7 ms·

What? I make things from scratch because I'm broke AF.

by foxyv 1mo ago

somenameforme 1mo ago
lol amen. I don't understand where this myth of it being expensive to do things yourself came from. It's not only cheaper but way way way cheaper. And that's comparing it to crap quality stuff. If you compare to what something of the same quality as you make would cost, then the difference is just ridiculous.
- AlexandrB 1mo ago
  I think the myth comes from the upfront costs of cooking equipment and spices as well as expensive proteins like ground beef. If you cook with mostly starches like rice or potatoes and just some meat, there's no contest. The other thing that can make cooking expensive is buying too many different ingredients to make a fancy dish and having a bunch of leftover stuff that gets thrown out. But that's where soups come in.
  - foxyv 1mo ago
    I think most people don't know how to cook cheap stuff and don't even know where to start. It is a bit of a learned skill. You get a repertoire of cheap but delicious menu items over time. It used to be that our parents would hand them down like sacred family heirlooms on notecards in a greasy metal box. But our parents were way richer than us and they only kept the most delicious ones. One big hit for me was having to create an entirely new set of recipes when I cut out meat from my diet. It got really hard because plant protein is way different from animal protein. The processed vegetarian stuff is insanely expensive too.
    - jandrewrogers 1mo ago
      Many of those old recipes on the notecards relied on heavily processed, shelf-stable industrial ingredients from a century ago that few people would use today. The recipes were commonly disseminated by companies as a form of marketing for their product. We have unimaginably superior access to diverse and fresh ingredients today compared to many of the recipes that e.g. my older relatives used. Modding those recipes to replace the dependency on heavily-processed ingredients with the fresh, less-processed comparables readily available today often produces good results, though it does take more time.
      - somenameforme 1mo ago
        Archive has a bunch of older recipe books. This [1] is a collection just from the 50s which would be primo processed time (mass canning/etc just after WW2). I could not find a single recipe with anything like what you're describing. [1] - https://archive.org/details/cbk?and%5B%5D=year%3A%221950%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221951%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221952%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221953%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221954%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221955%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221956%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221957%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221958%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221959%22 https://archive.org/details/cbk?and%5B%5D=year%3A%221950%22&...
        foxyv 1mo ago
        Blessed is the person who decided to exclude recipes from copyright law. They will forever hold a place in my heart.
        jandrewrogers 1mo ago
        That’s a limitation of your source. Several recipes that I’ve seen passed down from that era were like this. Many of those recipes have an origin that can be googled. I am an accomplished cook and I have a lot of recipes passed down a century or more first-hand. Many have the property I described. I know many other people with similar family recipes. Just because you’ve never heard of it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
        somenameforme 1mo ago
        Most of the product types you're describing didn't meaningfully exist until the 50s (which is why I used that era) as WW2 greatly expanded production of crap food and subsequently led to a wider public introduction. So having family recipes using them from a century or more would be quite odd. Beyond that, what do you think is more representative of recipes of the past? A selection of hundreds of recipe books with thousands of recipes, or the family recipes of yourself and some acquaintances?
      - account42 1mo ago
        That might have been the case in the US but definitely not everywhere.
- pjc50 1mo ago
  There's a specific category of people who get weird about this on social media. Shorthand for it is "burrito taxi discourse". There's usually a long list of excuses, some of which may have validity, some of which are a bit stretched. I don't know whether they're covering for their own insecurity or are just not prepared to accept that their own cooking is (necessarily) slightly worse than restaurant food even if it's much cheaper. Personally I sit at the middle level of this; in the UK there's a decent range of fresh refrigerated ready meals ("TV dinners" to Americans?) which are more expensive than cooking for yourself but less expensive than takeaway. This is mostly fine except you need to pick the gymbro protein-orientated branding in order to get a decent percentage of vegatables. Somehow this doesn't turn up in burrito taxi discourse.
  - somenameforme 1mo ago
    I definitely don't agree with this part. Home cooking is often significantly better than restaurants. Not only are cooking and running a restaurant very different skill sets (and 'just hire a really good chef' isn't really viable for a typical restaurant), but you also have issues of scale. Creating a diverse menu that can be created, on demand, in a short period of time imposes significant limitations on what you can produce. Another is that cheaping out on something in a dish at home can save you perhaps 60x over a month, but doing so at a restaurant can save you thousands of times that. So they tend to be using worse quality ingredients which end up being sold for much more because they're also needing to pay for labor, rent, electric, and much more - before they hopefully make some profit on the month. This is how you get things like fast food franchises typically being single digit profit margins enterprises in spite of selling large volumes of low quality food for relatively high prices. The comparison between home cooking and high end restaurants is certainly much closer, but also not entirely one-way. So for instance one issue I have with restaurant food is that it tends to be excessively salted. This is largely because the more people consume salt, the more they need of it to experience the same 'flavor'. It's kind of like a drug in that regard. So when somebody who minimizes the amount of salt they consume goes to a high end restaurant, it can often tastes like freebasing pure salt. I'm sure to their average customer it tastes fine, but it's subjective, and it's also why something like 100,000 Americans die per year of salt driven disease. To put that into scale we're already approaching (if have not already exceeded) more Americans dying of salt, over the past decade, than COVID.

