There are a few reasons. One is that soda is marketed extremely heavily by Coke and Pepsi as a very normal drink to have all of the time. The other is that is pushed in restaurants a lot as it has a huge profit margin, similar to alcohol but you can have it as a child; relatedly children get a taste for it as its very sweet and sets people up from child hood. Another is that corn syrup is heavily subsidized, and is in food everywhere here, and very few families have a house wife cooking food from scratch these days. So processed food with sugar additives is normal giving people these addictions and cravings.
You don't need a personal chef to cook non processed food at home, not even a stay at home housewife of 60's. This is the most privileged thing I hear Americans repeating. All the raw ingredients are there at your supermarkets, cheap prices compared to your wages. I've seen it with my own eyes from visiting. It's just laziness and saving time, billions of people around the world cook at home from raw ingredients. They also go to work.
People are lazy and prefer to replace it with netflix which I don't have a problem with until people lie to themselves and others about the reasons.
I agree with this. A combo meal at McDonalds is $8 or $9 per person these days, meanwhile, a (relatively) healthy supermarket meal easily cooked on the stovetop in the time it takes to wait in a drive-thru costs $1 or $2 per person. I don't buy into the idea that Americans eat processed unhealthy foods because of their personal financial situation.
> a (relatively) healthy supermarket meal easily cooked on the stovetop in the time it takes to wait in a drive-thru
Don't get me wrong, I don't disagree with your overall point....but what drive-thrus do you use?
A home-cooked meal for me takes at MINIMUM an hour. Prep, cooking, eating, cleanup. If it takes less than that, then it's probably a lot of pre-made/processed stuff that isn't particularly healthy in itself.
The only way I've been able to get around it with my work schedule is to meal-prep on weekends. Making stuff in bulk helps, but it's still 3-5 hours of my precious weekend used up.
You're doing it wrong. There's so many ways to cook a quick healthy cheap meal.
I cook 6 chicken breasts at a time, that way I have chicken for today and the next 5 days. It takes less than 5 minutes of your time to put chicken breasts on a sheet pan and then step away for 20 minutes while they bake in the oven. Then one minute to wash the sheet pan when they are done. There's 6 minutes of my time for 6 days of chicken breasts.
Then there's so many ways to use the pre-cooked chicken breasts. One day ill chop one up mix with mayo, and mustard to make chicken salad and apply to some toast. 5 minute chicken salad sandwiches.
Next day I'll chop the chicken Breast up mix with taco seasoning microwave for 1 minute and apply to taco shells with lettuce and tomato. 5 minute tacos.
Next day I'll microwave a chicken breast with some mixed veggies. 5 minute chicken and veggies.
Next day I'll microwave the chicken breast apply to some toast with lettuce,tomato, mayo. 5 minute chicken sandwich.
That was just some things you can do with a chicken breast. There's so many meals you can prepare in less than 5 minutes that is healthier and cheaper than anything you get going out to eat.
I used to cook chicken breasts whole until I discovered that cutting them up and then cooking them turns out way better. You end up cutting them up eventually, whether it's to put in a recipe or eat. But cutting and trimming 6 chicken breasts does take a while. The supermarkets are usually pretty good at removing the fat and icky parts, but there are still sometimes bits of gristle or even occasionally bone fragments. That said, it's well worth the extra effort.
For years I could never figure out how my favorite Thai restaurant makes the chicken in the Basil Chicken dish have such a great texture. Now that I cut the chicken before cooking, I get similar results. Now if I could only get the seasonings right.
But aside from that, your recipe ideas are excellent, and I do a lot of the same kinds of things. Chicken and veggies, usually done as a stir-fry kind of thing (and with a good wok, you don't even need to add oil, although I usually put a little in).
Another item I can't live without is garlic paste. I put that in almost everything, and my wife always gives me a hard time for buying so much of it, but I use it that much. Besides, we've had an agreement for many years: She doesn't like cooking, so I do most of it. And there are few things more satisfying than having your wife just raving about some excellent dish you've prepared (ditto the kids). That alone is enough encouragement for me to keep doing it, but I get to enjoy it as well.
