Toronto and I have to go out of my way to find good bread, and unprocessed whole grain bread is particularly difficult to procure.

"that goes stale when you'd expect it". Super dumb question, but would fresh baked bread placed in the freezer last a few weeks ? I don't buy fresh baked out of concern most of it will get thrown away.

Fresh (& commercial ultra-processed) baked bread can be frozen. You will lose the crunch of the crust, but freezing will prolong the shelf life.

Additionally, you can buy sourdough, which tend to have longer shelf life then yeast breads.

I only eat homemade bread. I slice unused bread and put in the freezer after a day or two. Thaw it out with a toaster. It will easily keep a few weeks.

Yes. My family bakes our own bread, and we freeze it all the time. Also, rolls seem to take less skill and attention than loaves, and are super convenient to freeze.

There's a national brand that makes fresh artisan style bread and then most even slightly upscale grocers will have a couple types in their inside bakery.

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