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Any non-wealthy single person faces an uphill battle to both 1. earn a living 2. take proper care of themselves. In the Middle Ages people invented a rather neat solution for this problem: go live together in a big building, work together, pray together, cook together and call it a monastery.

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We had other solutions for a while too: get married and have one person do the more-than-fulltime job of homemaking.

But that role disappeared because corporations needed more cheap worker-units and politicians needed more GDP, so they rode each others' coattails to eliminate that role. With each homemaker now a worker-unit, there are twice as many worker-units but employee costs are the same, household income is the same, twice as many taxes, twice as many cars, more spending, more consumption - it's a win-win for the ruling class, while family-units and non-wealthy individuals lose.

You can tell how good a job corporatists and statists did at eliminating and vilifying homemakers by observing how furiously most moderns rebuke even the mere suggestion that the role was A Good Thing.

> You can tell how good a job corporatists and statists did at eliminating homemaker by observing how most moderns fruoously rebuke even the mere suggestion that the role was A Good Thing.

Indeed. Ironically, the effect is to be expected, and in every other situation people would call it obvious. Give everyone $1k in unconditional basic income? Obviously, the market will quickly readjust prices to consume surplus income. But then, get people to run two-income households, and be surprised the prices readjusted so that single-income household is no longer a possibility?

The sci-fi story solution I've come up with is we put everyone into a lottery. Everyone draws a number. Evens get their salary doubled, odds are no longer allowed to work. Everyone find a partner.

Evens will pair up with evens to quadruple their unit income (why attach yourself to a deadweight odd?), with odds becoming a shunned caste largely doomed to death.

>and have one person do the more-than-fulltime job of homemaking.

After many years of denying this would be better for us, my wife and I have recently decided that one of us (maybe her, probably me) will focus full-time on the kids and house. A big shift after 20 years of working, but we’re looking forward to it.

> We had other solutions for a while too[...]

There were more solutions besides monasteries and marriage. My grandparents, living in a small town in a rural area of Austria maybe 50 years ago, had a large family. That town's teacher was single, and it simply wouldn't have been economical for her to do her own cooking, so she had a deal whereby she paid my grandparents so she could come over every day to have dinner with the family. This arrangement was so common that there was even a word for it ("Kostgänger").

I'm surprised that there isn't a sharing economy startup yet, trying to reinvent the concept. -- "Uber for warm meals". Or at least I'm not aware of one. It probably exists.

On another note: The nuclear family household with one dedicated homemaker was historically a relatively short-lived concept. Prior to that, we tended to have extended families sharing a household, and the significant amount of work involved in food preparation was surely one of the drivers of that.

Regulations around selling food are far more brutal than "ride sharing". It varies by state in the US, but generally speaking unless you keep your income below certain dollar amounts and stick to things like jam and pickles, you need to operate out of a commercially licensed and inspected kitchen.

Far better to do as hoc, personal arrangements than try to scale it into a fully fledged market.

I just got back from a week at a hiking camp that generally changes locations each year. I was talking to the head cook and she was saying some locations are more stringent than others but generally there's at least a cursory inspection required.

This is somewhat of a plot component in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, set in New York in 1790. Ichabod Crane is a schoolteacher, and he is sustained by food and lodging from the villagers.

This comment reminded me to thank my wife for doing the hard work of being a homemaker.

>have one person do the more-than-fulltime job of homemaking.

This was almost always the woman.

>disappeared because corporations needed

Also because women did not like the absolute dedication of their lives to homemaking as a default. They wanted the freedom to join the paying workforce, and wanted equal pay for their work (still waiting on that).

There's some truth in your comment, but it glosses over the very real problems that came with the gender roles and subsequent power structures of that time.

These power structures have existed for millennia, so this abstracted idea that women wanting to step out of their traditional gender roles ONLY in the last century is a bit arbitrary.

It makes much more sense that because the ruling class wanted a bigger work force they sanctioned for (or at the very least turn a blind eye) women’s role in the work force.

Do we have examples of the 1970s women's lib movement (for one example) receiving broad financial, social, and political support from large corporations across multiple industries?

