6 ms·

There are such restaurants around here in Europe but they are super expensive, so you are better off doing it on your own at home. Cooking a stew of lentils or

There are such restaurants around here in Europe but they are super expensive, so you are better off doing it on your own at home. 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?

andyjensen 11mo ago
I think you are having a too black and white opinion on the issue. As a founder it is actually cheaper for me to spend 1000$ on restaurant and take-out food per week than wasting time cooking for myself. Plus you support local businesses by eating out
- johnisgood 11mo ago
  It is cheaper to spend 1000$ on a restaurant than to take an hour or two to cook a very low-effort food that takes max 2 hours to cook and lasts for 3 days? I'm genuinely baffled. 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.
  - owenversteeg 11mo ago
    I personally don’t get takeout or eat at restaurants but there are certainly many cases in the US where it would be (far) cheaper. You say 2 hours for 3 days (so 40 mins/day or about 5h/week) which I think is on the low side. If you spend an average of 90 minutes a day on everything related to food (grocery shopping, recipes, cooking, cleanup, dishes) that’s 10.5 hr/week. In any case, that’s between 5-10h/week or $75-150/week at $15/hr, enough to pay the extra over groceries for cheap fast food. At $100/hr you could easily buy nicer food with the time savings, much like the GP comment. 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.
    - johnisgood 11mo ago
      Speaking of, I have difficulties gaining weight. I would have to eat a lot. The only time I could gain weight was when I spent most of my day eating. I am not sure how other people do it. I do not have that amount of time to eat food.
  - shagie 11mo ago
    The cost of time is something that's discounted ... and for some households, there isn't time (parents working two jobs type thing). 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 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.
    - ac29 11mo ago
      >While homemade rice and pinto beans is $9.26 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.
  - wahern 11mo ago
    I have a friend who, once he started steadily making mid-high six figures in Silicon Valley, began taking the HOV lane on his commute into work, despite driving alone. The calculus was easy. Assuming $500,000 salary (I think he made more), 8 hour days, 50 weeks a year, that's $250/hour. As a manager, he couldn't shuffle his schedule around very easily, unlike when he was programming and could come in late and leave late, or when you're a young programmer and come in early and leave late (or just sleep under your desk). The 30+ minutes saved during his commute each day was well worth the amortized cost of some tickets, and that's before accounting for the stress saved, marginal value on the dollar, additional personal time, etc. Though, when he told me this he hadn't yet accumulated many, if any, tickets, and I don't think automated occupant detection had been installed. 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.
    - thatfrenchguy 11mo ago
      > The 30+ minutes saved during his commute each day I mean, you could also live closer to the office
      - johnisgood 11mo ago
        It is not really feasible for many people.
    - FatherOfCurses 11mo ago
      What a clear example of how being wealthy allows you to thumb your nose at the laws that the rest of us plebs have to follow.
toast0 11mo ago
Most people aren't interested in a stew that you have to cook for 3 days easily. Even BBQ people expect low and slow to finish on the same day it starts. :p
- backscratches 11mo ago
  I think they meant once cooked you can eat it for 3 days worth of meals (in other words it is easy to cook a large quantity)
- rolph 11mo ago
  that sounds like preparing bear meat.
inglor_cz 11mo ago
Because they lack the skill? 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.
- johnisgood 11mo ago
  It is very easy to learn. If I could learn it, so can anyone else. :P I have not cooked my entire life, for the most part, but when my situation requires me to cook, then I can. I find a relatively easy recipe and I just follow the instructions. It has worked out fine for me. > 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.
  - throw-the-towel 11mo ago
    > If I could learn it, so can anyone else. 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.
    - lotsofpulp 11mo ago
      Different skills take different amounts of time and parameters to master. 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.
      - throw-the-towel 11mo ago
        Sorry, I wanted to sound edgier and made my point less clear! What I wanted to convey is, it's waaaaay easier to learn a skill when you've been exposed to it since you were a baby.
jltsiren 11mo ago
Cooking takes time and effort, which many people lack. You need to make an initial investment in utensils and appliances, which poor people can't always afford. And if you don't already know how to cook, learning it on your own can be risky. If you make a mistake, you may end up losing the food, which poor people again may not be able to afford. And learning it takes time and effort anyway. 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.
- HumanOstrich 11mo ago
  I've been hooked on fast food before, and I still grab some on occasion, but I don't understand these common excuses for why people HAVE to consume fast food. 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.
  - vacuity 11mo ago
    Moreover, changing one's habits to cooking requires effort upfront, and its benefits may not be apparent (at least in the start).
    - johnisgood 11mo ago
      I do not like cooking. Even just spending an hour on it sucks, and I would rather order, but I just cannot afford to order food on the daily, so I must cook something for a few days or the whole week. If you do not have the money to order on the daily, then you either cook or someone else has to do the cooking.
    - seec 11mo ago
      I have been doing all kind of strategies since I have lived largely alone for over 15 years. I have also worked in restaurant kitchens that were on the premium side. I can do very sophisticated pastries from the Ferrandi book. 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).
lofaszvanitt 11mo ago
They don't have time and/or money. The moment you have ample time you gonna cook.
anon291 11mo ago
Fast food is an addiction not nutrition. Some people develop the addiction and the restaurants feed it. 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.
- johnisgood 11mo ago
  I just wonder how poor people can afford to eat fast food. I wish I could afford to order food every day. I cannot. So I have to cook for myself which I have never really done before, but as an adult I had to learn.
  - spicyusername 11mo ago
    I mean, the OP is suggesting they can't...
    - johnisgood 11mo ago
      Yeah, but I am talking about everyone else in this thread (or most people). It is WAY cheaper to cook your own food.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
hackable_sand 11mo ago
People are doing this. Where did you get the impression that people stopped cooking homemade meals?
- madduci 11mo ago
  I know many that just keep ordering or buy things that are super easy to do (precooked rice, fish stabs, chicken nuggets).
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
bjoli 11mo ago
When I studied in Germany in 2010 I went to an Indian place that had a "small plate" (which was decent even for me, a man in my 20s at the time) for €2.80. The large one was €4.80. The food was magnificent, and was traditional Indian cuisine. Lots of legumes and vegetables.
potato3732842 11mo ago
>There are such restaurants around here in Europe but they are super expensive, so you are better off doing it on your own at home. 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.
seec 11mo ago
Cooking legumineuse notoriously take a long time and you very often need to soak them before hand. 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.

