Where is the next cheap lentils/legumes/nuts/yogurt/vegetables fast food restaurant?
I think it's a weird concept of a society where all the parts of it with money are directing people to do one thing - but at the same time, the people are expected to do the exact opposite and it's their own fault if they follow the coercion...
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
"It is very easy to learn. If I could learn it, so can anyone else. :P "
Well, the Neanderthals cooked, so it is not exactly a rocket engineering skill ... but it is probably acquired better from other people than alone, and equipment matters as well.
If you learn to cook from your mother in a well-equipped kitchen, you will probably enjoy the process a lot more than alone with Youtube in a cheaply rented flat with one pot, one dull knife and two dented plastic plates. And if people don't enjoy some learning process, they are much more likely to drop out and resign. Especially if fast food alternatives lurk at them from their smartphones.
The best way to start cooking is probably with a knife, cutting board, an 8" or 10" skillet, and a small saucepan (i.e. little soup pot). There are pans that can work as the last two, but it helps to be able to have two pans at hand, e.g. for making rice while cooking the protein and/or vegetables, even if all you have is a single burner. And none have to be fancy. A cheap soft wood cutting board helps your cheap knife stay sharper for longer.
Outside baking, that's basically all you need, at least if you're alone. Cooking for two or especially a family is when you need more equipment as time savers and for variability, e.g. mandolin, pressure cooker, etc.
I'd venture to say this is how many people have learned to cook, and even how many avid cookers continue to cook.
If you're starting out, canned food and pasta is definitely your friend, not to mention cheap. You can start to learn to cook by boiling a pot of water for your instant Ramen, and frying an egg to toss into the bowl. Or just soft boil an egg in the boiling water and set side before doing the Ramen in the same water. Building meals around something packaged and precooked is useful and can help save money (outside beans and rice, fresh ingredients are sadly often more expensive than what you can cobble together from pantry staples).
I come from a very poor family, and I am Eastern European... so we had very "shitty" equipments. We peeled our potatoes using a knife, too. I wonder how foreign it is to others.
I have never learned to cook from anyone. I just read the recipes and/or watch some videos and that is literally it. My kitchen is not as equipped as it is in rich households.
Ordering food is ideal, but super expensive, so I personally cannot afford to do that.
Aren't you Martin Janiczek? Bro, if true, you're not helping our collective effort to resurrect "Central Europe" in colloquial use :)
We had a weird assortment of equipment as well, some dating back to Masaryk, but it was usually durable and reliable. That is why we also kept it; late stage Communism was terrible at producing durable consumer goods, while old stuff lasted for decades.
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.
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.
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.
I'm male, and I was never taught to cook nor prepare a meal. And I do not like cooking one little bit yet I can prepare a meal that all but the most fussy would eat. And I'm talking about a meal with multiple parts—meat, three vegetables with condiments, and bread etc. then say finishing with a desert.
Basic cooking is profoundly easy, and for most it's instinctive, after all one has to eat, so there's incentive. In fact I have never knowing met anyone who couldn't prepare a basic meal that would not at least sustain them and other members of a family. It's true I've met people whose food preparation leaves much to be desired and I'd prefer to avoid their cooking but the food they prepared was definitely edible.
"You seem to take the ability of people to cook for granted."
Right, I've lived my whole life in a world where everyone I know well takes one's ability to prepare a basic meal for granted, it's something that's not even contemplated it's so elementary. In fact, when reading your comment my initial reaction was as this isn't April 1st he must be winding us up for the sake of argument.
If what what you say is true and there are significant numbers of people who can't cook then to me this is a startling revelation. Similarly, I'd not previously heard of Jamie Oliver's questioning of school kids and revealing their ignorance of food types but that's not surprising given that cooking programs bore me to tears. That said, the first thing I'd no doubt agree with Oliver about is that this ignorance is truly shocking, and second we'd be questioning how did we arrive at this disgraceful situation when it would have been inconceivable several generations ago.
How can someone not pick up the basics of food preparation after seeing it done several times? Even if like me one doesn't like cooking, at three meals a day it's hard to completely avoid watching those who are preparing one's food—so the normal human gets lots of experience even if they only see food preparation infrequently.
Even with my disinterest in cooking I picked the skill up by simply being around the kitchen at meal times. By age 10 I could easily prepare a decent meal, that's just how it was for the average person.
My grandmother cooked daily and taught her kids to cook. My mother cooked weekly and taught us to use the microwave. Sure anyone can learn to cook, just like anyone can learn to play the piano, but it requires time, money, dedication, and the push to get started. It’s much easier if you were taught some of the basics as a kid, or had an example in your life.
