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Agreed. Indians are conservative in spending habits and I think that's a good thing. Eating out is the best example. In West eating out is the default choice, e
by drieddust 9y ago
Agreed. Indians are conservative in spending habits and I think that's a good thing. Eating out is the best example. In West eating out is the default choice, even those who can't afford it will choose to eat out. On the contrary in India, eating out is a conscious choice even for very rich.
But I think with new generation, this culture is changing slowly.
- apexalpha 9y agoIn the US*. In Europe, cooking is still by far how most people eat. It's one of those things where our cultures drifted apart over the years.
- sanderjd 9y agoI think "eating out is the default" was hyperbole? If it's meant literally, it seems simply untrue in the US as well. I can believe that we eat out more, but most people I know eat breakfast and dinner at home and take leftovers to work for lunch. Are there statistics about this?
- stephenhuey 9y agoA huge percentage of Houstonians would eat out for lunch and maybe after work as well, even with a family. In a city of countless inexpensive restaurants, eating out might be the default for a lot more people here.
- sudhirj 9y agoThere are very few fast food chains that originate in India - people either cook at home or eat home cooked food out of roadside stalls if they don't have the time to cook. There are a very few indigenous restaurants, even fewer chains. It's simply not part of the culture, in the way that McDonalds is in the US. Only the rich and upwardly mobile go into a restaurant / fast food joint on a regular basis. To put this in perspective, a meal at McDonalds is affordable to most, if not all Americans. But the cheapest meal at a fast food joint (outside of a roadside stall) is affordable only to a minority.
- jessaustin 9y ago...eat home cooked food out of roadside stalls if they don't have the time to cook. I have loved this option, when I've visited places that have it. Much better than "McDonalds", every time. Life in USA is poorer because we don't have this.
- wycs 9y agoMuch of this is regulation, though some higher average wages, I suppose.
- newen 9y agoYeah but you are rolling the dice every time you eat from those roadside stalls. Most would never even have heard of food safety inspectors
- jessaustin 9y agoFood safety inspection is a relatively recent innovation. Somehow our ancestors survived. Diarrhea isn't fun, but one can generally avoid it by avoiding liquids that haven't been boiled. Most foodstuffs don't require near as much refrigeration as an American might imagine.
- roel_v 9y ago"Somehow our ancestors survived" Well, most of them did. This is the most literal example of 'survivor bias' imaginable. Look up 'sausage disease', to just name one. EDIT: this line of thinking is similar to people saying 'let children roam free, most abductions are done by people the victims know anyway!' or the anti-vaxxer 'why vaccinate when measles is so uncommon!'. Well yes, all of those things are the way they are exactly because of the thing those people are railing against.
- sanderjd 9y agoI think your point only holds for abductions if you can demonstrate that there were more prior to the cultural change in attitude towards roaming. Is that demonstrable? I don't think it is. On the other hand, diseases like the measles were definitely a widespread problem before vaccinations were developed.
- dsr_ 9y agoRemember that HN readers are demographically unrepresentative. Incomes are higher, urbanization is higher, professions are wildly skewed towards software, age is, I think, lower. In my experience, most people eat most of their meals at home, and lunch is the most likely meal to be eaten out. But some people eat out all the time. For most of my 20s I went out for lunch every day. Now I do so once a month or so on average.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- drieddust 9y agoPerhaps it's not everywhere. I have lived in UK, California, and Netherlands and my experience comes from there. My point still hold though. Indians still have a value oriented view to buying. Something is not bought just because you fancy it.But I think this is changing slowly. New generation is much more willing to spend for fun.
- cr1895 9y agoYou’ve lived in the Netherlands, and you experienced people eating out there as a default? That is entirely opposite to my experience. I’m genuinely struggling to understand how you’ve drawn that conclusion.
- simongray 9y ago> Eating out is the best example. In West eating out is the default choice, even those who can't afford it will choose to eat out. What? Not at all. Maybe in your country, it is.
- chillwaves 9y agoI work in Washington DC and eating out is very much a default choice.
- perseusprime11 9y agoIt’s actually the other way. Cooking is expensive in US. You spend a lot of money, buy recipe books, spend a whole lot of time cooking a mediocre meal. Now we have more options like Blue Apron but even those are expensive.
