3 ms·

Less and less people have time and money for that, for the same reason this stuff happens in the first place (i.e. greed and wealth consolidation). Put differen

Less and less people have time and money for that, for the same reason this stuff happens in the first place (i.e. greed and wealth consolidation). Put differently, if more people had time and money to do what you do, you wouldn't bother to do it, either.

foxyv 2mo ago
What? I make things from scratch because I'm broke AF.
- somenameforme 2mo ago
  lol amen. I don't understand where this myth of it being expensive to do things yourself came from. It's not only cheaper but way way way cheaper. And that's comparing it to crap quality stuff. If you compare to what something of the same quality as you make would cost, then the difference is just ridiculous.
  - AlexandrB 2mo ago
    I think the myth comes from the upfront costs of cooking equipment and spices as well as expensive proteins like ground beef. If you cook with mostly starches like rice or potatoes and just some meat, there's no contest. The other thing that can make cooking expensive is buying too many different ingredients to make a fancy dish and having a bunch of leftover stuff that gets thrown out. But that's where soups come in.
    - foxyv 2mo ago
      I think most people don't know how to cook cheap stuff and don't even know where to start. It is a bit of a learned skill. You get a repertoire of cheap but delicious menu items over time. It used to be that our parents would hand them down like sacred family heirlooms on notecards in a greasy metal box. But our parents were way richer than us and they only kept the most delicious ones. One big hit for me was having to create an entirely new set of recipes when I cut out meat from my diet. It got really hard because plant protein is way different from animal protein. The processed vegetarian stuff is insanely expensive too.
      - jandrewrogers 2mo ago
        Many of those old recipes on the notecards relied on heavily processed, shelf-stable industrial ingredients from a century ago that few people would use today. The recipes were commonly disseminated by companies as a form of marketing for their product. We have unimaginably superior access to diverse and fresh ingredients today compared to many of the recipes that e.g. my older relatives used. Modding those recipes to replace the dependency on heavily-processed ingredients with the fresh, less-processed comparables readily available today often produces good results, though it does take more time.
        somenameforme 2mo ago
        Archive has a bunch of older recipe books. This [1] is a collection just from the 50s which would be primo processed time (mass canning/etc just after WW2). I could not find a single recipe with anything like what you're describing. [1] - https://archive.org/details/cbk?and%5B%5D=year%3A%221950%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221951%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221952%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221953%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221954%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221955%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221956%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221957%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221958%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221959%22 https://archive.org/details/cbk?and%5B%5D=year%3A%221950%22&...
        foxyv 2mo ago
        Blessed is the person who decided to exclude recipes from copyright law. They will forever hold a place in my heart.
        jandrewrogers 2mo ago
        That’s a limitation of your source. Several recipes that I’ve seen passed down from that era were like this. Many of those recipes have an origin that can be googled. I am an accomplished cook and I have a lot of recipes passed down a century or more first-hand. Many have the property I described. I know many other people with similar family recipes. Just because you’ve never heard of it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
  - pjc50 2mo ago
    There's a specific category of people who get weird about this on social media. Shorthand for it is "burrito taxi discourse". There's usually a long list of excuses, some of which may have validity, some of which are a bit stretched. I don't know whether they're covering for their own insecurity or are just not prepared to accept that their own cooking is (necessarily) slightly worse than restaurant food even if it's much cheaper. Personally I sit at the middle level of this; in the UK there's a decent range of fresh refrigerated ready meals ("TV dinners" to Americans?) which are more expensive than cooking for yourself but less expensive than takeaway. This is mostly fine except you need to pick the gymbro protein-orientated branding in order to get a decent percentage of vegatables. Somehow this doesn't turn up in burrito taxi discourse.
    - somenameforme 2mo ago
      I definitely don't agree with this part. Home cooking is often significantly better than restaurants. Not only are cooking and running a restaurant very different skill sets (and 'just hire a really good chef' isn't really viable for a typical restaurant), but you also have issues of scale. Creating a diverse menu that can be created, on demand, in a short period of time imposes significant limitations on what you can produce. Another is that cheaping out on something in a dish at home can save you perhaps 60x over a month, but doing so at a restaurant can save you thousands of times that. So they tend to be using worse quality ingredients which end up being sold for much more because they're also needing to pay for labor, rent, electric, and much more - before they hopefully make some profit on the month. This is how you get things like fast food franchises typically being single digit profit margins enterprises in spite of selling large volumes of low quality food for relatively high prices. The comparison between home cooking and high end restaurants is certainly much closer, but also not entirely one-way. So for instance one issue I have with restaurant food is that it tends to be excessively salted. This is largely because the more people consume salt, the more they need of it to experience the same 'flavor'. It's kind of like a drug in that regard. So when somebody who minimizes the amount of salt they consume goes to a high end restaurant, it can often tastes like freebasing pure salt. I'm sure to their average customer it tastes fine, but it's subjective, and it's also why something like 100,000 Americans die per year of salt driven disease. To put that into scale we're already approaching (if have not already exceeded) more Americans dying of salt, over the past decade, than COVID.
