Stop being poor, buy real food, why didn’t anyone else think of this years ago.
Rice and dried beans and veggies are still pretty cheap, for now at least.
If you can get them.
I’m lucky to live somewhere where I have a selection of supermarkets that I can walk to which all stock fresh foods for reasonable prices, sounds like you’re in a similar situation.
In America they have loads of these “food deserts” (old article now, but it’s gotten worse) where the only place you can buy food without having to drive an hour, is a Dollar General store that only sells shelf stable, processed rubbish. There’s no amount of money you can spend in those towns to get anything fresh, not that the residents typically have much to spend anyway.
Those residents also can’t often afford to live anywhere else, or they’d have already moved; so they’re kinda of stuck in a situation that’ll make their lives worse with very little they can do to remediate it themselves.
Pretty sure you can buy rice and beans at dollar general? I have to go off search engine previews though, because the website doesn’t work for me (and I don’t live near any)
Edit: missed they said veggies, I guess that’s where the issue is. But canned veggies are better than a lot of other foods you could be buying, even if they are “processed”.
Even when they advertise stuff they are out all the time. The family dollar in my nearest food desert will be out of rice more times than not and the beans are more expensive than the grocery store in the next town they can’t afford to get to. It’s abysmal.
yes, but they don’t taste good and take more time to prepare than processed foods. they require time and skill to make them tasty and they veggies go back super fast.
cooking, let alone good cooking, is a skill that you acquire with a lot of time and patience and practice. most people are not willing to put 100s of hours into a thing. they will try a few times, it will taste like shit, and they will give up.
Not nearly as cheap as they used to be. Vegetables are getting expensive.
Farro is my go-to cheap meal. Bags of 10 minute farro at Trader Joe’s for less than $2.
The internet is available and recipes are searchable. Cooking can be learned as an adult. As a child I learned how to cook on PBS by watching the frugal gourmet and Julia Childs. Cookbooks are a thing.
The time issue is why people are eating pre-made, processed foods.
Below is an example of what it takes for me to make a pizza from scratch in terms of ingredients and time.
Cost of store brand premade pizza: $6-8, 15 minutes cook time, versus Cost of homemade pizza:
$2.50 for half block of store brand mozzarella cheese (Pre-shredded cheese has additives in it to keep it from clumping.)
1/2 onion - $1.00
2 cloves garlic $0.25
4 ounces tomato paste $0.50
Dry basil, oregano, bay leaf, parsley, paprika $0.10
2 cups flour $0.30
Packet of yeast $0.30
Total cost of ingredients: $4.95 Ingredient wise, I’m saving $1-3.
Prep time/clean time: Making dough, chopping veg, making sauce, shredding cheese, bake time, and washing dishes, is 2.5 hours (My hourly wage is $28) so that’s a $70 cost in terms of time. That cost will be variable depending on a person’s hourly wage.
Making a pizza from scratch has a cost of $74.95 for me. Yeah that homemade pizza is cheaper ingredient wise, and has better ingredients without added sugar, salt, or preservatives, but I could buy 10-15 store brand pizzas by just working for 2.5 hours instead. For a person making $15 an hour, that labor is costing them $37.50, and they could buy 5-7 pizzas bu just working 2.5 hours.
We all get 24 hours in a day, but they are not equal. If you don’t live close to work, or have to rely on public transit, you could spend 4 hours of your day commuting, on top of an 8 hour work day. My eating habits improved when I had a 15 minute commute which gave me time to cook and clean.
I think part of the problem is people aren’t taught how to cook anymore, either by family or by schools. They’ll SAY “Oh, I don’t have time.” and that may be partly true, but you get down to it they don’t have the knowledge or practice that takes the time out of it.
If you don’t know what to do in the kitchen, yeah, fast food, ready to eat, prepared pre-packaged food is it.
Someone linked here to an article about inflation in US some time ago. It was talking about an older lady that couldn’t make cookies any more because the pre-made cookie mix she uses has different size now and her recipe doesn’t work. It was just mind boggling to me. Cooking and baking is not that difficult. I’m just an IT guy and I can bake. You just follow the recipe, it’s not rocket science. If older generations can’t follow a cookie mix recipe I don’t even want to imagine what young people eat.
And more on the topic. I do check ingredients on most things I buy and if I can’t find something without preservatives I just make it. Yesterday I was making tortillas for tacos because the ones in stores have lots of additives. It’s really simple but definitely more difficult than cookie mix recipe.