Chicken breast is my go-to for easy meals, but lately I've also been using tilapia filets a lot. They're relatively inexpensive... for fish... and very easy to prepare. For a treat I'll use salmon filets or tuna steaks. I love both, but my wife really prefers the tuna.
I have a number of similar dishes based on ground beef, too, (like chili) but since that's been going up in price more than chicken, I've been using it a bit less these days.
Pork loins and chops are another good protein that's easy to cook, and not too expensive, but chicken often wins because it's the cheapest of all.
FWIW, I don't go out to eat that often. I don't cook much either, except for weekend prep as mentioned. When I don't have something prepped, it's usually wraps with tortillas, baby spinach, and some sort of meat and cheese.
(Long story but I live in a complicated environment with a bunch of people who never clean up after themselves, so the kitchen is basically unusable since I refuse to clean their messes.)
Also, "some mixed veggies". Do you use frozen? I like frozen veggies, but they take a lot longer than five minutes to cook unless I'm just microwaving a steamer bag (and they never taste that good prepped that way). I much prefer fresh (and they're normally cheaper, monetarily, though obviously they take much longer to prep).
I eat 1 ~7oz chicken breast 6 days in a row. I'm currently working out daily and gaining lean muscle. Chicken is high in protein and low in fat. So yes, I consider that healthy. You don't?
The average American is eating corn, beef, french fries, and cheese for nearly every meal every single day.
> A home-cooked meal for me takes at MINIMUM an hour.
It's not hard to optimize for speed. White rice, beans and frozen veggies boil in 10-15 minutes and don't even require attention for the full timespan. Cleanup consists of putting things in the dishwasher. And I don't know why you would factor in eating, going to McD won't teleport it into your stomach. Time can be further amortized by making several servings, putting them in the fridge and warming them up in the microwave later.
We're comparing to fastfood here, not a high end restaurant course.
Get an instant pot (a relatively new "smart" pressure cooker). I've been introducing my in-laws to their instant pot and it's hard for them to comprehend how fast it cooks. Mashed potatoes, steel cuts oats, lentils, all in about 10 minutes. The pot cooks everything.
My go-to lazy meal is 1 1/2 cups of rice and beans, a few cups of stock, a cup of salsa, extra flavoring as desired, whatever veggies and protein I have around, all thrown in the pot for 25 minutes. Then I take out the pot and put it in the fridge. That will last two people a few days. Very little prep for a massive amount of food.
You can also make yogurt overnight for maybe a 75% savings over store-bought.
The other tip with the instant pot I’ve found is to put your food in a glass bowl on the steamer tray in the instant pot. This way you can add exactly the amount of water, and you don’t make a mess of the pot.
Cleanup for me definitely doesn't consist only of the dishwasher; my knives, wok, cast iron stuff to start definitely don't get put in there.
I have optimized what I do quite well, or at least I'm much faster than I used to be. But for example this last weekend, I made some stir fry in a large batch for this week's meals. By the time I left my parents' house (long story but I basically can't cook at the house I live in), I had used up three hours. That was prepping four bell peppers, an onion, garlic, cabbage, broccoli, and chicken, cooking them, and cleaning up afterward.
I'm sure I can speed my prep up even more, mostly with knife skills. But at this point, that's how it is.
I factor in eating because I clean up after I eat. Most of the stuff I make is best fresh out of the frying pan with very minimal resting time.
But anyway, I'm not here to argue. If cooking at home works for you in 15 minutes, fantastic! I can't do that, it never works that quickly. I was mostly wondering how the parent poster's drive-thrus were so slow that they could cook faster because where I live, I never spend more than five minutes in one.
Cooking time heavily depends on the dish. There are recipes optimized for time consumption - if time is a priority, you could use those. Sometimes we just put potatoes in the pressure cooker, peel afterwards, and season with some oil and spice - takes 10m max. That’s the healthier alternative to fries from McD. A keto meal will take longer, but at least in my area there‘s no takeout option for keto anyway.
I feel like this doesn’t optimize for enjoyment. Like shit this is what I ate when I was a broke in college. Are y’all not miserable eating this? At that point in my
life getting taken by my parents out to somewhere mediocre like Olive Garden was heaven.