jandrewrogers 2mo ago
Making food from scratch is cheap. It also doesn't take much time unless you want it to. Choosing not to cook has become performative learned helplessness. I was far more likely to cook from scratch when I was poor than when I was not. And honestly, the food was healthier too. Basic life skills.
- Petersipoi 2mo ago
  I really want the "cooking is too expensive" crowd to show me where they're getting their cheap food. I would struggle to make a homemade burger cost as much as a McDonalds quarter pounder. Even if I used twice as much beef.
  - customguy 2mo ago
    Of course there's also eating of bad, expensive food. But being pressed for time is a real thing for some people. And IMO more importantly, if we enjoy the fruits of economics of scale for sooo many production processes, why can't we with mass produced food? Nobody says "if you want a really good office chair you have to build it yourself". Same for shoes, cars, bikes, a million things. You can do that, make your own bike for example, but to get up to par you need to spend vastly more time and money, it's basically using more resources to be quirky or make an experiment etc. IMO the default expectation, demand, the thing we should organise to achieve, should be that what's available, what the market competes over, is good and gets better, regardless of the market. Not that it gets worse because the buyers get fleeced. Doubly so not food.
    - fragmede 2mo ago
      Because there are multiple competing axis for "good" as relates to food. There's tasty, and theres healthy, and there's inexpensive (time or money); pick two.
      - customguy 2mo ago
        What in my comment is that "because" supposed to connect to? > if we enjoy the fruits of economics of scale for sooo many production processes, why can't we with mass produced food? Nope, doesn't work. > There's tasty, and theres healthy, and there's inexpensive (time or money); pick two. You could say this about anything, you can either have cheap, good, and, say, extremely light-weight office-chars: pick two. That's absolutely orthogonal to what I said, and still applies to making your own vs. buying one that was made a lot cheaper be economics of scale. That trade-off applies in either case, so your comment is a complete no-op. Why are so many things cheaper and get ever cheaper, while things like food, housing, education, medicine don't? Why does productivity rise so much faster than wages? Because there are no adults you can even discuss this with without their uneasiness forcing them to blurt out something, anything. Because people in golden cages can't even sit with what is. That's a provocative claim, an invitation for me to be proven wrong, but at least it actually relates to proceeding and surrounding comments and isn't just something out of a farmer's calendar.
Amezarak 2mo ago
> Less and less people have time and money for that, for the same reason this stuff happens in the first place (i.e. greed and wealth consolidation). It takes very little time to prepare and cook most simple meals - if you want to dress it and garnish it and execute a 1000 step recipe, that is of course on you. For example, you can have a steak and potato (loaded with cheese and sour cream) as good as anything you get in a restaurant in under ten minutes. It is rarely faster to go out to eat. That is of course taking as a given that people really are working more hours, which I am very skeptical of and which BLS data does not support. I am sympathetic to people's arguments about cost and free time generally, but I think "cooking your own food" is mostly a victim of the increasingly sky-high value people place on convenience vs doing almost anything for themselves that constitutes "work" in their minds. It is definitely not true that money is the issue, as other commenters already mentioned.
- foxyv 2mo ago
  I think a lot of it is depression and anxiety causing executive dysfunction. The claim about "Lack of Time" usually indicates that the person doesn't have the energy or wellbeing to engage in activities like cooking or cleaning. If there is one thing that poverty and financial instability do, they destroy your mental and physical health.
HeyLaughingBoy 2mo ago
And here I was stupidly thinking that making meals at home was the default and eating out/getting takeout was the exception.
- jandrewrogers 2mo ago
  You would be correct. US BLS survey data consistently indicates that a majority of Americans cook at home and almost never eat out. Affluent urban professionals, of which there are many on HN, may have their perception of the world influenced by living in a bubble of people that eat out several times a week. Until I saw the BLS data, I assumed more people eat out than actually do because almost everyone I know falls into this category. But having been poor once, I definitively know you can eat cheaply and well by cooking at home.
carlosjobim 2mo ago
It's usually faster making a meal at home than ordering from a restaurant, if you are smart about it. And it's always cheaper and healthier as well. And tastier.

