Cooking a stew of lentils or any other legumes is very easy and does not consume that much time either, and you can cook for 3 days easily.
Why are people not doing this?
In many cultures, men traditionally didn't know how to cook. It was not their job. That wasn't a problem, as long as men lived with their parents or in an institutional setting, until they got married. But in a modern, more individualist culture, such attitudes are holding men back.
It's far cheaper to 1) buy unprocessed foods at the grocery store, 2) spend $20 a few times for cookware that will last plenty long enough, and 3) cook for 20min a day or do more preparation on the weekend. It doesn't require becoming a professional chef or buying appliances.
I think the main problem is that fast food is addictive and those who are vulnerable to that tend to make excuses for why they can't stop.
If you do not have the money to order on the daily, then you either cook or someone else has to do the cooking.
If there is one thing I know for sure is that there is very little benefits in cooking, apart from the pleasure of eating something good. Even if you want to eat healthy there are plenty of ways that require very little cooking. The only problem is how much money you can throw at the problem, the easier it is the more expensive it will be. Sometimes you don't even have a choice because of time constraints (people who do 2 hours commute everyday just can't allocate time to that).
You seem to take the ability of people to cook for granted. I don't think it is automatic anymore. Generational transmission of some skills has ceased.
Jamie Oliver famously asked British school kids to name objects such as an apple, a potato or a cucumber, and plenty of them did not know. They just stared at the raw vegetables/fruits, baffled.
And as of now, you cannot simply vibe-cook using AI. You actually need to know some stuff, like what is what, how to use utensils, how to treat hot objects, what is too much gas and what not enough etc.
> Jamie Oliver famously asked British school kids to name objects such as an apple, a potato or a cucumber, and plenty of them did not know
Okay, the situation really is horrible then, wow.
More than a billion people have successfully learned to speak Chinese, some of them very stupid. Yet here I am, struggling to remember the hanzi and the tones.
Comparing learning a language to watching a video or reading a recipe and spending a few weeks adding some oil and spices in a pot or pan is ridiculous.
Well, the Neanderthals cooked, so it is not exactly a rocket engineering skill ... but it is probably acquired better from other people than alone, and equipment matters as well.
If you learn to cook from your mother in a well-equipped kitchen, you will probably enjoy the process a lot more than alone with Youtube in a cheaply rented flat with one pot, one dull knife and two dented plastic plates. And if people don't enjoy some learning process, they are much more likely to drop out and resign. Especially if fast food alternatives lurk at them from their smartphones.
I have never learned to cook from anyone. I just read the recipes and/or watch some videos and that is literally it. My kitchen is not as equipped as it is in rich households.
Ordering food is ideal, but super expensive, so I personally cannot afford to do that.
We had a weird assortment of equipment as well, some dating back to Masaryk, but it was usually durable and reliable. That is why we also kept it; late stage Communism was terrible at producing durable consumer goods, while old stuff lasted for decades.
Outside baking, that's basically all you need, at least if you're alone. Cooking for two or especially a family is when you need more equipment as time savers and for variability, e.g. mandolin, pressure cooker, etc.
I'd venture to say this is how many people have learned to cook, and even how many avid cookers continue to cook.
If you're starting out, canned food and pasta is definitely your friend, not to mention cheap. You can start to learn to cook by boiling a pot of water for your instant Ramen, and frying an egg to toss into the bowl. Or just soft boil an egg in the boiling water and set side before doing the Ramen in the same water. Building meals around something packaged and precooked is useful and can help save money (outside beans and rice, fresh ingredients are sadly often more expensive than what you can cobble together from pantry staples).
Cooking (provided you have access to some simple cookware) is literally printing out the recipe and FOLLOWING THE DAMN INSTRUCTIONS. If that’s beyond someone’s abilities then I weep for the general state of mankind.
If someone can afford fast food, they can afford enough utensils or equipments, too.
As I said, I come from a poor family and we only went to the McDonalds to get fast food when I was sick (because I craved it), so very rarely. Fast food was for special occasions due to its high price as opposed to cooking at home, as a poor family.
I am one of those people and I am arguing in good faith. I have seen it with my own eyes.
It is not "just" skills or "just" kitchen or "just" utensils or "just" unfamiliarity with the basics or "just" being tired after getting home late (poor people often work bad schedules). It is a bit of everything, and the resulting complex is hard to disentangle.