No we're not miserable. In fact having home cooked healthy meals daily makes me feel better than ever. When I go eat fast food now I feel noticeably worse than I normally do.
You are what you eat. Eat garbage fast food, and you will feel like garbage. And your body slowly accumulates all that garbage.
Traditional dine in restaurants are usually just as unhealthy as eating fast food as well.
It's actually shocking to me that garbage food has been normalized to the point where eating healthy is "what I ate when I was a broke in college." and that we must be miserable eating healthy.
I don't think they are necessarily saying that fast food is healthier, just that you aren't going to get too many people excited by claiming that cooking for yourself from scratch is easy and doesn't take much time. Then you go on to describe a meal that consists of white rice and boiled vegetables.
You're right. Cooking takes a lot of time, and cooking good healthy food that isn't boring can be expensive. I'm sorry, I can't live on vegetables and be happy. I cook plenty of chicken, fish and red meat as well. Although my appreciation for vegetables have gone up considerably in the past couple decades. The first lesson I learned is that canned vegetables are awful. Frozen is much better. Now I feel that frozen is awful (well, for things like spinach, broccoli, carrots and cauliflower anyway, corn and beans are fine). Now I only like fresh veggies (except for corn, frozen corn is fine). But fresh veggies don't keep long. There's a Lotte about 20 minutes away that has about twice as many different kinds of produce as most markets, and at about half the price, but that's a long way to go for every day shopping. I'll get fresh veggies at Giant or Target, but I don't like paying so much more.
I happen to love cooking, so to me it's relaxing. My wife doesn't like to cook, so I do most of it. But even still, as much as I like doing it, there are definitely days when I don't feel like all the work. And if I'm going to put the effort into making stuff, I want to make something good, and often something new, and that takes a lot of time.
And while brown rice is much better than white rice. If you want white rice, go with basmati. It tastes much better, cooks faster, and is hard to screw up. I don't understand why people use any other white rice. There are tons of other kinds of rice that are worth exploring too. They all have much more interesting flavors and textures than plain old generic long-grain white rice.
No, we’re not miserable. That’s just the media environment playing mind tricks on you to get you to buy things you don’t need so you don’t miss out on the montage of joyous people and half-naked bodies playing and frolicking on the sunny ocean beach with refreshing, ice-cold, bubbly, intensely colored sugar water.
Yo that’s super depressing if you’re buying your time back just to watch TV. Do you just assume that people don’t have friends, hobbies, side projects?
Sure, people have those. Friends to go out with to spend money, because that’s the way to socialize. Hobbies that require buying more non-essential things, and places to keep them in. Larger apartments to accommodate everything. Side projects to keep you busy while the world goes to shit.
So are you saying you don't have friends, you don't go out to socialize, you don't have hobbies, you don't do any work besides what your regular job pays you for, and you stay home in a small apartment and eat mostly white rice and boiled vegetables?
I don't believe your assessment of most peoples' priorities in life is helping you very much in convincing them to adopt your worldview and way of life.
Didn't optimizing for enjoyment get the US into this obesity thing in the first place? Maybe let's not do that so much?
Like just season stuff well, even boiled veggies
Unless we are talking about the kind of restaurants that are difficult to get a reservation for, then I think you are confused about what creates status in American culture.
Going through the drive through at McDonalds certainly will not raise your status in America.
This hits home for me. I really enjoy cooking but I’ve basically given up on weeknight meals that aren’t either leftovers from when I cook for fun or something prepared.
Like it is genuinely the most out of touch privileged statement but I have the money and am absolutely willing to buy the time. $30-70/wk (less the cost of groceries) to gain 8ish hours of leisure time and more variety than I would ever bother with is a no brainer experience at this point in my life.
I agree with this if your single, but if your a family every meal outside is 4 times the price and the time to prep the meal at home stays almost the same.
How much time do you spend driving to the drive-through, queueing up at a drive-through, making your order at the drive-through, waiting for your order at the drive-through, receiving the order from the drive-through, and then taking the order from the drive-through home before you eat it?
Add up that time over the course of a week and see how much time you waste on convenience.
You can cook a lot of inexpensive and healthy food in less than an hour. Protein, veg, complex carbs. Get a wok and do some stir fry - you can make a meal in literally 5 minutes then.