All the Boomers’ recipes were designed to use boxed, processed ingredients. Think green bean casserole with Campbell’s® Cream Of Mushroom Soup and French’s® Original Crispy Fried Onions, for example. “Modern” “convenience foods” were all the rage when they were growing up and it shows.
In USA right? My grandparents (which would have been boomers if I’m not mistaken) here in Europe have never been seen using that kind of crap. They were doing their cans and crap and all kind of horrific preservation methods but they always did 100%. They, and my parents as well, had cooking courses in school. They were also very much into foraging, hunting, fishing… all due to living through and after the war.
most people can’t follow directions. let alone do fractional math conversions that are required for converting recipies.
I’m pretty sure the new recipe in printed on the box. You can also look up new recipe that doesn’t use the mix and just follow it. What I mean is that is someone only knows one recipe by heart and is unable to learn a new one it means they can’t cook and if old people can’t cook then well… the skill of cooking in the society must be completely gone by now.
you are making assumptions that people can do what you can do, or that they are willing/want to do it.
they can’t/don’t.
other people aren’t you.
I’m not assuming people can cook. My whole point is that they can’t.
My grandmother was a great cook and also liked to cook, but she still needed my grandfather to do the very basic math to convert the recipe ratios in function of the amount of guests. She wasn’t stupid, she just left school at 13yo to help in the house and the only math that she did after that was counting.
All that to say: It’s not because it’s easy for you, that it’s easy for everyone.
I think the level of basic education in US is another issue and it’s possible both have impact here. My mother only finished primary school in some tiny village in the middle of nowhere in communist Poland and still has broad general knowledge, likes to read books and yes, can scale recipes without issues.
I’m not from the USA, neither was my grandmother. Irregardless of that, even if we were from the USA, my grandmother would have left school decades before the USA education system fell behind that of other Western nations.
My grandmother also read books and a non stupid daily news paper, but she still couldn’t do basic arithmetics. It wasn’t about intellect, sometimes it’s opportunity and exposure, or maybe the unique wrinkles in our brain. There’s all sorts of people, not everyone is able to do the same things, so grow some empathy.
Anyway, I don’t think math is that important here. I remember a TED talk I saw about cooking. It was talking about the decline of cooking at home in US and how when when people (well, women specifically because traditionally they do most of the cooking) are not good at cooking kids start associating home made meals with bad food and eating out with tasty food. Where I’m from, 30 years ago eating out was not a thing. As a kid I didn’t understand what restaurants are for (“I guess some people are traveling and can’t cook?”). I know how to cook, all my friends know how to cook, their kids know how to cook. So when I’m reading about old lady using pre-made cookie mix and not knowing how to follow a basic recipe it tells me that culture of cooking died there long time ago. Math is a secondary issue here.
That lady is 1 person, there’s no indication that she’s representative of the USA population as a whole. To see 1 person and then assume that everyone else in her country must be like her, is a very stupid generalization. Your opinion is based on prejudice, not reason. So far you’ve shown a tendency for victim blaming, a lack of empathy towards individuals that are left behind & prejudice towards all US Americans. Should I assume from that that all Poles lack empathy, and are full of prejudices about other people? Of course not, because you’re only 1 person and therefore too small a sample size to make a sweeping generalization like that.
Yeah, I’m also sexist and racist because I don’t cite data all the time.
That 1 lady is just an example. We’re commenting below an article about overly processed food, we keep hearing about food deserts and low food quality in US (lot’s of this stuff can’t be even exported to Europe). You want some data? Here: https://www.gallup.com/analytics/512897/global-cooking-research.aspx
EU is were people cook the most. US ranks somewhere in the middle. US is also the dominant market for frozen and microwave ready meals. No idea why would you assume I’m basing my opinions on a case of a single lady. It’s just weird. I’m not going to back up everyone comment with full bibliography. You can just assume most people know more then they have time to write down in a single comment.
Yeah, I hit the same thing with a chocolate cheesecake recipe of mine. It calls for a 12 ounce bag of miniature chocolate chips.
The “good” brand chips are all 10 ounce and 20 ounce bags now. Fortunately I found a store brand that was 12 ounces.
I do have a kitchen scale so it would have been possible to buy the 20 ounce bag and measure out 12 ounces…but still!
I personally think society should be set up so that everyone doesn’t have to cook. Look at Japan for instance
most people don’t want to cook because it takes effort and time. they are lazy.
Such a lovely paywall, yes it is.
CNN, really?
This article is for subscribers only. Do you subscribe to CNN?
I don’t, but I do have bypass paywalls clean. Sorry, I didn’t realize CNN had subscriber-only content.