- the_cat_kittles 9y agowhat? i cook all the time. better food, cheaper, often quicker. you just need a little bit of skill.
- drakonandor 9y agoI think the whole point of cooking for yourself is so you can get better at it.. The first few times you cook an omelette, it might suck, the Denny's $4 breakfast might be better, but it won't take long for you to surpass that point.
- Shivetya 9y agocooking is not expensive in the US. you can make it expensive, especially in buying over priced appliances, utensils, and other kitchen gadgets. however raw foods are well priced and when you work out complete meals. to avoid mediocre meals work you way up the difficulty chain and make sure to adhere to recipes. the number one way to make a mediocre meal is lack of preparation and the second is to short cut a recipe. plus when you get the hand of it you can make larger meals and freeze/store what you don't eat then so you have something tasty all week long
- philip1209 9y agoJust for discussion's purpose - how do you explain the rising diabetes rate in India through this lens? Data suggests that something, whether it's bad food or soda, is getting more mainstream adoption.
- gumby 9y agoIt’s a numbers issue. From a small base, any rise is a large percentage. And in India the small bases are large in absolute numbers. So if you have 50M people in your middle class and they drink an increasing number of sugary drinks, the rate of diabetes can shoot up.
- sizzle 9y agoThis is an unsubstantiated claim, see the comment above that referenced NIH studies discussing a genetic link between diabetes w.r.t. a subset of Indians.
- drieddust 9y agoGood point. I think this is because Indians are still sticking to old carb and sweet ricm diet. This was fine when a lot of work was done by hand. In addition to this sedentary is the another default choice of us Indians.
- jdietrich 9y agoTraditional Indian food is often very rich, with liberal use of oil and ghee. Deep-fried snacks like pakora, samosa and aloo tikki are widely popular. Indian sweets like jalebi, laddu and gulab jamun are staggeringly calorific. With rising incomes, a far wider section of society is able to eat plentifully. There's almost certainly a substantial genetic component. Punjabi Sikhs have a high rate of type 2 diabetes, despite below-average rates of obesity and tobacco and alcohol use. GWAS data suggests that most ethnic groups in India have an elevated genetic risk of type 2 diabetes. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23300278/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23300278/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3636658/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3636658/
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoEating out in the west is expensive. Eating out in the developing world is comparatively cheaper, if you are middle class, you can eat out everyday (or get delivery) and it won’t make a dent in your budget. In china, it really wasn’t uncommon at all, hence the density of restaurants being much higher than in the west. India felt similar when I visited, much higher density of restaurants/street food than in most western cities.
- jp555 9y agoEver hear of a milk bar? It’s like if your grandma opened a fast food place and served her best schnitzel, mashed potatoes, & coleslaw. I first came across them in Eastern Europe, and they’re amazing. Home cooked meal fast for less than it costs to make it yourself. Kinda like the ikea cafeteria but with better food. Apparently there were dozens of milk bars in San Francisco generations ago
- Ralfp 9y agoCan't tell for other countries, but most of those that are still triving in Poland after system change are subsided by local goverments.
- greggarious 9y ago> In West eating out is the default choice, even those who can't afford it will choose to eat out. On the contrary in India, eating out is a conscious choice even for very rich. But don't they also have cooks who make elaborate meals for them?
- h43k3r 9y agoNo, only a very few houses have cooks. It is usually the housewives that cook the food for the whole family.
- firstplacelast 9y agoWould be interesting to look at this through the lens of 1 vs. 2 working adults in a household. I grew up solidly middle class and we never went out to eat besides occasional fast food if we were on a roadtrip, I wasn't even allowed to purchase school lunches. However, I had a stay at home mom that cooked everything! Now, that I am an adult none of my friends that I would call "middle class" have a spouse that stays at home. Only those families that are very well-off have 1 adult that doesn't have to work and they tend to be rich enough that cooking most meals vs. going out doesn't matter much for them. I think this is a case where "middle class" can mean a million different things. I don't think someone is colloquially middle class if they can't afford the crappiest house within 2 hours of their office (slight exceptions for major cities), yet others define it differently.