> Get a wok and do some stir fry - you can make a meal in literally 5 minutes then.
I own a wok and stir fry is my go to meal- I can’t make meals in 5 minutes. I take the time to cut vegetables/protein, then clean up afterwards. And if you’re going from pre-cut frozen it takes more than 5 minutes to thaw???
I agree that stir fry is a fast easy meal but I really disagree with this exaggeration of its speed. It makes the argument disingenuous.
It's similar to saying fast food is fast because you get served in 5 minutes, but don't count the time you spend in your car on the journey there and back.
People pick up fast food on their way home from work. The time that takes is only the difference in travel vs the most direct route (could be negligible) plus the time spent waiting in the drive thru. On the other hand, a lot of recipes online or in cookbooks completely ignore the time it takes to wash and cut vegetables, meats, and clean up after the meal. Recipes quoted to take 15 minutes can easily take over an hour. Lots of people also don’t know how to sharpen and use a kitchen knife properly so they take even longer for simple prep tasks. It’s fine to say “well they’ll get better if they take the time to learn” but they may not have time between multiple jobs and looking after kids.
I love to cook, and I make home-made meals from fresh ingredients regularly, and it does take a lot of time. I will often spend 3-5 hours on the weekend cooking meals for the family as well, but since I find it relaxing and fun, I don't feel like I'm "losing" that time. Well, usually. I do keep some frozen meals or other similar stuff around because I don't always have the time or sometimes don't feel like making something fancy.
On Wednesday, I made a stir-fry with boneless chicken breast , broccoli, poblano peppers, canned mandarin oranges, canned pineapple, garlic and ginger paste. It took a little more than an hour for this "quick" meal. I should have chopped a couple of onions, but I was getting lazy.
After reading your post, I'm realizing that I spend a _lot_ of time chopping vegetables. I have a food processor from 25+ years ago, but I can't find all the parts to it. I think it's time to find those, or just replace it.
> A home-cooked meal for me takes at MINIMUM an hour
Cut some onions and garlic, some cabbage and perhaps some dried sausage, fry it while your rice is cooking. Dinner done in 20 minutes. Cleanup is done with a dishwasher, because I don't live in a swamp. Forgoing rice, it can be done far faster.
I personally compare cooking time to time to go out end-to-end. Even with fast food, you have to drive to the pickup window, wait for the food, etc. It’s easily 10 minutes and you have to do it 1-2 times a day, so 2-3 hours a week. I’ve had fast food joints take 20 minutes to make the food, too.
I don’t think most people analyze the cost like this and they probably like restaurant food more.
It’s like spending “just 10 minutes” on HN everyday, adding up to something significant by the end of the week.
Yeah cooking is really boring to me and extremely unrewarding as I live alone.
I wish I could simply but healthy meals for a few bucks. I mean I can outsource my laundry for 7€ a bag and get it washed, dried and folded the next day. Why doesn't it work like that with food?
There's takeaway of course but those aren't the healthiest of options. It's more a luxury special thing. I wish I could get a meal service like some old people get :)
Fwiw I do meal prep. The downside to it is refrigerated or frozen cooked food that you eat the same dish of for an entire week. The upside is that I get to cook and eat all kinds of world cuisine (some quite labor intensive), while still being quite alright on time spent cooking. So even though its microwaved leftovers, the very different flavor profiles that I get to snack on every week makes it up for me.
> A home-cooked meal for me takes at MINIMUM an hour. Prep, cooking, eating, cleanup
As you cook more at home, you get much faster at it. Especially for recipes you familiarize yourself with. It also becomes less of a chore as it requires less focus and you can do other stuff (listen to music/podcast, chat with your SO/roomates) while cooking.
Are you kidding me? No it absolutely does not. I make every single one of my meals in less than 15 minutes including cleanup time. I have been doing this for 10+ years.
It would be at least a 15 minute round trip to the drive thru from my house and would cost 5x as much and be 10x less healthy.
My most common lunch is a salad that takes all of 5 minutes to chop the vegetables. My most common dinner is a bowl of steamed vegetables that takes seconds to throw in the microwave, and a baked potato that takes seconds to put in the toaster oven a half-hour ahead of time. Oatmeal or eggs for breakfast take five minutes or less too.
