I mean, it’s great to suggest that cooking should be taught in schools, but if everyone in your house works I doubt anyone is going to have the motivation to cook on a regular basis, or retool their existing menu. It’s not the physical act of cooking that saves you money, it’s hitting a few targets:
Does it look good? Does it taste good? Is it nutritious? Is it cost effective?
If, as the article states, people have four core recipes and aren’t making cost saving substitutions… then households have probably come to a subconscious decision that it simply isn’t worth the time cost of figuring out substitutions. Inflation has just made everyone that much poorer.
Any time I read an article title like this, I imagine the ‘experts’ to be 4 old retired farmers meeting for their morning coffee at McDonald’s and jackjaw.
You should definitely blame the companies, but there should be alternatives until/unless companies change their pricing models, and the alternative is to cook.
So if this article is a wake up call to those who should learn to cook and don’t (I know some people who door dash twice a week on a 60k$ salary… I mean wtf), then it’s a good impact.
When it comes to food, there is a trade off between the cost of things and the amount of time needed to prepare those things. Cooking things from scratch is almost always cheaper in terms of money and most expensive in terms of time. If you are strapped for time, you’re going to probably be more willing/need to pay more for food that doesn’t require as much preparation. Even if you arent ordering uber eats every 5 minutes, there are a lot of other ways that people pay for more time. eg. canned beans instead of dry, tv dinners instead of literally anything else etc.
I argued some of that here. If you know how to cook, it’s not time consuming at all. As I said, my wife can make delicious devilled eggs seemingly appear out of thin air, and we eat on those for days.
She just whipped up a batch of raw hamburger meat loaded with onions and garlic. I can make a hamburger out of that as fast, or even faster, than waiting 10-15 in the McDonald’s drive through. And again, once made I can eat on that all week long.
Two things can be true at once. Straight from the article:
It’s important to note, however, that cooking skills alone cannot solve the affordability problem
Anecdotally, I only know a handful of Americans, of any age, who can cook much of anything. In contrast, my wife is Philippina and all those girls can cook. When you grow up poor, you learn.
For us Americans, food’s been stupid cheap for decades. Why learn to cook? I think that’s caused some cultural weirdness. I remember my ex-wife and I talking cooking to my Millennial niblings. They thought cooking was more expensive! They would start with an empty fridge and pantry, buy everything for a given recipe and complain how much a single meal cost. You see where I’m going with this. 🙄
More weirdness, or ignorance, is thinking that cooking is time consuming and burdensome. Not if you can cook! First couple of times my wife asked if I wanted devilled eggs I thought, “Hell yes I do! Really don’t want to wait that long…” (minutes later…) “Here you are babe.” Still don’t know how she does that.
Same goes for growing some food. It’s easy and cheap if you learn the skills. You can hardly kill or screw up potatoes, onions, peppers, garlic, etc. Stick it in the ground, come back later, receive food.
Now that food’s not cheap, we should learn to cook. Maybe that’s a good thing? Given our obesity “epidemic”, people having to cook healthier meals sounds like a win. Also, the market will adjust food prices down when people aren’t buying fast food. I’ve all but completely quit eating out. And I’ve lost a bit of my little beer gut. Imagine that.
(LOL, sorry OP. Stuck on the phone with customer service so I dropped a novel on you.)
Yeah they do. All of these shows are almost unilaterally using fresh produce and easy to access pantry items. If you can’t watch a Kenji for a few weeks and figure out how to do a simple trip to the grocery store then PEBKAC.
A lot of cookbooks give you the steps, but not enough tell you what steps are most important, and what, specifically, you need to be paying attention to to get the best results. The food lab does stuff like telling you how the salt changes the chemistry of scrambled eggs, then doing samples of "cook immediately after scrambling", "wait 3 minutes", "wait 5 minutes", "wait 15 minutes" and showing pictures of how it changes the outcome, before telling you his conclusions.
When you understand the core bits, it allows you a lot more flexibility and variety in how you do the surrounding bits. (I like Flour Water Salt Yeast for bread for the same reason.) Too many cook books are more recipe books that don't teach the fundamentals.
Yeah, I think overall, skill is going up, but I literally don’t know any millennial (or younger) couples where both people do not work. I can make a hell of a good meal out of anything, as can almost all of my peers, but the mental load and time required to effectively plan and execute a range of meals throughout the week is just too high for most people who work. Most traditional poor food is just stuff that takes time and/or labor to cook. Braises and barbecues, porridges like grits or oats, soups and stews.
I might grab some of whatever I see on sale at the grocery store, but I’m not planning anything ahead of time unless there’s a special occasion meal.
