this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024
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Science of Cooking
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Welcome to c/cooking @ Mander.xyz!
We're focused on cooking and the science behind how it changes our food. Some chemistry, a little biology, whatever it takes to explore a critical aspect of everyday life.
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What shite is this? Any excuse to not blame the companies gouging ...
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:
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.)
All very true! I just don't like the trend of blaming the consumer.