Unless you really work incredible hours, like a 16 to 24 hour medical shift or something, citing time as a reason not to prepare food is either looking for an excuse or way overshooting on the complexity needed.
Time is valuable whether you work 16 hour days or 2 hour days.
Wasting it on mindless things like chopping vegetables or washing pots and pans is of course a choice you are free to make, but it is a foolish one in my view.
It's usually about 2x the time to clean up after a meal than it is to actually prepare it, in my experience. The cooking is easy, but cooking makes a mess of the stove, of the pots and pans, of the utensils, et c.
I‘ve never cleaned up longer than 5 minutes after a meal, and I‘m cooking 1-2x a day for a family of four. Cook just one dish, ideally in a single pan/pot or in the oven. Get a pressure cooker for one-pot-dishes, ideally a smart one with auto-shutdown. Get machine-washable utensils. Get a self-cleaning stove (who cares about the mess anyway). Coated pans can just be rinsed with a soft brush and dried immediately (only smelly stuff like fish needs to be soaked).
Privileged, certainly. I take exception to the "laziness" accusation though.
We all have a finite amount of time on this planet, and replacing menial tasks with things that are interesting or enriching should be considered one of the more positive things one can do for their own life. It's like what they say about being rich/wealthy. Many people (I blame media mostly) think about the luxury items and lifestyle that one can purchase, but the real win is that fact that you don't have to anything you don't want to do ever again. You can choose exactly how you are going to live your life.
I don't personally believe life has a purpose or meaning, and I've become content to just wander the world finding interesting things until the end of it.
Since the edit timer has passed, I didn't intend to imply that cooking is only ever a menial activity.
The word came to mind thinking about coming home from a rough day at work and needing to put something, anything together to eat when you'd rather be doing literally anything else.
I'm not talking about a planned meal where some actual planning and effort went into a meal that the cook is hoping you'll enjoy, I'm talking about the results of "i'm tired and hungry and I need to make something and I'm hating the entire process" kind of meals.
The kind of cooking where you mechanically put something together without much thought because you're at the end of your rope for the day.
Obviously such a concept expands well beyond "cooking". Replace that with car maintenance, lawn care, programming, writing, etc. People enjoy different things, and would prefer to replace those activities they don't enjoy with something else.
Being able to is privilege, but I (personally) draw a hard line at calling that laziness.
Optimizing your time so that you can live your life the way you want to is a great idea. I daydream of having a personal chef so I can spend more time reading, studying, or any other activity that brings meaning to my life. But let's be honest, most of that time that people are freeing up with Uber Eats is spent scrolling through social media or watching Netflix.
Cooking food that is good for your body is not menial - it's central to living. Many people these days (myself even relatively recently) might choose a TV dinner so they don't miss any of that critical episode of House Hunters rather than spend 20 minutes throwing together a stir fry from raw ingredients. It is a lazy choice.
All I'm seeing from your comment is insulting OP's desire to not spend time cooking, and shaming it as being lazy. You don't even bother to back up your claim that it's not menial. Is shame really all you have to bring to the conversation?
I think they just meant it's uninteresting to them. I know how that feels. I really hate cooking myself. It's just so hard getting regular healthy meals another way
That's what I meant. The "menial" adjective was more describing something that is uninteresting to a person that is either basic and mechanical in the simplest form. As someone who loves good food, I am well aware that good cooking takes skill and effort. The meal made when I get home from a rough day at work and would rather be doing anything else is rarely an example of that.
I made some seasoned rice, a cucumber salad, and some sesame seed encrusted seared Ahi the other day. It was delicious and healthy, but it took 2 hours to put together, eat, and clean up after. That's not something I'm going to have the desire to do every day.
OP was (at worst) saying that cooking is menial. Not a comment about a person, and not a particularly negative descriptor. The person I replied to then indirectly called him lazy and made an insulting bad-faith assumption about how OP spends his time. The reply is pretty clearly an ad hominem.
I did not imply anything about how OP spends their time. I was referring to how I used to spend my time, which is much more clearly implied in that I refer to my own history of bad habits.
