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The problem is that people don't know how to cook. Something like pressure cookers (or crock pots where appropriate) are amazing for this sort of scenario. Ther

The problem is that people don't know how to cook. Something like pressure cookers (or crock pots where appropriate) are amazing for this sort of scenario. There are endless recipes you can find online that are toss a few ingredients in, wait, eat. Easy clean up, and delicious. I increasingly think cooking should be a part of basic education for everybody. Stuff like rice, beans, and chicken breast are extremely cheap, and most of the way towards a balanced diet by themselves. And cookers are like magic - just toss a bunch of stuff in, some spices, and it will come out amazing. I like a bit of yogurt as my fat, but you can go way cheaper - just toss some lard in there, it'll taste great.

lurking_swe 1y ago
i’m interested in using my pressure cooker more. Do you have a favorite recipe?
- somenameforme 1y ago
  This [1] is amazing, and also prep freezes extremely well. There are so many great recipes online, just search - it's also referred to as an instant pot in many places. [1] - https://kristineskitchenblog.com/honey-garlic-instant-pot-chicken-breasts/ https://kristineskitchenblog.com/honey-garlic-instant-pot-ch...
  - lurking_swe 1y ago
    Thank you very much!!
badc0ffee 1y ago
I agree with most of what you're saying, but here in Canada, chicken breast is so not cheap.
- doubled112 1y ago
  About $5 bucks per skinless boneless chicken breast where I'm at in Canada. That's $20 in just the chicken for a meal if you happen to have a family of four. I swear my growing boys have hollow legs. How do you eat more than I do?
  - ta12653421 1y ago
    Thas fucking cheap! LOL Chicken well raised and fed, is usually good starting at around 30-40 EUR / kg. I supermarkets selling 1kg of chicken for 4-5 EUR / kg - I would not touch this.
    - ta12653421 1y ago
      The one who downvoted me obviously has a problem with high quality food. Animals held and then sold for 4-5 EUR per kg is pure shit. Period. I would rather eat groceries instead. Most people have no idea what high quality meet is because they buy their stuff always at large chains - remember: None of the sustainability-interested local farms sells to any of those supermarkt chains. You have to GO there to get your stuff. Such animals you can also eat without having remorse.
      - inferiorhuman 1y ago
        The folks that this article is about are not the sort of folks who can afford €18/lb for protein. In the US, at least, cheap chicken can often be identified as it cooks up with a woody texture or suffers from a variety of visual defects. Out here I can't think of any farms selling chickens directly to consumers. More well regarded farms like Petaluma Poultry do, in fact, sell to the big chain grocery stores and that's closer to $5/lb for a whole "organic" chicken.
        ta12653421 1y ago
        well.... Im not in the US :-)
      - Libidinalecon 1y ago
- phil21 1y ago
  Costco has been 2.99/lb for chicken breast about as long as I can remember now here in Chicago. It’s only sometimes better priced than the local supermarket, but the quality is consistent and price stable. If I have spare time on a weekend it can be picked up far cheaper in bulk from a food services supply store. 2 weeks ago when I last walked through the cooler section it was sitting at $1.29/lb in 40lb cases. Costs maybe 10 cents per food saver vacuum bag or so to freeze them in packs of 2-4 each. A lot of folks are price takers and have forgotten how to comparison shop or buy on sale and stock up. These were skills lost over the past few generations - likely since stores thought they were competing on price far more than they actually are. Covid taught them the average consumer simply isn’t as price sensitive as the business classes teach you, and have engaged in aggressive price segmentation. I don’t bother buying most shelf stable or freezable products these days unless it’s on a very large sale - which I’ve found tends to happen roughly quarterly for most things. Beef is the current exception, but we buy a half cow from a local farm and eat off that for a year or more.
  - inferiorhuman 1y ago
