5 ms·

It is because in the US, it seems that people don't have enough time to do all the things they want to do in a day. Most of them eat, drink, put their make, etc

by jister 17y ago

It is because in the US, it seems that people don't have enough time to do all the things they want to do in a day. Most of them eat, drink, put their make, etc etc on the way to work. This is just an observation though. Relax anyone?

Mz 17y ago
Your remark reminds me of the book Timelock: How Life Got So Hectic and What You Can Do About It http://www.amazon.com/Timelock-Life-Hectic-What-About/dp/0060165766/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1270380300&sr=1-3 http://www.amazon.com/Timelock-Life-Hectic-What-About/dp/006... Though I would guess that there are other factors as well, such as the very high divorce rate here and general breakdown of family, plus our car-centric lifestyles which have us spending excessive amounts of time driving around, thus fostering the drive-through food mentality (which means even when you get home, you want it in 2 minutes, thus microwave meals). Cooking from scratch is time consuming. It's easier to develop those skills if you have the traditional nuclear family thing going where one person is the primary cook and it's easier to come up with the time when you don't spend an hour or more every day just driving to and from work. (Generally speaking, even if your commute takes just as much time, taking the bus/train takes less mental and physical energy out of you than driving does.)
- hardik 17y ago
  completely agree.. my home is an hour from work and switching to bus since over a year feels like sheer blessing
  - Mz 17y ago
    I live without a car and hope to never go back. I currently live in an apartment in the 'burbs and bus service sucks and the number of stores/amenities nearby is limited. I am currently researching what it will take to buy a house in a more walkable neighborhood. Even with the constraints imposed by my current location, for me, living without a car has been wonderfully less burdened and more relaxing than living with a car ever was. (Of course, I hate driving and always have.)
  - _delirium 17y ago
    I live closer (~20 min drive, ~40 min bus), and go back and forth on it. Sometimes the convenience and 2x speed of taking a car seems better, but sometimes the "don't have to drive it" aspect of the bus seems better. I definitely get more reading done on days when I take the bus: it takes 40 vs. 20 mins, but that's 40 minutes in which I can read a book. I guess I could do 20 mins of a book on tape in the car, but I hate taking in information via audio, so I just listen to music instead.
- truebosko 17y ago
  Great point. To coincide with others, I have a feeling our car-centric lifestyles are a huge reason for this kind of eating (Apart from all the marketing shoved in our faces.) If you look at the majority of cities in North America they have under 500,000 people, are very widely spaced out, and generally have poor public transit. I'm moving to a city with pretty good public transit and I look forward to leaving my car at home on a more common basis. In my current city, it takes me 2 hours to get to work on public transit for a 27km trip. Educating people on cooking their own food is a problem that I think many people are trying to solve but how do you beat the efforts of multi-billion dollar corporations marketing all these efficient, easy, and un-realistically "healthy" products?
  - Mz 17y ago
    Great point. Thanks. but how do you beat the efforts of multi-billion dollar corporations marketing all these efficient, easy, and un-realistically "healthy" products? You give them something genuinely superior and let them choose on their own to vote with their feet? (so to speak, as someone who tries to promote a pedestrian lifestyle :-D )
  - sorbits 17y ago
