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Comment by ffsm8 | Hacker News Reader

As a single almost 40yo overweight man I've gotta disagree.

McDonald's doesn't taste better, it tastes worse, but what working adult has the time next to their day job to eat healthy?

You have to be either

1. Rich enough to be able to spend a premium at restaurants for most of the week

2. Be rich enough to have a partner that doesn't have to work a 40-50h work week

3. Be rich enough to have a personal cook

4. Not work and get by via other avenues.

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Well you just have to prioritize, unfortunately.

If you want to lose weight - and part of my comment was a critique on nutritional advice and dieting - or save money or just cook for the enjoyment of it you have to make time to do that.

It's not easy. I work full-time and do other things. I'm tired. I don't want to drive to the grocery store. it's Friday I want to relax, etc. and sometimes I don't cook! But it's just another life choice to make and we can be better and more consistent over time and make improvements without going straight to 0 eating out.

Unless you’re working 16h per day, every day, you have time to cook. There are many things that are very easy to cook and don’t even take that much effort, but people just refuse to learn how to use the tools they have.

All you need is an oven and some baking pans, and you can easily make a well balanced meal in less than an hour. Roasted chicken, potatoes, vegetables. Done. There’s only a little bit of prep, then it’s mostly waiting.

The biggest impact of industrialized food companies is not their poor products, it’s that they convinced everyone that cooking is too hard.

To expand on this further: You can make a well balanced meal in less than an hour. You can make 5 well balanced meals by cooking 5 times the amount and dividing it up for 15% extra time

Cooking takes hardly any time when you're smart about it

Unless you’re working 16h per day, every day, you have time to cook.

if you are single, sure. but as soon as you have family, those calculations go out the window. worse if you are a single parent. long commutes, a stressful job...

8 hours work, 8 hours sleep, 1 hour commute, 1 hour lunch, 1 hour in the morning, 1 hour spending time with my kids (means i do what they want), 1 hour TV to relax. 1 hour exercise/go for a walk. that leaves me with 2 hours for everything else. housework? shopping? keeping in touch with others? go out to meet friends/family?

i love cooking. i did it all the time before i got married. i rarely went out to dinner. but as soon as i got married i had to stop. i couldn't afford the time that i needed to dedicate to it to do it right. it's more than just the process, it's the planning, the shopping, etc.

it's not a question of time, but priorities. for most people 18 hours (sleep, work, commute, lunch) are spoken for, and everything else has to fit into the remaining 6 hours. yes, you can move things around. you have time to cook if you can delegate. that just never worked for me. at best i can delegate washing dishes and other housework.

> 1 hour spending time with my kids

Cook when you do that.

> i love cooking

This is probably the problem, you try to cook fancy stuff rather than things that are easy and fast to cook. Cooking barely takes any time if you cook easy things.

i knew someone was going to suggest to combine cooking and kids, which is why i added that parenthetical: spending time with my kids (means i do what they want) which could be playing a game with them, or some other activity. but most certainly not forcing them to hang around in the kitchen with me (unless they want cook, but then it will take even longer). besides, if i do anything else while i am cooking then i am most likely going to burn the food. it just doesn't work that way.

and no, i am not cooking fancy stuff. but i am using fresh ingredients which take more prep time and also require me to go shopping more often because you can't keep vegetables fresh for long. meat at least i can freeze.

100% agree that people should cook more.

But your example of roast chicken in under an hour is misleading since it doesnt include the time to go grocery shopping or to clean up. Add those in and your roast chicken dinner is probably taking up at least 2 hours.

You take one hour a week to go grocery shopping and then you have everything you need to stay alive for that week. Then another two hours on the weekend to cook everything and clean.

It’s really a non-negotiable activity that’s essential for life. The mental gymnastics people use to justify their bad habits is really shocking.

Completely agree. And to add on, many are complaining about not having time and working, but you're working more because you're spending more on eating out, DoorDash, etc., then your waistline expands, health problems creep in, and so on and so forth.

The American version of how we eat is abject nonsense - DoorDash expensive food that's worse than what you can cook for yourself, incredibly unhealthy, and then in between doomscrolling Elon Musk's latest Tweets and your ever expanding waste line complain that there's no time to do anything and you just can't cook because it takes "2 hours to go to the grocery store". Americans don't even go out to eat and take their time and enjoy life and the culinary arts because they're in a rush.

Unfortunately our car-only infrastructure reinforces this learned helplessness, and so we have crappy food quality, obese people and massive healthcare costs, and antisocial behavior as people spend their time terminally online.

Sorry for the rant to anyone reading. Don't take it too seriously. It just drives me crazy that we have such a great and vibrant country and we refuse to truly live in it for some god forsaken reason.

erm, where i have been living for the past 15-20 years, each large grocery run takes at least 3-4 hours. 1-2 of which are simply the time to get to the supermarket and back. and then one hour to top up every other day, mostly fresh vegetables. so in a week, shopping takes me 6 to 8 hours.

and i have no idea how i am supposed to be cooking for a whole week in two hours unless i eat the same thing every day. that doesn't sound desirable at all

People who say that they cannot cook on a 40h work week are just inefficient at cooking. It sucks to take a long time to prepare meals, but you will get faster.

When you first start cooking for yourself you'll easily double the times online recipes say. As you get better at prep and more of an understanding you'll eventually reach their times. Dishes afterwards are included in this: most recipes have downtime that you can entirely clean up during.

Yea I agree too. It really is a skill. The first few times you cook a dish you are reading a recipe maybe, oh whoops forgot to cut the celery, ugh this is stressful! but then by the end of a few attempts you start to get much better and much efficient at it.

I get that not everyone wants to cook though, but for those who do or want to eat healthier food you can do it and you WILL suck the first few times you cook anything because you're a human being and you haven't done it before.

Buy a bag of rice, a bag of frozen veggies (corn, carrots, peas, already cut up), some chicken thighs, throw it in a rice cooker, that's a meal right there, almost no effort.

Roger Ebert wrote a whole cookbook about using the rice cooker, guy loved the thing, makes for a very easy meal.

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