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While I understand that there are food deserts in the US, I can't understand why someone poor would feed themselves with cheap ramen, mac and cheese and fast fo

• skrebbel 5y ago
  Don't underestimate the mental overhead having to cook a meal can cost. Especially if you're already stressed out (and if you're poor you're likely stressed out) and strapped for time. Nobody is a perfectly rational economical agent, like most comments in this subthread seem to suggest. Stuff sucks, work was hard today, you're tired, and you haven't even started thinking about dinner yet. Fuck. Let's just do hamburgers today. Can't afford them but let's worry about that tomorrow.
  • tomcooks 5y ago
    It's a basic need for survival and it's beyond my comprehension how it can be considered a chore. I say this as a person that lived homeless and that comes from a line of people that had to make do with scraps. I guess it could also be cultural, who knows.
    • FeepingCreature 5y ago
      It's not cultural, people are just different. I'm not poor, which is thankful because it means I can live off food bars instead of having to prepare meals daily, which would annoy me a lot.
    • viraptor 5y ago
      Depends on a person. I don't know of a worse chore than doing shopping and I do it only once a week. Cooking every other day is meh at best too. (apart from an occasional "I want to make something really nice") Look at the old HN comments on Soylent articles with a lot of people like me. I'd be happy eating a balanced nutrients paste most days if I lived alone.
    • mayniac 5y ago
      >that comes from a line of people that had to make do with scraps. That line is long. It only takes one generation feeding their children a diet of pre-made meals and snacks to break it.
    • watwut 5y ago
      I am fairly middle class and I find cooking chore that takes a lot of time I would rather be doing something else.
  • tiborsaas 5y ago
    Cooking can be relaxing and recreational activity too where you can escape into. I don't see it nowhere near being an overhead.
    • bserge 5y ago
      Not when you're goddamn hungry after a long day at a shit job. Source: experience.
• hellbannedguy 5y ago
  Raw ingredients are pricy. In my neighborhood, a wealthy liberal enclave called Marin County, preparing something paletable from raw ingredients is usually more expensive than cheap salty starchy food. There are no cheap cuts of meat at my Safeway. Most people are horrid cooks. They might think they can cook, but usually it's just awful. (Learning how to cook is not my point though.) Poor people have huge problems, and cooking a nutritious meal is down on the priority scale. Plus---for many poor people, the little bit of enjoyment is eating something that tastes good. I can see why the poor gravitate towards the lousy quick food. (My all means I am poor. I don't eat crappy food though. I was a cook in my teens though. I'm glad I learned how to cook, but understand those that didn't.)
  • tomcooks 5y ago
    Thanks for explaining and not downvoting while i'm honestly trying to understand something that makes zero sense to me. Sorry how can raw ingredients be expensive? I'm talking about staples flour, onions, carrots, beans, rice, etc. Is there a database with US staples prices somewhere?
    • foldr 5y ago
      > Sorry how can raw ingredients be expensive? Literally just the price tags in the store. I once baked some pumpkin spice muffins for a friend in NYC who wasn’t in the habit of cooking (so I had to buy everything). Total cost: $45. I think it would have come to about $10 in London (where I live). Admittedly, he’d have had some flour and butter to spare after that. But you have to somewhat know what you are doing to take advantage of the remaining ingredients.
      • ido 5y ago
        Why are groceries so much more expensive in the US than in Europe?
        • foldr 5y ago
          I don’t know. I imagine the price varies a lot in different parts of the US, however.
• joebob42 5y ago
  You have to make them. It costs time and equipment that ramen and Mac and cheese don't.
  • tomcooks 5y ago
    It takes 30 mins eh, the time it takes to go buy that crap
    • oblio 5y ago
      You need to learn to cook and cook well (time), buy the raw ingredients (time), cook them (time), clean the kitchen utensils and the kitchen itself (time). Every person that cooks often that I've talked to grossly underestimates how much time their cooking takes them. The ones that are more efficient either have a ton of cooking experience and talent or just a great kitchen setup, which is a rare luxury and generally a large investment.
      • hnbad 5y ago
        I'd say cooking a meal typically takes me about an hour if I include cleanup and preparation -- and that's while owning a dishwasher while not factoring in time spent on making meal plans and changing plans because an important ingredient isn't available or just time spent buying ingredients because not everything is available in one place.
    • nomorewords 5y ago
      Unless you have been taught at a young age that cooking is something valuable, I've found out that a lot of adults run from it like hell. When covid hit, I expected people to start being reasonable with their budget (and health) and reckoned that food delivery services would have a rough time surviving. Turns out, people started ordering food for home a lot more, even though they now had the time as well as the incentive to save money due to the uncertainty.
      • watwut 5y ago
• paulluuk 5y ago
  Well, only if you have enough money to own a kitchen and enough time to cook a meal between jobs.
  • tomcooks 5y ago
    There are homes without a kitchen? Honest question, it's as absurd as if you told me that there are houses without a toilet
    • strken 5y ago
      SROs often have no kitchen and don't allow hotplates etc., but allow microwaves, rice cookers, and similar appliances.
      • riffraff 5y ago
        Forgive my ignorance but what does "SRO" mean? I'm not an English native speaker and google is useless for acronyms unless you have context.
        • buck4roo 5y ago
          Single room occupancy. A type of hotel, with shared bathrooms down the hall. Here's an article from yesterday's NYT that has a historical background section about halfway down: When No Landlord Will Rent to You, Where Do You Go? https://nyti.ms/33ZiTKV https://nyti.ms/33ZiTKV
      • tomcooks 5y ago
        SRO? You can cook in microwaves and rice cookers, no?
