American Eating Habits Are Changing Faster than Fast Food Can Keep Up (bloomberg.com) 374
Home cooking would be making a comeback if it ever really went away. From a report: Restaurants are getting dinged by the convenience of Netflix, the advent of pre-made meals, the spread of online grocery delivery, plus crushing student debt and a focus on healthy eating. Eighty-two percent of American meals are prepared at home -- more than were cooked 10 years ago, according to researcher NPD Group. The latest peak in restaurant-going was in 2000, when the average American dined out 216 times a year. That figure fell to 185 for the year ended in February, NPD said.
Don't be fooled by reports of rising U.S. restaurant sales at big chains like McDonald's. Increases have been driven by price hikes, not more customers. Traffic for the industry was down 1.1 percent in July, the 29th straight month of declines, according to MillerPulse data. "It's counterintuitive because you see a lot of things in the press about restaurant sales increasing," said David Portalatin, a food-industry adviser at NPD. "America does still cook at home." The shift is weighing on the fast-food industry. Eateries already are struggling with higher labor and rent costs that they're passing along to customers, which in turn makes home cooking more economical. McDonald's, Jack in the Box, Shake Shack and Wendy's have all raised prices in the past year.
Don't be fooled by reports of rising U.S. restaurant sales at big chains like McDonald's. Increases have been driven by price hikes, not more customers. Traffic for the industry was down 1.1 percent in July, the 29th straight month of declines, according to MillerPulse data. "It's counterintuitive because you see a lot of things in the press about restaurant sales increasing," said David Portalatin, a food-industry adviser at NPD. "America does still cook at home." The shift is weighing on the fast-food industry. Eateries already are struggling with higher labor and rent costs that they're passing along to customers, which in turn makes home cooking more economical. McDonald's, Jack in the Box, Shake Shack and Wendy's have all raised prices in the past year.
So... (Score:3)
The whole article can be summed up in a single sentence... Americans are eating out less?
Why is this on Slashdot?
Re:So... (Score:5, Funny)
Why is there an article about fast food on a site for nerds? Are you kidding?
I would bet that there are more readers of Slashdot who eat fast food than there are readers of Slashdot who compile their own Linux kernels.
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Damnit, you're right...
*hands in geek card*
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Re:So... (Score:4, Funny)
Who eats fast food. You know I'm right.
Mars Bars are no longer a common sight in the US (Score:3)
We don't really have "mars chokolade bars" in the US, at least we don't call the kind you're referring to a Mars Bar. Perhaps you're thinking of Scotland? [wikipedia.org]
If you're looking for a vile American fried treat, then look no further than Deep-fried butter [wikipedia.org].
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How dare you!
The two are not mutually exclusive
I eat fast food while my kernel compiles!
Re: So... (Score:2)
I getgetmy fast food from the Kernel. Does that count?
Re: So... (Score:2)
Thank you captain obvious.
Re:So... (Score:4, Funny)
Say, you wouldn't happen to have a link, would you? Asking for a friend.
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I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but actually, I am. Sigh.
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Of course. Everyone knows that. But the GP specifically said, "latest My Little Pony fleshlight release". How is my friend supposed to know which one is really the latest so I...I mean "he", doesn't buy the wrong one?
Got an answer for that, bright boy? I didn't think so.
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I think that the real question to ask is why... I'd imagine that companies that sell meal delivery kits like Blue Apron and Plated would like to take credit for some of it, as would home grocery delivery services like Peapod and Instacart. A lot of VC tech money went into those companies.
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FTFY.
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In the spring, a "trio lunch" was around $6.00 tax in. That same meal today is 9.00. A 50% increase in 5 1/2 months
For a family of 5, thats $15/meal
Supermarkets are able to provide "meals for two in a tray" for for the fastfood price of a meal for one.
or maybe less people can afford to eat out... (Score:5, Insightful)
Even when working 2 jobs.
Somethings gotta give...
I'm now a poor slob. (Score:5, Insightful)
I now work white trash jobs. Yes, plural.
All of my co-workers buy fast food because they are jumping from job to job and work too hard and too long to have enough time to cook for themselves. Yes, too hard. They work harder than any CEO who gets an eight figure salary and bonuses.
Why am I stuck in those jobs? Because I was a good employee. I drank my employer's Kool-Aid, devoted myself to my company's "technology" and focused on my employer.