Exactly two millennia. The role of housewife didn’t really exist until the 1820s, and even then it was more of an upper-middle class thing and a distinctly American concept. It didn’t even really take off until the industrial revolution when factory jobs became more mainstream.

It was also created by corporations, largely to sell magazines, cookbooks, and home appliances.

Everywhere else in the world, especially outside of cities, the labor of the home was evenly divided because everyone in the family had jobs.

That’s two centuries, not millennia.

More obvious explanation is that the movement really took off after the World Wars, as there was a huge labor shortage on the market to be covered, in the form of a whole generation of young men who never came back from the meat grinder.

And many women spent WWII in factory jobs or even more directly combat-related roles especially in Europe. (Just finished reading a book that mentioned how Mary Churchill--daughter of that Churchill--ended up commanding an AA battery.)

While, of course, the period after is probably widely seen as classic white picket fence suburbia, the WWII experience couldn't have helped but set some changes, however slow, in motion.

At the same time, let's not discount the fact that it's made the single-earner family increasingly impossible to sustain for younger families. I'm sure I'm not the only heterosexual man who would be grateful if he could quit his day job and take care of the home while his spouse went out and made the money.

The problem was that which of those two roles you played was assigned at birth, and if you didn’t want the homemaker role, well too bad, you can’t have a bank account and most employers won’t hire you. That didn’t change in the US until the 1960s.

If you were a gay woman, you were forced to be a homemaker for a man you didn’t love because it was the only way to even access an income.

Black women could get jobs… as homemakers for rich white families where the wife either didn’t want to do the work or couldn’t keep up with the mountain of labor dumped on her. But they were paid a fraction what a white man could earn.

If you were a man who wanted to be a homemaker, literally everyone looked down on you and many institutions considered you a drain on society. This attitude still persists to this day.

But sure, corporations are why women now exist in the workforce.

House husband households, where the man is the homemaker, and the woman (in the case of a heterosexual relationship) is the high powered lawyer/c-suite exec/other highly paid professional are on the rise. Attitudes that the man in this case is a "drain on society" are slowly changing.

Funny how that works.

I've known a few couples where that was the case. They had maybe a couple young kids and the wife made very big bucks. You could hire a nanny but, if the husband wasn't especially passionate about his work and was happy to stay home, it's not the worst system one could imagine.

> The problem was that which of those two roles you played was assigned at birth, and if you didn’t want the homemaker role, well too bad, you can’t have a bank account and most employers won’t hire you. That didn’t change in the US until the 1960s.

The point is that this didn't change into a choice. It changed into everyone being assigned the role of a laborer at birth - instead of reality where anyone can get a job, we have a reality where everyone has to get a job.

Want to be a homemaker? Well, too bad, that's generally not an available role anymore - unless you find someone with above-average income (or accumulated wealth) to fund your stay-at-home work. Man or woman, gay or straight, your only role is now to make money on the market. All the usual homemaker responsibilities? Why, those are all services now, which you can pay for out of your salary.

More than full-time? Ha, I could manage three households and still have time left over compared to a 40h wage job. I doubt the average person spends more than 2h/day on housekeeping. My mother certainly didn't when I was a child.

I think the home-maker role would be a better thing if it hadn't been largely determined by one's gender.

How so? As a single person, one of my best purchases was an instant-pot type appliance (not the actual one, but one probably inspired by it, with less control over the temperature and especially the pressure release).

In less than one hour from start to finish, I can chop the vegetables, cook, clean the kitchen utensils while cooking, move the finished food into a big container for storage (or one per serving if you have a big fridge and enough containers) and clean the cooker. The longest part of all this is waiting for the food to cool down before putting it in the fridge. With the size of my cooker, I could prepare enough food to eat 5 to 7 times. The longest recipe I know has me cook dry beans for half an hour, and cook rice afterward. This could probably be improved by pre-soaking the beans.

Except when I fail for some reason, which is extremely rare, the food is incomparably better tasting and healthier, and also quite cheaper, than whatever I can get when at work outside of restaurants (which is even pricier, and not necessarily healthier). This allows me to avoid all the mystery sauces they put in, probably laden with vegetable oils and sugar, that make me hungry two hours later.