It still baffles me that people compare cooking to playing an instrument. It really is not that difficult to cook, depending on what it is. Do people know how to make schnitzel (breadcrumbed meat)? Make fries? Make rice? Make boiled potatoes? Or are those things difficult as well? Making a stew out of legumes is not that difficult either. Boil your legumes, then mix eggs, flour, and paprika together, put it in oil, heat it up for a few seconds, then pour everything into the water you are boiling your legumes in. Put some herbs to your liking. That is literally it. Healthy, delicious stew of any legumes.
Agreed. The analogies to playing a musical instrument or speaking a foreign language are pretty silly.
Cooking (provided you have access to some simple cookware) is literally printing out the recipe and FOLLOWING THE DAMN INSTRUCTIONS. If that’s beyond someone’s abilities then I weep for the general state of mankind.
You can get good enough cookware for the price of a couple of McDonald's meals too. We don't all need $100 pots and pans. I feel like the people arguing that cooking is a giant obstacle can't be doing it in good faith. Watch a YouTube video and throw a couple of eggs in a $10 pan already.
If someone can afford fast food, they can afford enough utensils or equipments, too.
As I said, I come from a poor family and we only went to the McDonalds to get fast food when I was sick (because I craved it), so very rarely. Fast food was for special occasions due to its high price as opposed to cooking at home, as a poor family.
"I feel like the people arguing that cooking is a giant obstacle can't be doing it in good faith. "
I am one of those people and I am arguing in good faith. I have seen it with my own eyes.
It is not "just" skills or "just" kitchen or "just" utensils or "just" unfamiliarity with the basics or "just" being tired after getting home late (poor people often work bad schedules). It is a bit of everything, and the resulting complex is hard to disentangle.
On a similar note, have you never seen, e.g., obese people who never exercise? It is again a bit of everything. They are not used to it, they feel bad when starting, they can easily overdo it, they feel ashamed going into a gym etc. All this summed together results in avoidant behavior, even though no single reason dominates it.
Yes, all those obstacles can be overcome, but we shouldn't expect everyone to just simply leap over them. All humans aren't built this way. If they were, humanity as a whole would look a lot different than it does.
My point was that if a person learns to cook early in life, they will consider it more natural and most of those obstacles will be easier to overcome for them. They will have all the circuits wired in, so to say.
I have a similar experience when exercising. I was never obese, but my mother never exercised. Simply never. (Ironically, at 74, she is in perfect health.) And thus, I didn't understand how exercise even makes sense as a kid. I had to learn it for years. It is hard to describe how challenging is it to adjust your mindset and rhythm of life to something that was completely alien to you in your first 20 years of life, especially if that activity is optional and there is no external pressure. You can do it, but various relapses and "falling off the wagon" are way more frequent than if that activity is second nature to you.
If we want to fix things on societal level, we must be realistic. Recipes like "just do X", where X is something nontrivial, feel good and easy (especially to doers of X), but they don't have a good track record in actually achieving society-wide changes. They work for some individuals, but they have a scaling problem.
Maintaining a fast food habit is both expensive and non-trivial. For the people who have to drive to get their fast food, at least you know they are capable of learning something more complex than cooking.
OK, so how do you explain that people don't cook, especially the ones who are relatively poor and could save some money doing so?
I have been engaging in this thread for a day now and harvesting downvotes. I would certainly love to see some competing theories and dig into them instead.
> Cooking (provided you have access to some simple cookware) is literally printing out the recipe and FOLLOWING THE DAMN INSTRUCTIONS. If that’s beyond someone’s abilities then I weep for the general state of mankind.
I mean, if you don't understand how badly the US educational system is failing people then I don't know what you expect. There are a large amount and growing amount of people that are barely literate and can only follow basic instructions. This is by design because we're starving our educational systems and creating a two-tiered society where people either receive private education or no education at all. It should come at zero surprise that people can't cook because they were never taught how to cook nor how to even learn and integrate that knowledge.
My parents for example were fishermen, neither of them are functionally able to cook anything beyond tossing some meat in a crockpot and some rice in a rice cooker. Everything I know about cooking was shit I had to pick up on my own and it's only because I'm both literate and computer savvy that I can grasp and integrate these things smoothly.
While the US education system is plenty bad, I expect that a substantial number of people who can't/don't cook are not held back due to illiteracy. To be fair, this thread seems to be discussing recipes and dishes, but even "tossing some meat in a crockpot and some rice in a rice cooker" is an improvement from ordering fast food.
It's not difficult per se, but you can't throw anyone into a kitchen and expect food to be made as a result. You still need to be taught to some extent. The bar is a lot lower than playing an instrument or many other things, but there's still a bar below which (edible) food will not be made. If you've never been taught and never went out of your way to learn, you won't know how to.
Some people get out of school not being able to read and write, at least to any meaningful degree. The fact that some people get out of school not being able to cook thus shouldn't be surprising.