On a similar note, have you never seen, e.g., obese people who never exercise? It is again a bit of everything. They are not used to it, they feel bad when starting, they can easily overdo it, they feel ashamed going into a gym etc. All this summed together results in avoidant behavior, even though no single reason dominates it.
Yes, all those obstacles can be overcome, but we shouldn't expect everyone to just simply leap over them. All humans aren't built this way. If they were, humanity as a whole would look a lot different than it does.
My point was that if a person learns to cook early in life, they will consider it more natural and most of those obstacles will be easier to overcome for them. They will have all the circuits wired in, so to say.
I have a similar experience when exercising. I was never obese, but my mother never exercised. Simply never. (Ironically, at 74, she is in perfect health.) And thus, I didn't understand how exercise even makes sense as a kid. I had to learn it for years. It is hard to describe how challenging is it to adjust your mindset and rhythm of life to something that was completely alien to you in your first 20 years of life, especially if that activity is optional and there is no external pressure. You can do it, but various relapses and "falling off the wagon" are way more frequent than if that activity is second nature to you.
If we want to fix things on societal level, we must be realistic. Recipes like "just do X", where X is something nontrivial, feel good and easy (especially to doers of X), but they don't have a good track record in actually achieving society-wide changes. They work for some individuals, but they have a scaling problem.
I have been engaging in this thread for a day now and harvesting downvotes. I would certainly love to see some competing theories and dig into them instead.
I mean, if you don't understand how badly the US educational system is failing people then I don't know what you expect. There are a large amount and growing amount of people that are barely literate and can only follow basic instructions. This is by design because we're starving our educational systems and creating a two-tiered society where people either receive private education or no education at all. It should come at zero surprise that people can't cook because they were never taught how to cook nor how to even learn and integrate that knowledge.
My parents for example were fishermen, neither of them are functionally able to cook anything beyond tossing some meat in a crockpot and some rice in a rice cooker. Everything I know about cooking was shit I had to pick up on my own and it's only because I'm both literate and computer savvy that I can grasp and integrate these things smoothly.
Some people get out of school not being able to read and write, at least to any meaningful degree. The fact that some people get out of school not being able to cook thus shouldn't be surprising.
Additionally, is it not common knowledge the US education system is bad?
The 'meaningful' part of my original comment is carrying a lot of weight there. Most people are literate in the literal sense of that word, but I went to class with people who have not read a written work longer than five pages sine they went out of school, and I would not trust them to read an even vaguely complicated instruction manual without me explaining something to them. They are not literate in any meaningful sense of that word. They barely knew how to read when we took our final exams, but they did pass, since no-one wants to deal with the trouble of actually teaching them now. They're good people. The schools just failed them.
I could barely write when I got out school, in the sense that I couldn't read my own handwriting. I had to be taught anew when I learned a language that uses a different script, and that practice made my normal handwriting 10 times better.
Basic cooking is profoundly easy, and for most it's instinctive, after all one has to eat, so there's incentive. In fact I have never knowing met anyone who couldn't prepare a basic meal that would not at least sustain them and other members of a family. It's true I've met people whose food preparation leaves much to be desired and I'd prefer to avoid their cooking but the food they prepared was definitely edible.
"You seem to take the ability of people to cook for granted."
Right, I've lived my whole life in a world where everyone I know well takes one's ability to prepare a basic meal for granted, it's something that's not even contemplated it's so elementary. In fact, when reading your comment my initial reaction was as this isn't April 1st he must be winding us up for the sake of argument.
If what what you say is true and there are significant numbers of people who can't cook then to me this is a startling revelation. Similarly, I'd not previously heard of Jamie Oliver's questioning of school kids and revealing their ignorance of food types but that's not surprising given that cooking programs bore me to tears. That said, the first thing I'd no doubt agree with Oliver about is that this ignorance is truly shocking, and second we'd be questioning how did we arrive at this disgraceful situation when it would have been inconceivable several generations ago.
How can someone not pick up the basics of food preparation after seeing it done several times? Even if like me one doesn't like cooking, at three meals a day it's hard to completely avoid watching those who are preparing one's food—so the normal human gets lots of experience even if they only see food preparation infrequently.