foxyv 2mo ago

What? I make things from scratch because I'm broke AF.

somenameforme 2mo ago
lol amen. I don't understand where this myth of it being expensive to do things yourself came from. It's not only cheaper but way way way cheaper. And that's comparing it to crap quality stuff. If you compare to what something of the same quality as you make would cost, then the difference is just ridiculous.
- AlexandrB 2mo ago
  I think the myth comes from the upfront costs of cooking equipment and spices as well as expensive proteins like ground beef. If you cook with mostly starches like rice or potatoes and just some meat, there's no contest. The other thing that can make cooking expensive is buying too many different ingredients to make a fancy dish and having a bunch of leftover stuff that gets thrown out. But that's where soups come in.
  - foxyv 2mo ago
    I think most people don't know how to cook cheap stuff and don't even know where to start. It is a bit of a learned skill. You get a repertoire of cheap but delicious menu items over time. It used to be that our parents would hand them down like sacred family heirlooms on notecards in a greasy metal box. But our parents were way richer than us and they only kept the most delicious ones. One big hit for me was having to create an entirely new set of recipes when I cut out meat from my diet. It got really hard because plant protein is way different from animal protein. The processed vegetarian stuff is insanely expensive too.
    - jandrewrogers 2mo ago
      Many of those old recipes on the notecards relied on heavily processed, shelf-stable industrial ingredients from a century ago that few people would use today. The recipes were commonly disseminated by companies as a form of marketing for their product. We have unimaginably superior access to diverse and fresh ingredients today compared to many of the recipes that e.g. my older relatives used. Modding those recipes to replace the dependency on heavily-processed ingredients with the fresh, less-processed comparables readily available today often produces good results, though it does take more time.
      - somenameforme 2mo ago
        Archive has a bunch of older recipe books. This [1] is a collection just from the 50s which would be primo processed time (mass canning/etc just after WW2). I could not find a single recipe with anything like what you're describing. [1] - https://archive.org/details/cbk?and%5B%5D=year%3A%221950%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221951%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221952%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221953%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221954%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221955%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221956%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221957%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221958%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221959%22 https://archive.org/details/cbk?and%5B%5D=year%3A%221950%22&...
        foxyv 2mo ago
        Blessed is the person who decided to exclude recipes from copyright law. They will forever hold a place in my heart.
        jandrewrogers 2mo ago
        That’s a limitation of your source. Several recipes that I’ve seen passed down from that era were like this. Many of those recipes have an origin that can be googled. I am an accomplished cook and I have a lot of recipes passed down a century or more first-hand. Many have the property I described. I know many other people with similar family recipes. Just because you’ve never heard of it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
- pjc50 2mo ago
  There's a specific category of people who get weird about this on social media. Shorthand for it is "burrito taxi discourse". There's usually a long list of excuses, some of which may have validity, some of which are a bit stretched. I don't know whether they're covering for their own insecurity or are just not prepared to accept that their own cooking is (necessarily) slightly worse than restaurant food even if it's much cheaper. Personally I sit at the middle level of this; in the UK there's a decent range of fresh refrigerated ready meals ("TV dinners" to Americans?) which are more expensive than cooking for yourself but less expensive than takeaway. This is mostly fine except you need to pick the gymbro protein-orientated branding in order to get a decent percentage of vegatables. Somehow this doesn't turn up in burrito taxi discourse.
  - somenameforme 2mo ago
    I definitely don't agree with this part. Home cooking is often significantly better than restaurants. Not only are cooking and running a restaurant very different skill sets (and 'just hire a really good chef' isn't really viable for a typical restaurant), but you also have issues of scale. Creating a diverse menu that can be created, on demand, in a short period of time imposes significant limitations on what you can produce. Another is that cheaping out on something in a dish at home can save you perhaps 60x over a month, but doing so at a restaurant can save you thousands of times that. So they tend to be using worse quality ingredients which end up being sold for much more because they're also needing to pay for labor, rent, electric, and much more - before they hopefully make some profit on the month. This is how you get things like fast food franchises typically being single digit profit margins enterprises in spite of selling large volumes of low quality food for relatively high prices. The comparison between home cooking and high end restaurants is certainly much closer, but also not entirely one-way. So for instance one issue I have with restaurant food is that it tends to be excessively salted. This is largely because the more people consume salt, the more they need of it to experience the same 'flavor'. It's kind of like a drug in that regard. So when somebody who minimizes the amount of salt they consume goes to a high end restaurant, it can often tastes like freebasing pure salt. I'm sure to their average customer it tastes fine, but it's subjective, and it's also why something like 100,000 Americans die per year of salt driven disease. To put that into scale we're already approaching (if have not already exceeded) more Americans dying of salt, over the past decade, than COVID.