When my employer decided that what we did can be done cheaper overseas, I lost my job. However, since my skills were very very specific to my employer - because I was so loyal - they weren't transferable: or so I'm told.
I should have drank the Microsoft Kool-Aid years ago. I'd be OK now. Or better yet, never went into technology. I should have went into finance. Yeah sure, '08 -'10 sucked - but they're humming along again!
Kids: your employer will cast you to the side on a heartbeat. Don't ever - EVER - think you're essential.
Sorry that happened. Misdiagnosed the cause (Score:3)
I'm sorry that happened to you. Sounds like it was, and is, pretty rough. I hope something like that never happens to you again.
To avoid really bad things happening, it might be helpful to be very clear about the cause.
Hurricanes happen. Businesses get destroyed. Laws like HIPPA and GDPR change industries so that some products and even companies no longer fit, or the changes give new competitors an opportunity. Technology changes, major contracts get cancelled. Any product or company can become infeasible a
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And yet according to the summary, the average American eats non-home made dinner every other day.
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No, it says the average is 216 times a year. That doesn't mean most people eat out every other day. More likely is there are people who eat out every day, even multiple times a day, people who almost never eat out, and people in the middle. Just from that one number we can't tell what the distribution is.
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because they are poor.
Even when working 2 jobs.
Somethings gotta give...
Heck, I ain't poor but eating out 185 times a year is close to $1k for one person as cheap restaurants, even $2-3k isn't too nuts depending on where you eat at. That is a pretty fair amount of extra money to spend if you can avoid some of it.
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I have a tiny (ish) apartment kitchen with 24" stove. Pans don't take "forever" to heat -- it works as well as any other gas stove, just smaller. Burners are the same size with less space between them.
Cleanup is easy -- wash the pans used, dump everything else into the dishwasher, throw some powder in, and turn the knob to "RUN." Cut/chop things on old plates that you don't care about scratching -- they're dishwasher-safe, unlike cutting boards.
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That makes no sense. If their kitchen is small and crappy, they'd eat out more, not less.
Indeed. In many dense Asian cities, small apartments don't even have kitchens. But street food is available on every block, and is inexpensive and very good. I'd love a steamed mushroom-leek-fennel baozi right now.
Re:or maybe less people can afford to eat out... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:or maybe less people can afford to eat out... (Score:5, Insightful)
If one refuses to acquire marketable skills, one will remain poor even in a thriving economy.
It's often stated but wrong nonetheless. If you don't have the opportunity, the time and the money to acquire marketable skills, you will remain poor. If acquiring marketable skills takes more time than the time window the market wants those skills, you will remain poor. If you don't have the personal ability to acquire marketable skills you will remain poor, e.g. if you are shorter than 6', you can train as much as you want, you will never have marketable basketball skills.
Your statement simply ignores the sheer amount of luck you need to have the personal abilities, the opportunities, the financial background and the time to acquire the right skills at the right moment. And it comes with a big dose of Survivorship bias. It might be that most people you know have had that luck. But you would never have met them anyway if they didn't have that luck. This makes it easy to totally overlook the amount of chance that played a role in their and your life.
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You don't have to run your own business to do well. You just need an actual skill, of the kind that you need to go to school and work hard to get, in order to do well. Then, of course, you need to get a job using that skill.
We've spent the last two decades shouting that everyone needs to go get a STEM degree, and then they will have the marketable skills you describe.
We now graduate 1.5 STEM students for every entry-level STEM job opening...with piles of student debt to do so. And then we ponder why, oh why does that 0.5 not dine out as often?
So no, it's not just dumb people getting degrees in fields you do not like, or people not going into plumbing. It's kids doing exactly what we told them to do.
(It's also coupled with th
Incorrect assumptions (Score:5, Insightful)
No wonder so many people get trapped in a cycle of poverty.
You think eating out is what traps people in poverty? You might want to learn about poverty traps [wikipedia.org] and their causes. There are lots of causes of poverty [businesspundit.com]. Eating out is not a meaningful cause.
That's more than every other day! And the latest figure is still more than every other day.
If you look at the number of restaurants out there (and the obesity statistics) this should not surprise anyone. People like to look down their nose publicly at McDonalds and the like but the simple fact is that vast numbers of people eat at these places routinely regardless of what they actually say. You think they stay in business because people are eating at home? People LIKE to eat out, they like fast food, and honestly a lot of the food tastes better than what many people can cook themselves.