Can you mention this appliance by name? Also, what are some fun recipes?

I got the actual Instant Pot. This is my second actually, I got the one that also does air frying.

It's a great purchase. Get some cheap protein that needs to cook for long, get some vegetables, brown the protein a bit (can be done in the Instant Pot), add chopped vegetables, salt, spices, and a little water; pressure cook for 1 hour. Shorter version: add meat, add vegs, add water, turn on.

You can get fancier as you learn, but stews are my favourite food because they require cheap ingredients, and with the instant pot I don't even need to take care of it while it cooks. Toss everything together and turn the thing on. It has a timer and a keep warm function, so you can literally fill it in the morning, and come back from work to a warm pot of stew.

My favorite recipe is chilli con carne, which is little more than minced beef with onions peppers and beans in tomato sauce. Stews, chilli and random salads are 90% of my diet.

> You can get fancier as you learn, but stews are my favourite food because they require cheap ingredients, and with the instant pot I don't even need to take care of it while it cooks. Toss everything together and turn the thing on. It has a timer and a keep warm function, so you can literally fill it in the morning, and come back from work to a warm pot of stew.

This is the main issue I have with my model: it won't let you stew for more than 30 minutes at a time. It's a huge PITA to come back to it and start it again, since you can't just go out and about your business and leave it to do its thing.

30 minutes is not very useful. The good thing about pressure cooking is 1 hour is more or less equivalent to 2.5 hours in a regular stove.

Cook a stew for 2 hours in a pressure cooker and even the toughest meat will melt like butter in your mouth.

I don't know what the limit is on pressure-cooking, the 30 minutes is for non-pressured "slow cook" mode. It won't engage the "pressure-cooking" mode if the lid is not secured in place. I never needed to pressure-cook for more than 30 minutes at a time, though. The longest recipe I had was, IIRC, 30 + 15 minutes. The recipe said to put dry beans in, pressure-cook for 30 minutes, release pressure, add sausage, cook for 15 more minutes.

Instant Pot is great while it lasts. I had one die on me (the electronics), and after asking for photo evidence they denied warranty coverage. A year later they went bankrupt.

There are traditional pressure cookers too. I got one as a Christmas present that I use now and then but I admit I probably don't use it as casually as I would an instant pot. (I also have an old slow cooker I use in the same non-casual way.)

It's a Moulinex Cookeo (French brand). They have multiple varieties, I'd skip the ones with a phone connection and pretending to do 500 recipes, and go for the basic one. It's a big bowl that gets hot. That's it. I'm not convinced this is fundamentally better than a random old-school pressure cooker, but in my case, the apartment I was renting at the time had a shitty electrical stove, so it helped a lot. The self-timer is also nice.

I usually save recipes on my phone, editing out the fluff and keeping the ingredients and directions, so I don't have links for them anymore.

My favorite recipe is the "picadillo", and this is the actual recipe: https://www.skinnytaste.com/instant-pot-picadillo/

The recipe says "serve over rice". In my case, the picadillo tends to have a lot of sauce. What I like doing is cooking the right amount of rice for the whole batch, then dumping it with the rest of the dish. It'll soak up most of the sauce. The rice may not end up what people typically call "well-cooked rice", but I don't care and actually prefer it this way. You can also replace the rice with a quinoa mix. Or do both rice + quinoa, but this is a pain because their cooking times are different. It goes great with pasta, too. Also, as filling for tortillas, but you have to manage the sauce, or it's annoying to eat. In all cases, adding some grated cheese is great, but not necessary.

I also do a pasta one. I think this is the recipe: https://eatinginaninstant.com/instant-pot-ground-beef-pasta/ Bonus points for not requiring to cook the pasta separately.

Can't find the link to the one with the beans, but here's one which looks so good I might give it a try: https://www.simplyhappyfoodie.com/instant-pot-red-beans-rice...