andyjensen 11mo ago

I think you are having a too black and white opinion on the issue. As a founder it is actually cheaper for me to spend 1000$ on restaurant and take-out food per week than wasting time cooking for myself. Plus you support local businesses by eating out

johnisgood 11mo ago
It is cheaper to spend 1000$ on a restaurant than to take an hour or two to cook a very low-effort food that takes max 2 hours to cook and lasts for 3 days? I'm genuinely baffled. 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.
- owenversteeg 11mo ago
  I personally don’t get takeout or eat at restaurants but there are certainly many cases in the US where it would be (far) cheaper. You say 2 hours for 3 days (so 40 mins/day or about 5h/week) which I think is on the low side. If you spend an average of 90 minutes a day on everything related to food (grocery shopping, recipes, cooking, cleanup, dishes) that’s 10.5 hr/week. In any case, that’s between 5-10h/week or $75-150/week at $15/hr, enough to pay the extra over groceries for cheap fast food. At $100/hr you could easily buy nicer food with the time savings, much like the GP comment. 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.
  - johnisgood 11mo ago
    Speaking of, I have difficulties gaining weight. I would have to eat a lot. The only time I could gain weight was when I spent most of my day eating. I am not sure how other people do it. I do not have that amount of time to eat food.
- shagie 11mo ago
  The cost of time is something that's discounted ... and for some households, there isn't time (parents working two jobs type thing). 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 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.
  - ac29 11mo ago
    >While homemade rice and pinto beans is $9.26 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.
- wahern 11mo ago
  I have a friend who, once he started steadily making mid-high six figures in Silicon Valley, began taking the HOV lane on his commute into work, despite driving alone. The calculus was easy. Assuming $500,000 salary (I think he made more), 8 hour days, 50 weeks a year, that's $250/hour. As a manager, he couldn't shuffle his schedule around very easily, unlike when he was programming and could come in late and leave late, or when you're a young programmer and come in early and leave late (or just sleep under your desk). The 30+ minutes saved during his commute each day was well worth the amortized cost of some tickets, and that's before accounting for the stress saved, marginal value on the dollar, additional personal time, etc. Though, when he told me this he hadn't yet accumulated many, if any, tickets, and I don't think automated occupant detection had been installed. 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.
  - thatfrenchguy 11mo ago
    > The 30+ minutes saved during his commute each day I mean, you could also live closer to the office
    - johnisgood 11mo ago
      It is not really feasible for many people.
  - FatherOfCurses 11mo ago
    What a clear example of how being wealthy allows you to thumb your nose at the laws that the rest of us plebs have to follow.