WTF people, the fastest way to save money is to not eat out; doesn't everyone know that??
Several points on that. Basically your thesis isn't necessarily supported by the facts.
1) There is plenty of evidence to suggest that eating healthy tends to be more expensive [harvard.edu] than eating badly, at least in the short term. Even if you do manage to save money (which can be done) it's going to come at the cost of an investment of time and energy.
2) There is also evidence to suggest that eating out can be cheaper [businessinsider.com] than eating at home for many.
3) Eating at home requires having the time to prepare the food. Speaking as someone with a young child and a working wife this time can be hard to come by for many people even if you would prefer it.
4) Eating at home does not necessarily equal eating healthier nor does it necessarily equal costing less. It CAN but it often doesn't.
5) Many people don't know how to shop economically in grocery stores and grocery stores have no incentive to help.
6) Food culture is as subject to fads as anything else. One should expect to see variation over time in where and how people eat their food.
Depends on the meal (Score:3)
Cooking for one, it's probably cheaper to eat out for some meals.
You don't need the "probably" qualifier. It's DEFINITELY cheaper for quite a few types of meals. Not all, but a large number of them.
Cooking for five. It's never cheaper to eat out.
Not true at all. Again it depends on the meal. I can feed a family of 5 very cheaply at the local pizza joint for example. Not saying the food will be better but there is no single answer to the question.
What about spread of recipe sites? (Score:5, Insightful)
We usually make food at our house, and have for years.
But over time it's gotten easier and easier to just say something like "I feel like some dish that has apples and rice" and boom, within seconds have some recipes to choose from.
It makes making food at home a lot easier when you don't need to do any work to dig up a recipe and can easily just bring together a few things you have on hand into a full meal.
Also the other aspect I would think helps is that produce in grocery stores is better than it used to be, with more variety as well. There's honestly a lot of stuff I make at home I'd way rather eat than most restaurant food.
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Indeed. My mom uses an Alexa app that lets her ask for a recipe for X, and it'll say recipes for that. Very convenient if your hands aren't clean.
I agree that places like Whole Foods are encouraging people who can afford it to eat more at home. There are higher-quality prepared mixes nowadays that you can just throw in a skillet, heat, and eat. That said, brick and mortar retail sales are also going down steadily, so that raises the question of where people are buying their food (maybe grocery stores are bu
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That said, brick and mortar retail sales are also going down steadily, so that raises the question of where people are buying their food (maybe grocery stores are bucking the trend?).
. . . homemade Soylent Green . . . ?
Re:What about spread of recipe sites? (Score:5, Informative)
The trend in New Zealand is weekly delivered food and recipes. No more meal planning, no more big grocery shops. People pay for convenience.
Maybe that's happening elsewhere too?
That experience seems to be poor in the U.S. (Score:5, Interesting)
The trend in New Zealand is weekly delivered food and recipes.
I've seen that approach for a while in the U.S., in various forms.
But it seems to stay niche. in part because you are at the mercy of what they decide you should eat, along with you not being the one picking out produce.
The last aspect is what really has killed it for me every time, there's always something about the stuff that is delivered that I would have never picked that item at the store - like overly wilted lettuce, or especially bananas that are way, way to overripe for me.
It's really 1000x better to go into a store and see what looks good, so it totally puts the balance away from delivery being convenient or useful if you can't rely on what is being delivered to be usable or good.
Re: That experience seems to be poor in the U.S. (Score:3)
But it seems to stay niche. in part because you are at the mercy of what they decide you should eat, along with you not being the one picking out produce.
From what I've seen it's also expensive as fuck. I got a $60 coupon in the mail from one of those companies once which encouraged me to look into it. Doing some math, my grocery budget would have to almost quadruple were I to use their service. Even with the "free" $60 I got from them, ordering the first weeks food would have been more expensive than what I normally spend in a week.
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It's the Economy, Stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Back during the Great Recession, I recall a survey that asked people what they'd cut back on in order to make ends meet. Right at the top of the list, people said they'd eat out less at restaurants. People are feeling the squeeze economically, so fewer people are eating out.
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Even if they are doing well now. The Great Recession had made eating at home a habit.
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Even if they are doing well now. The Great Recession had made eating at home a habit.