    how do you beat the efforts of multi-billion dollar corporations Pass laws about proper labeling of foods, what can even be sold as food, and educate the public about healthy eating (which doesn’t necessarily require home cooking or to take more time). I think that is probably the root of the problem, that food in the US is not labelled and regulated as strongly as in most of the EU. Related to the discussion: http://www.foodincmovie.com/ http://www.foodincmovie.com/
  - kjhghjmkedfcv 17y ago
    Who wants to beat them? Those $Bn corporations put tins of tuna, different beans, tomatoes on store shelves for pennies. They even go to the trouble of coloring the good value cans differently for me. The same corps deliver basics foods like onions, potatoes, carrots, rice year-round for roughly the cost of transport. All I have to do is open the cans, mix them together and cook for 20mins and I can have healthy tasty veggie food in about the time it takes to deliver a pizza. And a big thank-you to all the people that buy the frozen ready meals that subsidize this.
riffraff 17y ago
I'd have bet on the lack of a generalized "good eating culture", which automatically makes ready made food more acceptable.
yummyfajitas 17y ago
I don't buy this explanation. In my personal experience, the people with the least time are the most likely to eat well. Consider programmers, quants, bankers, and other such overworked types. Observing their shopping baskets at Fairway (upper west NYC) suggests they eat mostly fresh products. On the other hand, you have poor people, the vast majority of whom don't work at all. They have nothing but free time. Observing their shopping baskets (in Harlem or Jersey City) suggests they eat lots of packaged foods. I suspect laziness is a better explanation for packaged foods than free time.
- pkulak 17y ago
  I'd say it's cost, not lazyness. And also the fact that there aren't any real grocery stores in poorer areas. I'm way lazier than most poorer people, but eat only fresh food that I make myself.
  - yummyfajitas 17y ago
    I'd say it's cost, not lazyness. And also the fact that there aren't any real grocery stores in poorer areas. This is simply not true. Fresh food is available in both the poor areas I mentioned (and is cheap), people just don't buy it. It's not overpriced either, on a per-meal basis (rather than a per-calorie basis) it tends to be cheaper than prepackaged crap. When I lived in Harlem [1], I noticed an interesting fact. There was almost a perfect correlation between the contents of a shopping basket and the appearance of the person carrying it. Poor looking people ate prepackaged crap, yuppies ate fresh food. [1] For those unfamiliar with NYC, Harlem used to be a terrible neighborhood. It became safe under Giuliani/Bloomberg and yuppies have moved in because it's cheap. The neighborhood is now roughly 50% yuppie, 50% local.
    - kellishaver 17y ago
      Eating fresh foods isn't necessarily more expensive, but there's the common misconception that is and many people just don't take the time to find out otherwise. Often times, people who try it end up spending more, too, because they're not used to it and don't make a full committment to it, so all that fresh produce they bought sits in their fridge and goes bad, taking a back seat to the pre-packaged stuff they bought along with it. So there's another thing that can be seen by them as driving up the cost. They end up wasting a lot of food and thereby wasting a lot of money. What a lot of them don't realize as well is that healthy food is more filling than pre-packaged crap. Your body is getting all of the nutrients it needs with less food, so you don't stay hungry all the time or need huge quantities, so you can actually buy less food. Also, many people in poorer communities who are, for example, on food stamps, will get their $250 in food stamps at the beginning of each month of whatever and they think they need to go out and buy $250 in groceries with it right then, because they're on a limited budget and they think this will be an easier way to see what they have/need and balance that budget. So they buy pre-packaged stuff, because they can throw it in the cabinet and it will still be good 4 weeks later, or 6mo later, just in case they lose those food stamps or that minimum wage job.

