While true, there are many people who cannot do this because they work 16+ hours per day. And if they have children it is even more difficult.
To me, this points to the fact people in the US are not being paid a "living" wage. I even heard Walmart will help new employees apply for food stamps, that is sick because we are subsidizing the owners of Walmart and their stockholders.
Whenever I read these comments I feel like people either grew up in an alternate reality than I did, or they get their perception of poor people from the hyperbole on Reddit.
People who grew up in poverty and work two full time jobs aren’t the ones feeding their families with fast food for 2-3 meals per day. They’re the ones who are experts at cheap cooking, crockpot meals, and cheap meals at home.
Reading comments like this that hit a checklist of cliche bullet points (being “forced” to feed your family with fast food, parent who works 16+ hour days, using Walmart as the canonical American job, mentioning the anecdote about Walmart instructing people about how to apply for assistance) I suspect the experience is more of a conglomeration of talking points from politicians and Reddit rather than real experience.
Who is waiting while food cooks? When I cook I am attending to the food the entire time. Perhaps if you are a heavy oven user you get time to do other things, but otherwise, no.
And laundry lol. To barely keep up with the laundry, I have to do a load a day and the on the weekend I do several loads. It wasn't like this before I had a kid, but everything grt dirt faster and more often with a child around.
Being a parent who works is _exhausting_. You're always weighing money vs time investment. In many cases it's just easier to buy food you don't have to make or think about then have to do the whole rigamole of planning and buying groceries and then cooking the food yourself. If you're like me and you order a head via an app, you don't even have to wait the few minutes fast food takes. It's right there for you and you carry on your way. I can now spend my mental energy on something else.
Long long ago I had a neighbour who cooked ONE day per month and froze everything. He printed out a menu card for himself with 3 and 4 course meals. He used a table cloth with the fine silver utensils and fancy plates. He would sit himself down, look at the menu, pick something then move the food from the freezer to the microwave. It looked like a high end restaurant. His argument was that he hated cooking and didn't want to spend any time on it.
The house had a shared kitchen. The one day he cooked was hilarious. He cooked for 40-50 people (inc guests), made various kinds of soup, all kinds of meat, pastas, curries, deserts etc
He one time pondered buying a rice cooker to make better rice but decided it was to much like cooking.
The food went in plastic bags in containers, when frozen he would pull it out of the container to save space and avoid having to wash the containers.
I also know people who eat together. They have no further relationship. They take turns cooking. Small groups like 3 or 4 but also larger ones like 6 or 8 people. You do need space for that ofc.
If you really attend to the food for an hour it is probably a more nutritious and more sophisticated meal than the fast food? How much money are you saving in that hour?
Parenting is just hard work. I'm afraid it includes teaching how to cook.
Nothing wrong with eating later, in fact we prefer it because fast food is kinda crap and I don’t really like them eating processed foods. But it definitely saves time, not to mention on the cleanup side too.
And no, can’t really multitask during the weekdays because the timing is so tight. I can do dishes as I go but that’s the limit because the kids start screaming at each other that their feet are touching or whatever the drama of the day is…
Also my kids are picky eaters (autism) so it's not like we only have to make one delicious and nutritious meal for everybody. It's more like two or three different meals, or my wife and I have to settle for buttered noodles or what have you. Eating out lets us get a different meal for each person and there's still a chance of the adults being able to eat something delicious and/or nutritious. Or we can get take-out for the kids and make our own dinner or vice-versa.
2. let's say these 16+ hours workers were the only ones justified eating ready meals, would the industry survive?
The solution would be something like wage crush from the top. The mass of this change wouldn't come from billionaires or the 1%, they are a drop in the bucket compared to the 50-90%.
There are tons of "average" people who got absolutely stacked in the last 5 years. Especially here on HN. They won't raise their hand, it's pretty taboo in this environment, but consumer spending and unrelenting housing prices make it very clear which social classes are fucked and which ones are richer than ever. And it's not billionaires and everyone else.
Is this true? I have repeatedly come across people saying tipping in North America is insane since in most of the rest of the world it isn’t required because restaurants pay living wages to start, and the pricing is on par or less than in North America.
But anything along these lines is still relatively expensive.
What you describe is one of my concerns with UBI, but the devil is very much in the detail.
Granted, you can often play political games with labor, such as only raising the wages of workers in the USA, while leaving the labor making the plastic trinkets in who knows what third-world country to continue to struggle. In that sense, it doesn't necessarily happen linearly. Not really achieving the goal of a "living" wage then, though.