To take advantage of a ham going on sale, you need to plan one meal of ham + sides, and the ham likely takes a few hours to warm up. Another meal after could be baked beans with ham (which require overnight soaking) to be planned ahead, and several hours of baking. Another meal might be pea soup with the ham bone, another meal that takes a while to prepare. Most people just don’t have the time for that. When I want to make baked beans, I end up just buying a small chunk of country ham at a greater markup.
If your problem for meal planning is the lack of imagination, ChatGPT is surprisingly good at coming with easy to cook diverse meals. I’m not even kidding. LLMs are great at regurgitating info they read somewhere meshed together, and that’s what planning is.
Nah, that’s insane. Both my wife and I work 40 hours a week and raise a toddler.
If you are doing 60 hours weeks sure that’s valid but at the risk of being called boomer that’s some bullshit. It takes 2 hours tops to shop every week and a half hour to make a decent meal. You have plenty of time to do that on a 40 hour week.
Yeah, definitely still possible, but my point is that wages no longer support having one person that can devote their whole day to cooking/cleaning/etc. No matter how good you are at cooking dinner in 30 minutes, you would be able to make better and cheaper meals given 8 hours.
I honestly don’t think that really true though. Frozen and fresh produce + protein, beans, rice is about as cheap as you get. Maaaaybe you save a few bucks buying in bulk at Costco but that’s an extreme for limited gains. And adding time to food prep doesn’t necessarily make it better. You can eat very very well in the US on 5 hours and $100 a week.
Buying in bulk can actually realize significant savings. It’s definitely true that more active time does not directly translate to more savings, especially with just a little planning. Lots of food is happy to cook itself while you wait.
I wouldn’t even say 2 hours of shopping time, but yeah. I hate shopping, so I run in and out, 30 minutes tops. I commented here, but I think the problem is people don’t know how to cook. They find a recipe online, hunt all over the store for the ingredients, go home, cook it up, look at the time spent. Now they have leftover ingredients and think those are a waste.
If you already know a few dozen things you like, you already know where to find those ingredients in the store. And whatever your tastes, there’s bound to be crossover. I love me some Mexican. With the same few ingredients, I can make loads of different dishes.
Learning takes time up front, just like any skill. And yeah, you’ll spend money ramping up the pantry and fridge, and you’ll waste money starting out. Figuring out how to feed yourself is part of growing up.
All the cheap cuts of meat that we used to eat when we were growing up e.g. pork belly, lamb belly and beef shin, are now not cheap because the middle classes started eating them thanks to the proliferation of tv cooks.
The tech has improved, too. I’m not going to blame anyone but big Ag for the pricing though. I don’t think the demand created by the proliferation of sous vide, pressure cookers and air fryers caused the current problem.
Ultimately, there is not a single problem that I see around me that is not either caused directly or greatly exacerbated by Capitalism/Class War being prosecuted by the ruling class. For the purposes of casual conversation I sometimes will, as in this case, just talk about the circumstances that the ruling class have caused to come into being but it’s always those greedy bastards fault and when you talk about big Ag then you’re talking in most cases about the descendants of people that stole land from the commonweal. Class war every time.
Seriously, food is more expensive in all its forms. We only cook and our grocery bill is up 50% in the last few years. If you aren't getting true COL raises there is no way to adapt.
Right but what if the cheapest food is idk, something like celery root? I think the idea w/the thesis of the article is that a skilled cook can adapt to whatever ingredients are cheapest at any moment.
I think I’m a decent cook but I also think I need to improve because when I’m in the produce area and have no idea how to use like 15—20% of the options there. E.g. celery root, cactus, and ½ dozen things I don’t even recognize.
Sorry, but my point was even shopping cheapest only is getting too expensive now. Poor people have always been buying cheap produce only. That strategy doesn’t help when the floor for prices is rising. So if something as basic as cheap as cabbage—the canonical broke peasant food—is like $1.25/lb where it used to be $0.25/lb, the problem isn’t the %15-20 of vegetables you don’t know how to cook!
Indeed… now that we can simply enter a couple ingredients into a search field and get countless recipes, and also w/Youtube, I would expect people to be better equipped in recent decades.
It’s also that in the past not every member of the household worked. You can save money by baking your own bread but it takes time people don’t always have.
It depends on what you’re baking at home. You can make a very basic bread from flour, salt, water and yeast. Sourdough can be even cheaper because you can perpetuate the starter and not really need to buy yeast. The cheapest sourdough recipe costs about 2.8 cents an ounce to make and cheapo walmart bread costs 6.6 cents an ounce. If you make something fancier you could probably save more over the equivalent store bought BUT it takes a lot more time and work to do that. You are effectively trading your time for extra control over your food and potentially, spending less money on the ingredients than it would have cost to buy an equivalent.
Weren’t bread machines all the rage because you just dump in the ingredients and it’s autopilot from there? I see a lot of them at 2nd markets and in dumpsters, so I wonder if their usefulness was overestimated.
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