- jessaustin 9y agoSibling comment by 'firstplacelast seems to have been downvoted to [dead]? Why? Why are many of her comments in that state? I can't see anything in her history that should have led to a hellban.
- signal11 9y agoIn my limited experience, families with working women were very happy to eat out. Families with stay-at-home wives or who lived with parents were often keen to invite me for family dinners. Many did have "servants". I don't want to overthink this but some of the value in "eating in" sometimes feels like taking advantage of the fact that there's usually a woman at home whose 'job' it is to cook. > > In West eating out is the default choice Huh? if you're fresh out of school, maybe. Certainly not in families. > > even those who can't afford it will choose to eat out How does that even work? Anyone piling on debt to eat is, well, seriously lacking in financial planning.
- ravivooda 9y agoI would have agreed with you that conservative spending is a good thing a year ago. But, after ready many economics books and data analyzing many other countries including USA, China etc. I'm convinced that non-conservative spending would/could improve businesses and overall progress (GDP, Health, Living Index) of a country. I feel like India is missing out on this by a long margin. If you compare the number of business loans and the amount (personal loans, other loans as well) across many countries it might show what I wanna point out. Any thoughts?
- ravivooda 9y agoI think I was trying to point out, debt-driven economics is not such a bad option
- IncRnd 9y ago> Any thoughts? Yes. My thought is that when one is planning for others to live a certain way to benefit society, that telling them to go into debt to benefit society may work over the long term over a large population. However, this only "works" if you treat people as interchangeable numbers, and if too many of the people deviate from your plan, the debt driven society will stop working as planned. However, when one runs their own budget which needs to last through the ups and down, and presumably get one into a better place than they started, saving or investing is better than going into debt. Just because there are multiple books advocating you spend your money ... well - the old adage is, "Don't believe everything you read."
- ravivooda 9y ago> Yes. My thought is that when one is planning for others to live a certain way to benefit society, that telling them to go into debt to benefit society may work over the long term over a large population. However, this only "works" if you treat people as interchangeable numbers, and if too many of the people deviate from your plan, the debt driven society will stop working as planned. Agree very much! > However, when one runs their own budget which needs to last through the ups and down, and presumably get one into a better place than they started, saving or investing is better than going into debt. I think I should have clarified, I'm talking from a Macroeconomic perspective, when spending boosts economies and saving could lead to devastating deflation. But, on a Microeconomic perspective, totally agree with you. > Just because there are multiple books advocating you spend your money ... well - the old adage is, "Don't believe everything you read." Thank you sir for reminding me :)
- canes123456 9y agoI wondered about this. I have some Indian coworkers who make a lot more than me who rotate between a tiny amount of clothes.
- deepGem 9y agoNot really. The new generation hires cooks. Works out far cheaper than eating out. The demand for cooks has skyrocketed in my neighborhood.
- rayiner 9y agoIt's better to view saving versus spending in economic rather than moralistic terms. Spending supports production of goods and services in the present, including the jobs necessary to produce those goods and services. Saving helps build the capital base that can be used to increase production of goods and services in the future. In a poor country with a growing population, it makes sense to save so you can increase production in the future. But in most of the west, you have the opposite problem. We have more capital than we know what to do with, and are looking forward to stagnant demand in the future due to a stable or even decreasing population. In that case, it makes sense to spend now. Also, cooking at home doesn’t really make sense from an economic standpoint when you think about it.[1] Like everything else, cooking has economies of scale and specialization, so it’s cheaper to cook for many families at once. It only seems cheaper because we don’t account for the labor and opportunity cost of the (usually) women who stay home to cook the meals. [1] Assuming you don't assign an intrinsic positive value to the time spent cooking or getting a home-cooked meal. That may be true for many people, but then you're talking about how people relatively value their free time versus time spent cooking, which is a different issue.
- drieddust 9y agoI am not moralistic, it's just different. Economically also it does make sense when you consider all the waste these restaurant produces competing with each other and catering to visited taste. They have to over stock or cook and then waste it when it goes unsold. All that cost gets transferred to person who buys so I don't think it comes cheap. It does save time though.