    Not everyone lives near a Costco. Not everyone is a fan of the environmental cost of their cheap chickens, or whatever. When I lived in San Francisco there was a Costco but it was more inconvenient to get to via Muni than most of the alternatives. Their parking garage is an absolute zoo. If I have spare time on a weekend it can be picked up far cheaper in bulk from a food services supply store. Not everyone has the luxury of being able to store perishable items in bulk. Personally I struggle a bit to store a whole chicken in my fridge. Six and a half pounds (what you'd have to buy to get Costco's $3/lb price) is quite a lot. And if you want to cook that chicken first and then freeze it, you run a high risk of it just tasting weird. I just checked around and for boneless, skinless chicken breasts: Sprouts $7/lb. Safeway $7/lb (more if you don't want the chlorine treated stuff). Trader Joe's $7.50/lb (but they've gained a reputation for nasty, woody chicken). Whole Foods out of stock. Lucky's $8.50/lb. Mollie Stone's $8.89/lb. Berkeley Bowl $9.59/lb. US Foods Chef Store $3.75/lb for *twelve pounds*. At least out here there's a lot less variability than you're claiming, unless you're buying enough to fill your entire fridge/freezer.
  - listenallyall 1y ago
burnt-resistor 1y ago
Not knowing how to cook isn't the main problem. Really poor people don't have time to cook and don't have any disposable income to buy a luxury like a pressure cooker, so this is fantasy. Really poor people are on SNAP (which doesn't cover a lot of fast food) and food banks (which provide random/useless stuff like unhealthy ultra processed food, dented canned food like canned corn and tomatoes, and random produce that requires a lot of time to use).
- adrian_b 1y ago
  A good microwave oven is extremely cheap, about the same as the food for a few weeks. I eat only food cooked by myself from raw ingredients, in a microwave oven. Previously I was cooking with traditional methods, but some years ago I have eventually discovered that I was misusing a microwave oven only for reheating, when it can be much better be used for cooking. In most of the cases, I cook everything that I eat immediately before eating it, which rarely needs more than 20 minutes for cleaning/peeling/paring/slicing vegetables, cooking in the oven and washing dishes. This is short enough. If I would go out to eat somewhere, I would loose much more time than that. The only thing that I do not cook immediately before eating is meat, as depending of its kind it may need up to 30 minutes of cooking in the oven, so I cook all the meat for a week during the weekend and I just reheat it and combine it with the garnish in the other days. When you cook for a large family, you can cook all the food for a week, for a few hours during a weekend day, and you can reheat the food in less than 5 minutes in all the other days. You can even bake bread very quickly and with excellent results in a microwave oven. When I want bread, I bake it immediately before the meal. Cooking at home and using only raw ingredients results in a cost for food that is frequently even 10 times less than a similar dish would cost from a supermarket, while being more healthy due to the use of high quality ingredients without any dubious additives. Even for bread, home-made bread is about half of the price of supermarket bread. Eating in a restaurant is of course much more expensive than buying processed food from a supermarket, so the difference in cost is even higher. Therefore I agree that most poor people spend too much on food that is also unhealthy, and that is because they do not know how to choose wisely what they eat and how to cook that quickly and inexpensively. I believe that these are essential survival skills that should be taught to everyone in elementary school, but, even if I had a much better education than most, that did not help me, so I have learned most of them only when old and after a lot of failed experiments.
rini17 1y ago
I'm afraid home cooking is the first victim of "big tech" strip mining our attention. When you are hooked it's too difficult to plainly keep concentrated on the cooking/cleaning process and on procuring of individual ingredients. No matter how easy it is, still needs capability to deal with messy physical stuff. And it's too easy to get demotivated by mediocre result. An harbinger of things to come, widespread crippling executive dysfunction.