The evidence is massive and drastic that the eating habits of the majority of Americans are killing us. Maybe approaching 50 is making me care less about insulting sensitive internet randos than with helping people understand the consequences of poor eating habits and the fairly simple way one can change. Sorry for caring.
Not being willing to feed your sole human body properly is the definition of lazy in my opinion. It's purely an opinion, as is the opinion that doing so is menial, so there's no "backing up the claim". If someone is insulted by my belief that humans should be willing to spend time feeding themselves, so be it. My point is to encourage healthy behavior, not to insult.
Some meals are so easy to cook that you could actually watch the TV while cooking, only looking away for a few moments, usually while cutting ingredients. (Then there are other meals where such approach would most likely result in burning the meal.)
It kind of comes down to wealth and the average American is significantly wealthier than the average Indian (or average a lot of countries). Wealth affords you time for things that you care to pursue rather than things you have to. For an American this translates to a lot of people not spending much time in the kitchen.
It could perhaps be perceived as laziness when you deride whatever replacement someone chooses over basic chores they’re no longer responsible for but really this is you conflating leisurely activities as lazy.
I personally enjoy cooking but not everyone does and them choosing to pay to not have to do that is their choice.
"Privilege" is an interesting word. If I were Indian or Chinese, I would feel privileged to have been raised in one the world's greatest food cultures instead of eating spaghetti and mac 'n' cheese like an American my whole life.
Kids don't choose what their parents feed them, and that's how culture is imparted to the next generation.
This is a very broad statement. It's likely true in some cases, but access to food is wildly different depending on where you live and how much you make.
Consider these individuals (not meant as an exhaustive list of archetypes):
1. A high-income American who lives in a large city, owns a car and/or can afford grocery delivery
2. A middle-income American who lives in the suburbs and has access to a grocery store, but is price-sensitive when it comes to food
3. A low-income American without access to a car, who lives in a "food desert" in a large city and does most of their shopping at a bodega/corner market
4. An American who lives in a rural area without a grocery store for several miles
The way these people engage with food is wildly different, and only those in the first group could be rationally considered "lazy" if they chose processed food.
If your goal is simply to feed yourself and your family, you're likely going to optimize more for calories-per-dollar than you are than for freshness. When compared to processed food, fresh produce is actually incredibly expensive.
>You don't need s personal chef to cook non processed food at home, not even a stay at home housewife of 60's. This is the most privileged thing I hear Americans repeating
I think you are manufacturing your own argument here - no one said that they had to eat at a restaurant, have a personal chef, or a 60s housewife to eat well?
I think you've misread something, the parent post specifically mentioned personal chefs. Not trying to manufacture anything here and I give you the benefit of doubt.
The hours that you save not cooking meals add up. One hour a day spent cooking all three means (conservative estimate) is a lot when you have roughly 5 hours outside of work and sleep (likely less if you have a long commute). With access to outside food also cheap, there are other priorities to focus on. I don't live in the US, but cooking for myself only made sense after I started meal prepping.
My mom had a job. When she came home she still cooked a meal for her family. With vegetables.
The real truth is that a majority of Americans are now overweight. Unhealthy lifestyle has been normalised to a point when non fat kids who don't eat pizza for lunch will be bullied.
This is a tragedy that needs to be addressed but is not even close to non fat kids are being abused by fat kids now in America.
While the picture for adults is much worse, still only 42.4% of American adults are obese. A great tragedy that needs to be addressed but a “significant” majority of Americans are still at a healthy BMI.
Not sure what a google search for "2021 High School America" is supposed to prove. Its just a collection of photo's of beauty pagent winners and athletes...
Then we are getting localized results differences. I spent a few seconds scrolling down those links and there are dozens of group shot photos of dozens of American school children. It’s anecdotal evidence showing that the majority of American children are not obese which you can see in those photos with your own eyes. If you don’t like anecdotes it’s followed up with the actual population level statistics from an authoritative source.
Idk if “cooking from scratch” is something of privilege but my entire extended family and my wife’s entire extended family all cook “from scratch” most of the time unless we’re dining out. Anecdotal but I’ve known very few people/families who rely solely on take out/prepared meals for their sustenance.