        • maccard 5y ago
          Cooking a meal from fresh ingredients in a microwave seems like a pretty Herculan task to me, as someone who cooks every day
• plandis 5y ago
  Yes it was in my case. I didn’t realize that fact until I started working at 13 and was seeing the prices all the time though.
• crispyporkbites 5y ago
  It takes much longer to cook from scratch than use processed food. If you're on the bread line it's better to spend that time working overtime. It also takes a long time to learn to cook effectively, and you need a decent kitchen, utensils, storage, spices, scales etc. which all cost money. There's also the mindshare element, if you need to do a thousand things to survive, adding cooking from scratch to the list is really hard.
  • tomcooks 5y ago
    Soup takes 3 minutes to make and a hour of boiling while you clean at home. You don't need utensils, scales, nor anything decent, just a container that can be put on the fire. I survived cooking in army surplus over a tin can stove. Food is basic survival so I don't know what to say about the mindshare element, especially when cooking from scratch saves you money and keeps you healthy.
    • FeepingCreature 5y ago
      Soup that takes three minutes to make is a prepared food... Anyway, for me, maybe 50/50 I'd forget the soup on the stove and it would char a bit.
      • tomcooks 5y ago
        Chop one onion, one carrot, add fat, nasty meat bits or fish heads, and whatever else is going to rot in the fridge. 3 minutes prep, then just let it boil 1+ hours. If you forget stuff on the fire then yeah go get a burger
        • FeepingCreature 5y ago
          I keep my fridge empty of perishables, precisely because things in it have a tendency to rot. Putting the rotting stuff into a rot soup that makes me sick will not increase the amount of stuff in my fridge.
• dalemyers 5y ago
  Lots of replies here about time, and while they are true, they aren’t the full story. The fact is that vegetables are ridiculously expensive in America compared to Europe. I’ve lived in both. I’ve been dirt poor and I’m now quite well off. Buying vegetables here in the UK costs literal pennies for many meals. In the US, the same veg can cost literally 10x as much in some cases. Prepped food on the other hand is half the price in the US than it is in the UK. These two factors combined make it a no brainer to go for the prepped stuff over the raw ingredients when you are trying to save money.
  • alecco 5y ago
    Canned and dry vegetables are inexpensive. Beans, brown rice, wholemeal oats, bitter cocoa, whole wheat, (sweet) potatoes, cabbage, and many more healthy whole foods are more than affordable. The cost of spices is negligible. Most of those foods can be pre-cooked and warmed with microwave or stir fried in a handful of minutes. And you can buy bulk monthly at some place like Costco. But of course, the economic stimulus for corporations is for you to become addicted to salt, sugar, and fat. From ads to aisle positioning, junk foods are first. Big Food is the modern day Big Tobacco. I've worked with poor people in different countries, and even with the homeless. A lot of them eat mostly junk food, smoke, drink sodas, chew gum, watch junk TV, some gamble, many don't brush often, most don't exercise, and many get trapped in unpaid loans. And it's worse for their kids. Churches of all denominations used to steer them out of that path. This is a massive society whole now, and note I'm not a religious person. But between on one hand enabling liberals telling them it's not their fault and it's out of their control, and on the other hand media bombarding them with advertisements of such products, it's becoming impossible to contain. Add that to the YOLO culture of social media. This is not going to end well if we don't make drastic measures right now.
• hnbad 5y ago
  The working poor not only lack money, they also lack time. In addition to possibly having to juggle multiple jobs and responsibilities and having to waste time on maintenance problems rich people either can delegate or avoid entirely (e.g. car breaking down because you can't afford a nice car and regular maintenance) poor people also spend a lot more time simply waiting/queueing where sufficiently rich people can either avoid the wait entirely or get preferential treatment. Cooking requires both time and resources. Most healthy ingredients have a limited shelf life and are bulkier (low calorie density) so you need to do your shopping more often. You then need to store them so they don't spoil too quickly (which is harder if you have a small kitchen and no pantry). Then you need to prepare meals in advance and cook them, both of which requires not only dedicated time but also time available on a somewhat predictable schedule, not to mention making meal plans in the first place to organize your shopping, which not only takes time but also mental energy. Compare this to simply stocking up on cheap meals and throwing one in the microwave for a few minutes at dinner time.
  • Mediterraneo10 5y ago
    I question the claim that the poor in the US lack the ability to cook for themselves. Central American immigrants in the US are often even poorer than the native poor (and have longer working hours), but they manage precisely by cooking for themselves: they eat lots of beans and rice, which can be bought in big bulk bags to last many weeks, and the vegetables for which (onions, red peppers) can easily last a couple of weeks in a fridge.
    • amanaplanacanal 5y ago
      I suspect immigrants already had those skills before they came to the US. Natives might never have learned them.
    • sangnoir 5y ago
      Its not just about ability - motivation is also a factor, immigrants do not have the hope for a better life beaten out of them, so delayed gratification is possible vs "enjoy while/when you can" attitude that's fostered by poverty. Immigrants also occasionally to have support networks that born-american poor do not. Additionally, while some immigrants appear to be barely scraping by, sometimes its an improvement of circumstances compared to the okd country. That resilience is borne out of environments no American should be subjected to, IMO.
• lostlogin 5y ago
  Cheese isn’t cheap, but are vegetables and meat cheaper than pasta where you are?