Misconception. The economy is doing great ... for you and corporations. Jobs are here. The elephant in the room are 2 things. 1. Mellenials represent the biggest population size since the baby boomers. 2. Student loan debt is catistrophic! When you owe $60,000 and and pay $1000 a month while making only $45,000 for the privileged of not working at McDonalds it means you can't afford to eat there.
Since this is the largest demographic sector it means production and lots of jobs but people too broke to spend i
Re:It's the Economy, Stupid (Score:4, Informative)
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Most restaurants are still offering low fat dishes that are loaded with carbs because that's what everyone thought they needed.
WTF? I thought America is the land of the big steak? Go to a restaurant and get yourself a 600g T-bone and skip on the fries and you won't need to worry about carbs.
Seriously though have a look at a typical restaurant menu. There's plenty of low carb things on the menu, and most of the dishes you'll find the carbs are in some ignorable sides anyway. .... Unless you're at a Pizza Hut.
Bingo! Instead of modding you up.. comment... (Score:3)
I am approaching my 6th year eating low carb / high fat. STILL feeling the best I have felt in my life, and I am in my late 40s. I know people like to call it a fad, but high-carb low-fat bullshit is the fad. We only eat huge amounts of grain/starch carbs in the absence of real food. We've only been farmers for 10k years, yet as a species we've been evolving for millions of years. We didn't get to where we are by accident. I've also been an avid home cook for 20+ years. Once you learn the basic princ
Re:It's the Economy, Stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
If you visit a supermarket that caters to working class clientele, you'll find a vast ocean of convenience foods surrounded by a narrow fringe of regular food. For example if we call a foot wide section of one level of shelving a "shelf foot", my local supermarket has at least 75 shelf-feet dedicated to numerous variations on boxed macaroni and cheese. The same market only about ten or twelve shelf-feet dedicated to root vegetables.
The reason this market is dominated by prepackaged convenience foods is government subsidies. Take all that pasta and cheese; it's just subsidized wheat and milk industrially converted into a highly palatable food that is cheap because it's largely already been paid for with tax dollars. It'd be easy and cheap to stock up on enough of this kind of food to get you through the week, but doing that all the time would be courting obesity, hypertension, heart disease and stroke.
In other words, many home cooked meals are just crappy fast food, prepared at home. Vegetables, which are not subsidized, are surprisingly expensive when compared to this crap. On a per pound basis they're more expensive than meat, which is just subsidized grain converted into cows and chickens. Consequently it doesn't sell well, and it's not stocked well. I learned home cooking from my Cajun Mom back in the 1960s, but a lot of young people I know would have no idea how to prepare vegetables from raw.
I obviously have to rely on a more distant upscale supermarket to get the stuff I need to cook, but surprisingly this market's ratio of prepared convenience food to ingredients isn't much higher. It's just the the market is vast. You may find yourself buying a yanagi ba knife for cutting your sushi fish. You're not likely to be eating enough sashimi to justify this, but the whole place is a engine designed to provoke impulse purchases.
In the end this tells me wealthier people are eating a lot of junk prepared food too, but they're doing occasional stunt cooking where they reproduce stuff they've bought at restaurants or seen on TV.
It's no wonder we have an obesity epidemic. It's our tax dollars at work.
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Not about tax policy (Score:3)
The reason this market is dominated by prepackaged convenience foods is government subsidies. Take all that pasta and cheese; it's just subsidized wheat and milk industrially converted into a highly palatable food that is cheap because it's largely already been paid for with tax dollars.
This is not correct. That same wheat and cheese in their "raw" form share the same government subsidies but people don't buy those. The reason processed foods are cheap is because they can be produced at massive economies of scale, they don't require special handling or storage or refrigeration, they can use artificial (read cheap) ingredients, packaging is standardized, and they don't perish on shelves. A large company can buy cheese FAR cheaper than you or I can because they buy more of it and they can
We are ditching the stupid Boomer Ways! (Score:5, Interesting)
Eating out is suppose to be a special occasion thing, or for convince when you are not near a kitchen.
However for the most part we just cook our own meals. Guess what for a basic meal it isn't that hard and you can cook for a family for about as much as one serving at a fast food restaurant.