jandrewrogers 2mo ago

Making food from scratch is cheap. It also doesn't take much time unless you want it to. Choosing not to cook has become performative learned helplessness. I was far more likely to cook from scratch when I was poor than when I was not. And honestly, the food was healthier too. Basic life skills.

Petersipoi 2mo ago
I really want the "cooking is too expensive" crowd to show me where they're getting their cheap food. I would struggle to make a homemade burger cost as much as a McDonalds quarter pounder. Even if I used twice as much beef.
- customguy 2mo ago
  Of course there's also eating of bad, expensive food. But being pressed for time is a real thing for some people. And IMO more importantly, if we enjoy the fruits of economics of scale for sooo many production processes, why can't we with mass produced food? Nobody says "if you want a really good office chair you have to build it yourself". Same for shoes, cars, bikes, a million things. You can do that, make your own bike for example, but to get up to par you need to spend vastly more time and money, it's basically using more resources to be quirky or make an experiment etc. IMO the default expectation, demand, the thing we should organise to achieve, should be that what's available, what the market competes over, is good and gets better, regardless of the market. Not that it gets worse because the buyers get fleeced. Doubly so not food.
  - fragmede 2mo ago
    Because there are multiple competing axis for "good" as relates to food. There's tasty, and theres healthy, and there's inexpensive (time or money); pick two.
    - customguy 2mo ago
      What in my comment is that "because" supposed to connect to? > if we enjoy the fruits of economics of scale for sooo many production processes, why can't we with mass produced food? Nope, doesn't work. > There's tasty, and theres healthy, and there's inexpensive (time or money); pick two. You could say this about anything, you can either have cheap, good, and, say, extremely light-weight office-chars: pick two. That's absolutely orthogonal to what I said, and still applies to making your own vs. buying one that was made a lot cheaper be economics of scale. That trade-off applies in either case, so your comment is a complete no-op. Why are so many things cheaper and get ever cheaper, while things like food, housing, education, medicine don't? Why does productivity rise so much faster than wages? Because there are no adults you can even discuss this with without their uneasiness forcing them to blurt out something, anything. Because people in golden cages can't even sit with what is. That's a provocative claim, an invitation for me to be proven wrong, but at least it actually relates to proceeding and surrounding comments and isn't just something out of a farmer's calendar.

Amezarak 2mo ago

> Less and less people have time and money for that, for the same reason this stuff happens in the first place (i.e. greed and wealth consolidation). It takes very little time to prepare and cook most simple meals - if you want to dress it and garnish it and execute a 1000 step recipe, that is of course on you. For example, you can have a steak and potato (loaded with cheese and sour cream) as good as anything you get in a restaurant in under ten minutes. It is rarely faster to go out to eat. That is of course taking as a given that people really are working more hours, which I am very skeptical of and which BLS data does not support. I am sympathetic to people's arguments about cost and free time generally, but I think "cooking your own food" is mostly a victim of the increasingly sky-high value people place on convenience vs doing almost anything for themselves that constitutes "work" in their minds. It is definitely not true that money is the issue, as other commenters already mentioned.

foxyv 2mo ago
I think a lot of it is depression and anxiety causing executive dysfunction. The claim about "Lack of Time" usually indicates that the person doesn't have the energy or wellbeing to engage in activities like cooking or cleaning. If there is one thing that poverty and financial instability do, they destroy your mental and physical health.

HeyLaughingBoy 2mo ago

And here I was stupidly thinking that making meals at home was the default and eating out/getting takeout was the exception.

jandrewrogers 2mo ago
You would be correct. US BLS survey data consistently indicates that a majority of Americans cook at home and almost never eat out. Affluent urban professionals, of which there are many on HN, may have their perception of the world influenced by living in a bubble of people that eat out several times a week. Until I saw the BLS data, I assumed more people eat out than actually do because almost everyone I know falls into this category. But having been poor once, I definitively know you can eat cheaply and well by cooking at home.

carlosjobim 2mo ago

It's usually faster making a meal at home than ordering from a restaurant, if you are smart about it. And it's always cheaper and healthier as well. And tastier.