What? I make things from scratch because I'm broke AF.

by foxyv 1mo ago

What? I make things from scratch because I'm broke AF.

lol amen. I don't understand where this myth of it being expensive to do things yourself came from. It's not only cheaper but way way way cheaper. And that's comparing it to crap quality stuff. If you compare to what something of the same quality as you make would cost, then the difference is just ridiculous.

AlexandrB 1mo ago
I think the myth comes from the upfront costs of cooking equipment and spices as well as expensive proteins like ground beef. If you cook with mostly starches like rice or potatoes and just some meat, there's no contest. The other thing that can make cooking expensive is buying too many different ingredients to make a fancy dish and having a bunch of leftover stuff that gets thrown out. But that's where soups come in.
- foxyv 1mo ago
  I think most people don't know how to cook cheap stuff and don't even know where to start. It is a bit of a learned skill. You get a repertoire of cheap but delicious menu items over time. It used to be that our parents would hand them down like sacred family heirlooms on notecards in a greasy metal box. But our parents were way richer than us and they only kept the most delicious ones. One big hit for me was having to create an entirely new set of recipes when I cut out meat from my diet. It got really hard because plant protein is way different from animal protein. The processed vegetarian stuff is insanely expensive too.
  - jandrewrogers 1mo ago
    Many of those old recipes on the notecards relied on heavily processed, shelf-stable industrial ingredients from a century ago that few people would use today. The recipes were commonly disseminated by companies as a form of marketing for their product. We have unimaginably superior access to diverse and fresh ingredients today compared to many of the recipes that e.g. my older relatives used. Modding those recipes to replace the dependency on heavily-processed ingredients with the fresh, less-processed comparables readily available today often produces good results, though it does take more time.
    - somenameforme 1mo ago
      Archive has a bunch of older recipe books. This [1] is a collection just from the 50s which would be primo processed time (mass canning/etc just after WW2). I could not find a single recipe with anything like what you're describing. [1] - https://archive.org/details/cbk?and%5B%5D=year%3A%221950%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221951%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221952%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221953%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221954%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221955%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221956%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221957%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221958%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221959%22 https://archive.org/details/cbk?and%5B%5D=year%3A%221950%22&...
      - foxyv 1mo ago
        Blessed is the person who decided to exclude recipes from copyright law. They will forever hold a place in my heart.
      - jandrewrogers 1mo ago
        That’s a limitation of your source. Several recipes that I’ve seen passed down from that era were like this. Many of those recipes have an origin that can be googled. I am an accomplished cook and I have a lot of recipes passed down a century or more first-hand. Many have the property I described. I know many other people with similar family recipes. Just because you’ve never heard of it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
        somenameforme 1mo ago
        Most of the product types you're describing didn't meaningfully exist until the 50s (which is why I used that era) as WW2 greatly expanded production of crap food and subsequently led to a wider public introduction. So having family recipes using them from a century or more would be quite odd. Beyond that, what do you think is more representative of recipes of the past? A selection of hundreds of recipe books with thousands of recipes, or the family recipes of yourself and some acquaintances?
    - account42 1mo ago
      That might have been the case in the US but definitely not everywhere.
pjc50 1mo ago
There's a specific category of people who get weird about this on social media. Shorthand for it is "burrito taxi discourse". There's usually a long list of excuses, some of which may have validity, some of which are a bit stretched. I don't know whether they're covering for their own insecurity or are just not prepared to accept that their own cooking is (necessarily) slightly worse than restaurant food even if it's much cheaper. Personally I sit at the middle level of this; in the UK there's a decent range of fresh refrigerated ready meals ("TV dinners" to Americans?) which are more expensive than cooking for yourself but less expensive than takeaway. This is mostly fine except you need to pick the gymbro protein-orientated branding in order to get a decent percentage of vegatables. Somehow this doesn't turn up in burrito taxi discourse.
- somenameforme 1mo ago
  I definitely don't agree with this part. Home cooking is often significantly better than restaurants. Not only are cooking and running a restaurant very different skill sets (and 'just hire a really good chef' isn't really viable for a typical restaurant), but you also have issues of scale. Creating a diverse menu that can be created, on demand, in a short period of time imposes significant limitations on what you can produce. Another is that cheaping out on something in a dish at home can save you perhaps 60x over a month, but doing so at a restaurant can save you thousands of times that. So they tend to be using worse quality ingredients which end up being sold for much more because they're also needing to pay for labor, rent, electric, and much more - before they hopefully make some profit on the month. This is how you get things like fast food franchises typically being single digit profit margins enterprises in spite of selling large volumes of low quality food for relatively high prices. The comparison between home cooking and high end restaurants is certainly much closer, but also not entirely one-way. So for instance one issue I have with restaurant food is that it tends to be excessively salted. This is largely because the more people consume salt, the more they need of it to experience the same 'flavor'. It's kind of like a drug in that regard. So when somebody who minimizes the amount of salt they consume goes to a high end restaurant, it can often tastes like freebasing pure salt. I'm sure to their average customer it tastes fine, but it's subjective, and it's also why something like 100,000 Americans die per year of salt driven disease. To put that into scale we're already approaching (if have not already exceeded) more Americans dying of salt, over the past decade, than COVID.