Heck when I was laid off back in 2008 I got a whole chicken for about $5.00 baked it. Then after we had our dinner, I shaved off the extras for sandwiches, and boiled it down with the bones to have chicken soup for a couple days. Yes by the end of the week I was sick of chicken, but it was a good idea that I had money to pay the mortgage and car payments. Granted I was lucky enough to get an other job in a couple of weeks, however I needed to save up.
For those pesky millennials who are still trying to save up for this middle class life style, cooking at home vs wasting money on prepared food is a good plan.
Even if you are not a chief of even a good cook you can normally make yourself a decent meal. Unlike the boomer time and before, we now can google how to cook nearly anything now.
This is how our grandparents/great grandparents lived, very few went to a restaurant every day for their meals. It was a special thing, for every once in a while. The Boomer generation who didn't want to force women to cook, and were too manly for the men to do the cooking, had a generation who ate out more. And now in their 70's suffering from diabetes and demanding their Social Security Checks or are still working, because where did all their money go.
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I will point out your grandmother almost certainly started with a recipe and measurements, even if those recipes were oral instructions from a relative, and the measurements were someone overseeing and correcting her eyeballing.
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"Eating out is suppose to be a special occasion thing, or for convince when you are not near a kitchen."
No, eating out is and has always been up to individual will. No one has ever opened a restaurant and said "this place is for special occasions only"
Also, use your freezer and you don't have to eat everything you make from a chicken all at once.
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Uh- what? (Score:2)
I am as mystified as to why this is even here as the rest. But "crushing student loan debt" is influencing eating habits in a sigificant way? When it affects a tiny fraction of the population, and only those who did something really stupid?
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Well, at least in the U.S. it's over 40 million with student loan debt. Not a tiny fraction of the population.
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"Did something really stupid" means "trying to get an education because public education in the US has gradually become worthless?"
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It's too bad that's how you approached it. You could have learned something at no extra cost.
Re:Uh- what? (Score:5, Informative)
Tiny? About 1/3 of adult Americans have college degrees, but here's the kicker: about 60% of adult Americans have attended college, but a large fraction of them never finish. If you include technical schools that don't grant degrees but which students take out loans to attend, the number goes up further.
Americans owe over 1.3 trillion dollars in student loan debt -- more than they owe in credit card debt by a good margin. That's why cracking down on unscrupulous or misleading educational institutions is important. Education -- both college and trade -- is a huge industry with a big impact on the economy.
Americans going back to normal at home cooking? (Score:2, Insightful)
It will be a golden time for Aldi.
Here in Germany, simple home cooking and buying cheap food at Aldi/Lidl/... is the normal everyday routine for every student or poor person, and richer people also still prefer home-cooked meals, and only eat out if they have less time than money.
To us, US culture is rather strange. You really go out to eat each day, every day? And if you "cook" at home, it’s ready-made convenience food? How do you even survive? Isn't that extremely expensive? Don't you miss real food
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If that were true, slave systems would be more productive than capitalist systems. They're not.
Wise people understand that you get out of life what you put into it.
You have no understanding of what most managers do and what they have to put up with.
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Dude or dudette, you need to talk with actual, average Americans more. Don't develop your world view from news clips.
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Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Time (Score:3)
It takes exactly 6 minutes to grill the chicken to 170 degrees
Maybe if you slice it to be as thin as deli meat and don't care much about the end result. Properly cooking a reasonably thick chicken breast will take quite a lot longer than that. Roasting a whole chicken typically takes 30-40 minutes in an oven. Oh, and unless you are cooking dark meat, 170F chicken is (slightly) overcooked.
Ok, so it takes 32 minutes.. big deal.
32 minutes can be a lot of time to some people. Right now I have a young child under the age of 1 at home and my wife and I both work alternate shifts. There are quite a few days
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Because the Food Tastes So Bad (Score:2)
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I'm not from the west but I wonder if multiple gourmet foodstuff becoming "mainstream" take-outs (some also served in fast food like fashion) having some effect of people's perception.
If one has eaten a good $13 lobster roll off the back of a Manhattan truck, or take-out steak salad or a decent Wagyu burger - the take-out from a shop counter during lunchtime not dissimilar to the Mac - which they view as fair comparison (as opposed to family restaurant) against the Mac, and one start to acknowledge cheap
And then there are special needs (Score:2)
An unknown number of people have special eating needs. Driven, I suspect,
by the total revision of what and how food is grown and created
over the last 100 years. By needs I mean not hospital,
necessarily, but at least discomfort and immune system issues.