lurking_swe 1y ago

i’m interested in using my pressure cooker more. Do you have a favorite recipe?

somenameforme 1y ago
This [1] is amazing, and also prep freezes extremely well. There are so many great recipes online, just search - it's also referred to as an instant pot in many places. [1] - https://kristineskitchenblog.com/honey-garlic-instant-pot-chicken-breasts/ https://kristineskitchenblog.com/honey-garlic-instant-pot-ch...
- lurking_swe 1y ago
  Thank you very much!!

badc0ffee 1y ago

I agree with most of what you're saying, but here in Canada, chicken breast is so not cheap.

doubled112 1y ago
About $5 bucks per skinless boneless chicken breast where I'm at in Canada. That's $20 in just the chicken for a meal if you happen to have a family of four. I swear my growing boys have hollow legs. How do you eat more than I do?
- ta12653421 1y ago
  Thas fucking cheap! LOL Chicken well raised and fed, is usually good starting at around 30-40 EUR / kg. I supermarkets selling 1kg of chicken for 4-5 EUR / kg - I would not touch this.
  - ta12653421 1y ago
    The one who downvoted me obviously has a problem with high quality food. Animals held and then sold for 4-5 EUR per kg is pure shit. Period. I would rather eat groceries instead. Most people have no idea what high quality meet is because they buy their stuff always at large chains - remember: None of the sustainability-interested local farms sells to any of those supermarkt chains. You have to GO there to get your stuff. Such animals you can also eat without having remorse.
    - inferiorhuman 1y ago
      The folks that this article is about are not the sort of folks who can afford €18/lb for protein. In the US, at least, cheap chicken can often be identified as it cooks up with a woody texture or suffers from a variety of visual defects. Out here I can't think of any farms selling chickens directly to consumers. More well regarded farms like Petaluma Poultry do, in fact, sell to the big chain grocery stores and that's closer to $5/lb for a whole "organic" chicken.
      - ta12653421 1y ago
        well.... Im not in the US :-)
    - Libidinalecon 1y ago
phil21 1y ago
Costco has been 2.99/lb for chicken breast about as long as I can remember now here in Chicago. It’s only sometimes better priced than the local supermarket, but the quality is consistent and price stable. If I have spare time on a weekend it can be picked up far cheaper in bulk from a food services supply store. 2 weeks ago when I last walked through the cooler section it was sitting at $1.29/lb in 40lb cases. Costs maybe 10 cents per food saver vacuum bag or so to freeze them in packs of 2-4 each. A lot of folks are price takers and have forgotten how to comparison shop or buy on sale and stock up. These were skills lost over the past few generations - likely since stores thought they were competing on price far more than they actually are. Covid taught them the average consumer simply isn’t as price sensitive as the business classes teach you, and have engaged in aggressive price segmentation. I don’t bother buying most shelf stable or freezable products these days unless it’s on a very large sale - which I’ve found tends to happen roughly quarterly for most things. Beef is the current exception, but we buy a half cow from a local farm and eat off that for a year or more.
- inferiorhuman 1y ago
  Not everyone lives near a Costco. Not everyone is a fan of the environmental cost of their cheap chickens, or whatever. When I lived in San Francisco there was a Costco but it was more inconvenient to get to via Muni than most of the alternatives. Their parking garage is an absolute zoo. If I have spare time on a weekend it can be picked up far cheaper in bulk from a food services supply store. Not everyone has the luxury of being able to store perishable items in bulk. Personally I struggle a bit to store a whole chicken in my fridge. Six and a half pounds (what you'd have to buy to get Costco's $3/lb price) is quite a lot. And if you want to cook that chicken first and then freeze it, you run a high risk of it just tasting weird. I just checked around and for boneless, skinless chicken breasts: Sprouts $7/lb. Safeway $7/lb (more if you don't want the chlorine treated stuff). Trader Joe's $7.50/lb (but they've gained a reputation for nasty, woody chicken). Whole Foods out of stock. Lucky's $8.50/lb. Mollie Stone's $8.89/lb. Berkeley Bowl $9.59/lb. US Foods Chef Store $3.75/lb for *twelve pounds*. At least out here there's a lot less variability than you're claiming, unless you're buying enough to fill your entire fridge/freezer.
- listenallyall 1y ago

burnt-resistor 1y ago

Not knowing how to cook isn't the main problem. Really poor people don't have time to cook and don't have any disposable income to buy a luxury like a pressure cooker, so this is fantasy. Really poor people are on SNAP (which doesn't cover a lot of fast food) and food banks (which provide random/useless stuff like unhealthy ultra processed food, dented canned food like canned corn and tomatoes, and random produce that requires a lot of time to use).

adrian_b 1y ago
A good microwave oven is extremely cheap, about the same as the food for a few weeks. I eat only food cooked by myself from raw ingredients, in a microwave oven. Previously I was cooking with traditional methods, but some years ago I have eventually discovered that I was misusing a microwave oven only for reheating, when it can be much better be used for cooking. In most of the cases, I cook everything that I eat immediately before eating it, which rarely needs more than 20 minutes for cleaning/peeling/paring/slicing vegetables, cooking in the oven and washing dishes. This is short enough. If I would go out to eat somewhere, I would loose much more time than that. The only thing that I do not cook immediately before eating is meat, as depending of its kind it may need up to 30 minutes of cooking in the oven, so I cook all the meat for a week during the weekend and I just reheat it and combine it with the garnish in the other days. When you cook for a large family, you can cook all the food for a week, for a few hours during a weekend day, and you can reheat the food in less than 5 minutes in all the other days. You can even bake bread very quickly and with excellent results in a microwave oven. When I want bread, I bake it immediately before the meal. Cooking at home and using only raw ingredients results in a cost for food that is frequently even 10 times less than a similar dish would cost from a supermarket, while being more healthy due to the use of high quality ingredients without any dubious additives. Even for bread, home-made bread is about half of the price of supermarket bread. Eating in a restaurant is of course much more expensive than buying processed food from a supermarket, so the difference in cost is even higher. Therefore I agree that most poor people spend too much on food that is also unhealthy, and that is because they do not know how to choose wisely what they eat and how to cook that quickly and inexpensively. I believe that these are essential survival skills that should be taught to everyone in elementary school, but, even if I had a much better education than most, that did not help me, so I have learned most of them only when old and after a lot of failed experiments.

rini17 1y ago

I'm afraid home cooking is the first victim of "big tech" strip mining our attention. When you are hooked it's too difficult to plainly keep concentrated on the cooking/cleaning process and on procuring of individual ingredients. No matter how easy it is, still needs capability to deal with messy physical stuff. And it's too easy to get demotivated by mediocre result. An harbinger of things to come, widespread crippling executive dysfunction.