Even with my disinterest in cooking I picked the skill up by simply being around the kitchen at meal times. By age 10 I could easily prepare a decent meal, that's just how it was for the average person.
Even the simpler stuff like lentils have at least twice the cooking time of regular pasta (20-30 min at least) unless you like eating stuff hard as rocks.
On top of that; it isn't very good as is and need quite a lot of skill to taste great. The usual way to make it taste good, is to use animal fats/meats and various vegetables broths/sauces. It's a very time consuming process and very often quite expensive as well because the raw ingredients are not necessarily cheap.
So basically what happens is that either you are poor enough that one person in the household is basically dedicated to this task (especially if it's a large family) or both are working, most likely middle class, and then there is very little time to do that sort of cooking without completely destroying the possibility of having a life.
Normal food behavior is to eat until satiated. We've pretended it's normal to gorge yourself at McDonald's and such because saying otherwise makes some people feel bad.
People adopting normal food behavior aren't going to be drawn to eating at such a restaurant. The food that's been mentioned is trivial to make at home and requires less time than going out.
In places where there's enough mass of people to actually make this worthwhile (mainly Asia), there's tons of options, but no large ones.
There's a bougie breakfast/lunch place near me like that and it's wildly successful, seems like every year they open another location.
The joke conspiracy theory in my office is that the menu is made by a world class french chef who's mocking the median target/whole foods shopper who is the customer by making stuff that's objectively garbage and incompatible with the fundamentals of cooking and papering over it with sheer skill.
"haha ze dumb white wimmen want kale, I put kale in ze mac and cheese and I make them like it"
"Quinoa is trendy you say? I put quinoa in your motherfucking eggs".
Obviously I'm leaving out details but those are actual examples of combinations. Now the food doesn't suck per say, but it ain't great either. And yet the place is wildly successful.
Personally I would not call it a waste of 2 hours.
Either way, if you can afford it, then Godspeed. :D
I definitely do not have 1000 USD per week for food. I do not even have 100 USD per week for food.
But of course the math is different for everyone. Some people love to cook and some hate it. Some people like things that are fairly hard to cook (Korean, Japanese, Indian.) Some people need a different dinner each night and some are happy eating a giant pot of one bulk-cooked thing across days or weeks. Personally, I occasionally cook elaborate dinners, but for weeknights I find that a rice cooker plus frozen vegetables is a nice middle ground. Variety, hot fresh food, nutritious, and also very little time required. That, and eating with friends and family and trading off cooking.
One of the calculations in there is the dinner for 4 section of xkcd 980 https://xkcd.com/980/huge/#x=-2003&y=-1465&z=6
While homemade rice and pinto beans is $9.26 ... when you add in the time for shopping, travel, prep, and cleanup it has an it has an effective cost of $41.80
If you take off the cost of going to groceries or that someone can spend the time to cook rather than work (or relax), then that $9.26 is the price you see.
Similarly, homemade chicken dinner is $13.78 ... or $46.32 with additional costs of living factored in.
McDonald's is $27.89 (in 2011... it's more now ... but then all the above numbers are too)... but the total cost is $36.03.
If you could get paid $16.27 rather than doing grocery shopping and the time spent cooking or cleaning then it is cheaper to eat at McDonald's than to have a home cooked meal.
For many people, cooking (and cleaning) is only economical if the time spent doing it can be completely discounted. If I have to spend 30 minutes in front of the stove not do other things, or 5-10 minutes cleaning up afterwards, that's time not doing other things that I'd enjoy. For families with kids, that sometimes means that young children are left unattended for an hour (not always viable). Getting fast food, on the other hand is has no cooking or time spent cleaning and furthermore has a good chance of having something that the kids want to eat.
"Just learn to cook" isn't always an option for every household.
Eating out for every meal isn't $1000 per week. If I went to the local diner, that would be about $200 / person / week. If I got pizza every day that would be down to about $100 / person / week.
At Whole Foods prices, $4.29 gets you 8000 calories of rice. Beans are more expensive per calorie but still very cheap. $9 would get you more beans and rice than a family of four could eat in an entire day.
Bought in bulk its even cheaper.
In the past couple of years there's now a toll option for some HOV lanes, which is how it should be. He's generally a very conscientious person, but time is money, particularly so when you're well remunerated.
I mean, you could also live closer to the office