- icebraining 9y agoBecause people never waste at home? :)
- walshemj 9y agorestaurants normally cook to order
- laughingman2 9y agoCooking at home may seem "uneconomical", but directly interacting with the food you take in, act of cooking etc are valuable in qualitative way, which is hidden by economic reductionism. I think E. F. Schumacher nailed it in his "Small is beautiful" and other works on how this reductionist view of analyzing behaviors/practices in terms of their to economic utility alone is the demon behind various problems of modernity
- eevilspock 9y ago> eating out is a conscious choice even for very rich. The rich in India have cooks that work for slave wages. The rich don't know how to drive because it is so cheap to have a chauffeur. I knew an Indian kid in Berkeley, CA who didn't get into any American medical schools. So his parents gave a big "donation" to a medical school in India and got him in. They got him a flat, a maid and a cook. That's what he had at age 22.
- toephu2 9y ago"In West eating out is the default choice" I find it baffling how one can put themselves in a position to speak on behalf of the entire West.
- wickawic 9y agoWest = Western California obviously!
- coding123 9y agoThe entire world is to your west, including you.
- paulddraper 9y agoMid-Southern Western California, obviously
- lamby 9y agoPerhaps it's a subtle meta-commentary on the linked article itself that one can't make such huge generalisations ;)
- vostok 9y agoI think it's really more of a class marker than a "Western" thing. Eating out is certainly the default choice for professionals in New York, London, Moscow, Dubai, Singapore, San Francisco, or Hong Kong.
- int_19h 9y agoI wouldn't say it's the default choice in Moscow...
- toephu2 9y agoHow can you speak for every single one of the 800k people living in San Francisco? I doubt all SFers eat out every single day. It is the default choice for you and your circle of friends perhaps, but I don't think you can generalize that to everyone living in the entire city.
- puranjay 9y agoMy parents (in their early 70s) will not even entertain the idea of eating out if they're busy. If they come home at 10pm, they'll still find a way to cook something rather than order something from outside. It's just something they don't think of.
- eecc 9y agoHold on, going to a Domino’s Pizza qualifies as eating out? In my book it’s “I’m too drunk to even think what I’m doing, would be better of hounding a couple sandwiches and an ibuprofen for the morning hangover...”
- Nydhal 9y agoYes. In my country we don't have any of the american fast food. I guarantee you if Mcdonalds opens shop there same thing would happen. HN readers seem to be very unaware of how different lifestyle/culture is across the developing world.
- eecc 9y agoI remember when McDonalds opened its first venue in Piazza di Spagna, cries of wonder and sighs of sacrilege. That was Italy 20-something years ago... its not the stage of economic development that matters, but the amount of subjection to US lifestyle
- geodel 9y agoPizza cost as much as it in US but people earn 1/10th of US income. So in India unless you are in top 1% of economic pyramid even a chain pizza has high aspirational value. Think of it as <1% people in India earn more than $25K per year. And 25K in salaries are at places where $200K apartment is normal thing.
- sorokod 9y ago"West eating out is the default choice, even those who can't afford it will choose to eat out." This is not my experience in UK. Are you American?
- Razengan 9y ago> On the contrary in India, eating out is a conscious choice even for very rich. It's the same in Pakistan, a country similar to India in many aspects, and I think it also has other causes besides economy/frugality: – The rich have household "servants" to cook for them and their kids at any time. – Even for the less than "rich" the women are generally expected (and usually content) to stay at home and cook for the family. So why bother eating out? It's usually an expression of "going out"; doing something enjoyable/entertaining, taking advantage of a day off, a treat for the kids, or to hang out with friends you can't host at home.
- Razengan 9y agoEdit: I should add "and/or resigned" next to "usually content" up there. Women in South-Asian and Middle-Eastern countries are also expected to cook for guests. The males hosting while the women hosts make tea for the guests is an iconic feature [TODO: find a better term to describe that] of society there.
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago> In West eating out is the default choice, even those who can't afford it will choose to eat out. In my experience this is not true at all. I live in Australia, I host a lot of travellers from around the world: Western Europeans (English, French, Italians, Germans), Asians (Vietnamese, Taiwanese, Chinese), North Americans (US, Canada), South Americans (Chilean, Argentinian). None of these people eat out be default.