I've initially found those randomly searching for "instant pot recipe" on google. Some general recommendations: don't be afraid to dump in a lot of vegetables. If the recipe calls for "half an onion" or "small onion" and you only have big ones and nothing to do with the remaining half, put it all in. Same for peppers and tomatos. If it asks for tomato sauce and you only have big containers (they tend to be cheaper), dump it all in and just cook for a bit longer with the top off. Also works if the recipe calls for tomato paste, it's sometimes cheaper to make your own from tomato sauce.

Generally speaking, you don't have to follow recipes to a T. What I like to say is that "given what you put in, it's hard to get something bad out". The worst that happened to me was when I dropped too many peppercorns in. The taste was still great, but it was a PITA to fish them out one by one.

It’s a culture problem, not an economic one. Cooking delicious dirt-cheap meals is easy, and doesn’t take an unreasonable amount of time out of your day. We’ve just had a few generations of western parents not teaching their children to cook anything. So when those people realise they have to figure out how to feed themselves, they simply don’t know any reasonable ways to do it, even though plenty exist.

> Cooking delicious dirt-cheap meals is easy, and doesn’t take an unreasonable amount of time out of your day.

...depends on what you find "unreasonable". The internet is full of delicious "10 minute" recipes or "30 minute" recipes or whatever, but that doesn't count the amount of time you spend at the grocery store, cleaning your kitchen, washing your kitchen towels, (un)loading your dishwasher, etc.

The reality for me is that I spend maybe 10 hours each weekend shopping for groceries and pre-preparing things that I need to have on hand in the freezer/fridge to even be able to cut the workload to only an hour on a weekday. This adds up to 15 hours a week, so it's maybe half the hours I spend each week being truly productive at work. By some measure, that's actually a lot.

And I don't do it because I enjoy doing it. I do it, because I'm forced to. And I don't think my expectations are unreasonably high either: Not living in a major city and spending a ton of money on eating out, and not wanting to fill my body with additives from processed foods is basically what's forcing me.

> And I don't do it because I enjoy doing it. I do it, because I'm forced to

You sound like exactly the sort of person I’m talking about. I’d spend a maximum of 2 hours per week grocery shopping, and I can make dinner at a couple of dollars per portion in 15-30 mins with no prep. I’m not sure what anybody could be forcing you to spend 15 hours per week doing.

I think you will find an extreme range in mastery in the kitchen, just like you will find it in programming, blacksmithing, construction, plumbing, or literally anything else.

In most cases, the master craftsman is orders of magnitude more efficient than the apprentice. Solving problems without any tools. Solving two or more problems at the same time (hint, hint). Etc.

The best way to approach this discussion is to respect it as a skill issue and come to terms with that reality. I think we could find a lot of constructive advice to share in this environment.

Attitude also helps. If you have the right mindset, it is a lot easier to overcome these concerns. If I really want to keep eating home-cooked meals and enjoying all of the benefits that go along with it, I would absolutely find a way to optimize these activities. At some level, you have to want it. No one is going to hand you the convenience being advertised throughout this thread. For example, I get my ass out of bed at 530AM and arrive at the grocery store as they are opening so that I can avoid crowds and get in/out in <10 minutes. I can literally go from home->store->home in ~25 minutes, but only if I do it at the right time of day. If I wait to go when everyone else does, it will take at least an hour.

I'm still not convinced that parent commenter and I are solving for the same problem, and am not quite ready to chalk it up to differing levels of skill, but it's not really a discussion I particularly want to go into any deeper either.

When I was a student, my skill level was certainly several orders of magnitude below what it is today, and I certainly spent a lot less time on food preparation. The difference is that back then I was filling my body with crap, which my body now no longer takes, approaching 40. I think, that has a lot more to do with it. Also, if, for example, you have children, you wouldn't feed them crap either. It's one thing to decide for yourself that you're going to live off of ramen, when you're a student. It's quite another to decide that you're going to feed your loved ones that way.

I don’t think skill has much to do with it either, but I’d be surprised if we were solving substantially different problems. I’m also approaching 40, and I eat a very healthy diet. Other than the occasional protein bar, yogurt is about the most highly processed food I eat. Most of my diet is fresh vegetables and staples like rice and legumes.