by jister 17y ago

Mz 17y ago

Your remark reminds me of the book Timelock: How Life Got So Hectic and What You Can Do About It http://www.amazon.com/Timelock-Life-Hectic-What-About/dp/0060165766/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1270380300&sr=1-3 http://www.amazon.com/Timelock-Life-Hectic-What-About/dp/006... Though I would guess that there are other factors as well, such as the very high divorce rate here and general breakdown of family, plus our car-centric lifestyles which have us spending excessive amounts of time driving around, thus fostering the drive-through food mentality (which means even when you get home, you want it in 2 minutes, thus microwave meals). Cooking from scratch is time consuming. It's easier to develop those skills if you have the traditional nuclear family thing going where one person is the primary cook and it's easier to come up with the time when you don't spend an hour or more every day just driving to and from work. (Generally speaking, even if your commute takes just as much time, taking the bus/train takes less mental and physical energy out of you than driving does.)

hardik 17y ago
completely agree.. my home is an hour from work and switching to bus since over a year feels like sheer blessing
- Mz 17y ago
  I live without a car and hope to never go back. I currently live in an apartment in the 'burbs and bus service sucks and the number of stores/amenities nearby is limited. I am currently researching what it will take to buy a house in a more walkable neighborhood. Even with the constraints imposed by my current location, for me, living without a car has been wonderfully less burdened and more relaxing than living with a car ever was. (Of course, I hate driving and always have.)
- _delirium 17y ago
  I live closer (~20 min drive, ~40 min bus), and go back and forth on it. Sometimes the convenience and 2x speed of taking a car seems better, but sometimes the "don't have to drive it" aspect of the bus seems better. I definitely get more reading done on days when I take the bus: it takes 40 vs. 20 mins, but that's 40 minutes in which I can read a book. I guess I could do 20 mins of a book on tape in the car, but I hate taking in information via audio, so I just listen to music instead.
truebosko 17y ago
Great point. To coincide with others, I have a feeling our car-centric lifestyles are a huge reason for this kind of eating (Apart from all the marketing shoved in our faces.) If you look at the majority of cities in North America they have under 500,000 people, are very widely spaced out, and generally have poor public transit. I'm moving to a city with pretty good public transit and I look forward to leaving my car at home on a more common basis. In my current city, it takes me 2 hours to get to work on public transit for a 27km trip. Educating people on cooking their own food is a problem that I think many people are trying to solve but how do you beat the efforts of multi-billion dollar corporations marketing all these efficient, easy, and un-realistically "healthy" products?
- Mz 17y ago
  Great point. Thanks. but how do you beat the efforts of multi-billion dollar corporations marketing all these efficient, easy, and un-realistically "healthy" products? You give them something genuinely superior and let them choose on their own to vote with their feet? (so to speak, as someone who tries to promote a pedestrian lifestyle :-D )
- sorbits 17y ago
  how do you beat the efforts of multi-billion dollar corporations Pass laws about proper labeling of foods, what can even be sold as food, and educate the public about healthy eating (which doesn’t necessarily require home cooking or to take more time). I think that is probably the root of the problem, that food in the US is not labelled and regulated as strongly as in most of the EU. Related to the discussion: http://www.foodincmovie.com/ http://www.foodincmovie.com/
- kjhghjmkedfcv 17y ago
  Who wants to beat them? Those $Bn corporations put tins of tuna, different beans, tomatoes on store shelves for pennies. They even go to the trouble of coloring the good value cans differently for me. The same corps deliver basics foods like onions, potatoes, carrots, rice year-round for roughly the cost of transport. All I have to do is open the cans, mix them together and cook for 20mins and I can have healthy tasty veggie food in about the time it takes to deliver a pizza. And a big thank-you to all the people that buy the frozen ready meals that subsidize this.

riffraff 17y ago

I'd have bet on the lack of a generalized "good eating culture", which automatically makes ready made food more acceptable.

yummyfajitas 17y ago

I don't buy this explanation. In my personal experience, the people with the least time are the most likely to eat well. Consider programmers, quants, bankers, and other such overworked types. Observing their shopping baskets at Fairway (upper west NYC) suggests they eat mostly fresh products. On the other hand, you have poor people, the vast majority of whom don't work at all. They have nothing but free time. Observing their shopping baskets (in Harlem or Jersey City) suggests they eat lots of packaged foods. I suspect laziness is a better explanation for packaged foods than free time.

pkulak 17y ago
I'd say it's cost, not lazyness. And also the fact that there aren't any real grocery stores in poorer areas. I'm way lazier than most poorer people, but eat only fresh food that I make myself.
- yummyfajitas 17y ago
  I'd say it's cost, not lazyness. And also the fact that there aren't any real grocery stores in poorer areas. This is simply not true. Fresh food is available in both the poor areas I mentioned (and is cheap), people just don't buy it. It's not overpriced either, on a per-meal basis (rather than a per-calorie basis) it tends to be cheaper than prepackaged crap. When I lived in Harlem [1], I noticed an interesting fact. There was almost a perfect correlation between the contents of a shopping basket and the appearance of the person carrying it. Poor looking people ate prepackaged crap, yuppies ate fresh food. [1] For those unfamiliar with NYC, Harlem used to be a terrible neighborhood. It became safe under Giuliani/Bloomberg and yuppies have moved in because it's cheap. The neighborhood is now roughly 50% yuppie, 50% local.
  - kellishaver 17y ago
    Eating fresh foods isn't necessarily more expensive, but there's the common misconception that is and many people just don't take the time to find out otherwise. Often times, people who try it end up spending more, too, because they're not used to it and don't make a full committment to it, so all that fresh produce they bought sits in their fridge and goes bad, taking a back seat to the pre-packaged stuff they bought along with it. So there's another thing that can be seen by them as driving up the cost. They end up wasting a lot of food and thereby wasting a lot of money. What a lot of them don't realize as well is that healthy food is more filling than pre-packaged crap. Your body is getting all of the nutrients it needs with less food, so you don't stay hungry all the time or need huge quantities, so you can actually buy less food. Also, many people in poorer communities who are, for example, on food stamps, will get their $250 in food stamps at the beginning of each month of whatever and they think they need to go out and buy $250 in groceries with it right then, because they're on a limited budget and they think this will be an easier way to see what they have/need and balance that budget. So they buy pre-packaged stuff, because they can throw it in the cabinet and it will still be good 4 weeks later, or 6mo later, just in case they lose those food stamps or that minimum wage job.