I got down-voted, which is odd, because I truly have not encountered anyone here in Hungary who do not know how to read nor write. The only demographic that may difficulties with that are gypsies because they typically do not go to school.
Additionally, is it not common knowledge the US education system is bad?
The 'meaningful' part of my original comment is carrying a lot of weight there. Most people are literate in the literal sense of that word, but I went to class with people who have not read a written work longer than five pages sine they went out of school, and I would not trust them to read an even vaguely complicated instruction manual without me explaining something to them. They are not literate in any meaningful sense of that word. They barely knew how to read when we took our final exams, but they did pass, since no-one wants to deal with the trouble of actually teaching them now. They're good people. The schools just failed them.
I could barely write when I got out school, in the sense that I couldn't read my own handwriting. I had to be taught anew when I learned a language that uses a different script, and that practice made my normal handwriting 10 times better.
And this is before you get into people who for most intents and purposes apparently can read, but their brain grinds to a halt when a computer requires them to do that very same activity and act accordingly. I'm not sure of those people have a similar problem of functional illiteracy, or if it's a problem of a different kind, but it sure is real and sure keeps happening.
For someone raised around music, starting a new instrument might not sound very challenging. You could get good at twinkle twinkle little star on the recorder in under an hour. Take carpentry as another example. It’s not hard. It’s not expensive to get into. But, if you never had someone in your life who was into it, then it just never occurs to you to try it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> I think it's a weird concept of a society where all the parts of it with money are directing people to do one thing - but at the same time, the people are expected to do the exact opposite and it's their own fault if they follow the coercion...
You've summed up the foundation of our entire consumer economy quite well. And people might be able to devote their attention to several types of things they need and not fall prey to adversarial pop culture for those specific things, but nobody is capable of doing that for everything.
That doesn’t make sense in any way. People eat what they learn to eat and what’s available. Choice doesn’t enter into the picture unless something sort of bumps you out of your normal headspace and makes you think about it in the first place.
> Where is the next cheap lentils/legumes/nuts/yogurt/vegetables fast food restaurant?
Nowhere, because people prefer to pay for excess sat fats, sugar, carbs, and salt.
> I think it's a weird concept of a society where all the parts of it with money are directing people to do one thing - but at the same time, the people are expected to do the exact opposite and it's their own fault if they follow the coercion...
Every single health resource in society says not to eat excess sat fats, sugar, carbs, and salt. And avoid alcohol and tobacco. And gambling.
But people like short term benefits, even if they know there are long term consequences. And society is composed of people. Maybe GLP-1 pills can fix this error in the psyche.
There are plenty of these restaurants all around the world, they’re just not cheap. Poke bowls and salads and Sweetgreen are very popular, go to any downtown anywhere. But where McDonald’s uses shelf-stable, globally sourcable bulk materials, these places are the opposite. Both Coke and salads are mostly water, but the Coke ships as a concentrate and the salad ships whole. You can sign one contract and get a regular, reliable delivery of Coke to your stores in Houston, Anchorage and everywhere between; good luck doing that with salad. There also aren’t any great huge-markup upsells with healthy foods; the closest thing is guac, which costs a ton, meanwhile McDonalds can upsell you on fries or coke (which are basically free!) There’s the trend factor: Baja Blast is catchy and you can rotate it out for another neon soda in a week, how do you do that with arugula? Artificial ingredients provide more of a moat/proprietary edge; it is legally and practically trivial to copy a healthy sandwich. Healthy foods are more difficult to eat while walking or driving, so you need more seating. Then there’s the prep time, the addictive factor, calorie density…
I am without a kitchen for the last month (remodel) and I just use my microwave. There's nothing magic about cooking. Take cold things and make them hot. How are people managing to be this daft? You can cook rice, pasta, lentils, etc in a bowl and a microwave.
Pollan touches on this in The Omnivore's Dilemma. The low price of a burger is an illusion because the real costs to the environment and public health are externalized, making fast food artificially cheap due to indirect subsidies on corn byproducts and other animal feed. Healthy food competes on a totally different cost base.
There's also the split between eating with agency and just consuming which requires a top down solution. Unless the government stops subsidizing meat and corn subproducts linked to health issues the majority of people will always gravitate towards the cheapest calories available.
one thing i miss about living in a city is being near a hare krishna restaurant or similar hindu place, like ones run by the sikh community. cheap, healthy and yum. some would offer free food to homeless or if you went to one at a temple it was pay-by-donation. sometimes the donation was just being there and singing the hare krishna song with them :D
I think it's a weird concept of a society where all the parts of it with money are directing people to do one thing - but at the same time, the people are expected to do the exact opposite and it's their own fault if they follow the coercion...