I would guess that the reason that I seem to spend about a third of the time cooking and preparing meals as you do is because I’m taking a more simple approach than you are. Unless you have some especially specific dietary requirements, but then that would hardly be relevant to a general discussion about the cost and time burden of preparing food.

Tooling and space makes a massive difference. While it's true that a master could build/cook something amazing with subpar tooling, efficiency goes down significantly.

I wouldn’t say it’s significant. Good tools can make your life easier, but you reach diminishing returns very quickly. I used rather crappy kitchen tools for probably my first 10 years of home cooking, and didn’t have any big increase in productivity when I started spending more money on them, and wasn’t held back by them at any point prior to that. I got a decent boost from buying a nice stand mixer, but I only use that for cakes and leavened bread, which I don’t cook that much of.

Then guilt trip others to donate to you money and their inheritance and end up filthy rich... Still doing the same...

Kinda weird end result... Who did profit anyway, apart from upper management.

Sure such systems tend to end up getting corrupt if they amass too much power. That was not my point. I guess my point was that given the bleak state of today's social landscape, I wonder if there's opportunity for some kind of renaissance of communal living, in one form or another. And maybe these monasteries didn't only exist because of fervent religiosity but also as a practical way for single men and women to have a better life.

"I wonder if there's opportunity for some kind of renaissance of communal living, in one form or another."

Sure and it is happening since a while, take a look here for example:

https://www.ic.org/

So far most of the projects are rather in dreamland than in reality, but some are well established and working.

edit: you will also find actual monasterys there if that is your thing

Very interesting - hadn't come across this before, thanks!

You might be confusing "monastery" with "church."

EDIT: damn, I stand corrected!

Not really, quite many monasteries themselves ended up very wealthy. Though they could have acted as proxies by churches. But did not mean they did not hold land what was the wealth back then. And did not have to divide it as inheritance had to.

"An English medieval proverb said that if the abbot of Glastonbury married the abbess of Shaftesbury, their heir would have more land than the king of England."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_monasteries

> You might be confusing "monastery" with "church."

Many religions besides the catholicism have monasteries, and exploit the same social loophole. Countless Buddhist monasteries also operate as a spa hotel of sorts.

It's all just one giant pyramid scheme anyway...

https://youtu.be/z-iWe4qXUD8?t=7s

Funny how "Holy Grail" is woven through with it ... so many scenes of "kissing up and kicking down":

And how'd you get that, eh? By exploiting the workers! By 'angin on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic and social differences... (just as apt / relevant for the above linked scene)

And, as has been proven repeatedly EVERY SINGLE time it is tested, what "trickles down" ain't "wealth".

What a racket this whole universe is! This God fella's got some 'splainin to do... XD

If you think monasteries were a solution thought up by poor people to be less poor, then I don't think you know much about the history of monasteries.

Not that I'm an expert either, but from what little I gathered monks were relatively privileged people.

The fourth son of the landed gentry...

Nowadays you can join a commune, shared appartment (Wohngemeinschaft) or multi-generation home.

...live together in a big building, work together, pray together, ~~cook~~ eat together...

What, kinda like this?

https://youtu.be/EqTyZoupc1w

... monastery.

Ooh. Very nice, eh? Do I get to take a turn as a "sort of executive officer for the week"?

https://youtu.be/t2c-X8HiBng?t=41s

More seriously, where do I sign up? ... The older I get, the more I think those monks were / are onto something...

monasteries were already at least a millennium old when the middle ages started, maybe several millennia old; a pilgrimage to a monastery is central to the plot of the ramayana, which depicted its events as impossibly ancient when it was written, at least 900 years before the middle ages. in particular, the kingdom where it began did historically exist but was conquered 1000 years before the middle ages; the ramayana doesn't bother to mention the kingdom that conquered it

all of these events predate the wide adoption of writing in the region, which makes it hard to tell how old the traditions described in the oldest sources are, though vedic scholars make arguments from internal features of the text

also it is common into deep prehistory for non-wealthy people to live with their parents as long as they are single; that's what most people do here, for example. no monastery needed

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