toast0 11mo ago

Most people aren't interested in a stew that you have to cook for 3 days easily. Even BBQ people expect low and slow to finish on the same day it starts. :p

backscratches 11mo ago
I think they meant once cooked you can eat it for 3 days worth of meals (in other words it is easy to cook a large quantity)
rolph 11mo ago
that sounds like preparing bear meat.

inglor_cz 11mo ago

Because they lack the skill? 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.

johnisgood 11mo ago
It is very easy to learn. If I could learn it, so can anyone else. :P I have not cooked my entire life, for the most part, but when my situation requires me to cook, then I can. I find a relatively easy recipe and I just follow the instructions. It has worked out fine for me. > 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.
- throw-the-towel 11mo ago
  > If I could learn it, so can anyone else. 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.
  - lotsofpulp 11mo ago
    Different skills take different amounts of time and parameters to master. 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.
    - throw-the-towel 11mo ago
      Sorry, I wanted to sound edgier and made my point less clear! What I wanted to convey is, it's waaaaay easier to learn a skill when you've been exposed to it since you were a baby.

jltsiren 11mo ago

Cooking takes time and effort, which many people lack. You need to make an initial investment in utensils and appliances, which poor people can't always afford. And if you don't already know how to cook, learning it on your own can be risky. If you make a mistake, you may end up losing the food, which poor people again may not be able to afford. And learning it takes time and effort anyway. 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.

HumanOstrich 11mo ago
I've been hooked on fast food before, and I still grab some on occasion, but I don't understand these common excuses for why people HAVE to consume fast food. 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.
- vacuity 11mo ago
  Moreover, changing one's habits to cooking requires effort upfront, and its benefits may not be apparent (at least in the start).
  - johnisgood 11mo ago
    I do not like cooking. Even just spending an hour on it sucks, and I would rather order, but I just cannot afford to order food on the daily, so I must cook something for a few days or the whole week. If you do not have the money to order on the daily, then you either cook or someone else has to do the cooking.
  - seec 11mo ago
    I have been doing all kind of strategies since I have lived largely alone for over 15 years. I have also worked in restaurant kitchens that were on the premium side. I can do very sophisticated pastries from the Ferrandi book. 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).

lofaszvanitt 11mo ago

They don't have time and/or money. The moment you have ample time you gonna cook.

anon291 11mo ago

Fast food is an addiction not nutrition. Some people develop the addiction and the restaurants feed it. 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.

johnisgood 11mo ago
I just wonder how poor people can afford to eat fast food. I wish I could afford to order food every day. I cannot. So I have to cook for myself which I have never really done before, but as an adult I had to learn.
- spicyusername 11mo ago
  I mean, the OP is suggesting they can't...
  - johnisgood 11mo ago
    Yeah, but I am talking about everyone else in this thread (or most people). It is WAY cheaper to cook your own food.

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

hackable_sand 11mo ago

People are doing this. Where did you get the impression that people stopped cooking homemade meals?

madduci 11mo ago
I know many that just keep ordering or buy things that are super easy to do (precooked rice, fish stabs, chicken nuggets).
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]

bjoli 11mo ago

When I studied in Germany in 2010 I went to an Indian place that had a "small plate" (which was decent even for me, a man in my 20s at the time) for €2.80. The large one was €4.80. The food was magnificent, and was traditional Indian cuisine. Lots of legumes and vegetables.

potato3732842 11mo ago

>There are such restaurants around here in Europe but they are super expensive, so you are better off doing it on your own at home. 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.

seec 11mo ago

Cooking legumineuse notoriously take a long time and you very often need to soak them before hand. 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.