The Gluten Free and Paleo Diet consumers are a symptom of this great
change. Big Food prefers not to know about any of this as
it reflects on *all* their current product lines. Very
uncomfortable for grocery stores and more so for
restaurants.
it's not going
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I need a Gyro... (Score:3)
Arby's did a good thing by selling Gyros. The Lamb "traditional" Gyros are damn good and I hope they're permanent this time.
Pretty solid nutrition, too, especially for fast food. I ate worse in my teen years.
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Convenience, Selection, and Quality (Score:2)
My wife and I eat at home most of the time. We're each competent cooks, but not great. Even so, we find the experience of eating at home to be as good or better than most restaurants, especially where we live now. After all, the food we like is always on the menu at home, the ingredients are never poor quality, and we know the food has been handled and prepared safely. Eating out and ordering in, at this point, is mostly a fallback plan if something comes up. Even then -- with takeout in particular --
Bland repetitive chow-chow ... (Score:3)
... loses its "flair" once it becomes commonplace. Who would've thunk? MD's always was about indulging in something generally regarded as unhealthy and not something to do every day. That was no different in the 70ies when I was a small kid and we'd go there to treat the family to some junk food.
Perpetual fast food has turned the US population into a flock of land-whales and the growing counter movement are hipster foodies and minimalist Paleo and quantified self geeks.
That sort of thing only works emotionally if you actually prepare your meals yourself and steer clear of junk food.
By and large this is a good thing IMHO.
Tip - go electronic (Score:3)
One of the very best thing I've ever done was to start using Chick-fil-a's mobile app, rather than waiting in line... not because I have anything against the in-person ordering experience, nor even because of a time difference between the two experiences. (There is often little or no time advantage, actually.) Rather, the critical factor which makes ordering from my phone worth doing, is the digitally e-mailed receipt. With all of those receipts already in a digital format and handily sent to me automatically, I don't have to really think about things like historic price increases, until the moment that such a thing becomes important to me. Nor do I have to guess at how often I frequent a given restaurant/store; the answer to that question is a simple word search away.
Obviously, you could also go with one of those apps that attempts to read your paper receipts and collates them for you... assuming that you're going to consistently remember to add your latest receipt to the app. But I'm not Sheldon; I'm not nearly obsessive enough to remember every single time. For those of us who are more Leonard and less Sheldon, letting the computer do a bit more of the work for us is, perhaps, a good thing.
As an aside: Chick-fil-a doesn't seem to change their prices very often; that's vaguely interesting to me, especially in light of this particular article. (Not that I ever actually eat at McDonalds, anyway...)
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Location, Location, Location.
Country and Suburbs will eat at home much more, City Folks will eat out more.
Due to greater availability of restaurants, and smaller kitchens in their apartments, which makes cooking more difficult.
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City Folks will eat out more.
How does location change what they do in the bedroom?
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"I eat exactly *0* homecooked meals a week. My time is worth more to me than the $$ is costs to get a (good) restaurant meal. "
Unless you live in NYC and go around the corner to your fave restaurant (and even if this is true), I don't believe you actually save much time given your "good restaurant meal". It is fairly simple to prepare a very high quality meal with a wide variety of foods in well under an hour, in many cases under 30minutes. No "good restaurant" experience that I know of is less than 60mins,
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so you're going to go to a "good restaurant" and READ while you wait? How gauche... Read while driving to the restaurant? read while waiting for your table?
Ok, so when you're cooking, you can listen to music OF YOUR CHOICE (or even TV if you must).... not possible at a restaurant (unless I suppose you're going to do the earbud thing and continue to be gauche...)
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I eat exactly *0* homecooked meals a week. My time is worth more to me than the $$ is costs to get a (good) restaurant meal.
Given how unhealthy most restaurant meals are, you're probably hacking far more time off the end of your life than you'd ever save by not cooking.
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I really doubt your off time is a valuable as what you assign it. As stated elsewhere, this is a very common /. attitude. Your off time is no more valuable than the garbage man's.
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How many people do you know who never buy breakfast or lunch at work?
The place where I work doesn't sell food. Either I bring some home made lunch in a box, or I just skip it. At home we cook all our meals, except on birthdays when we go to a restaurant (where they sell healthy food)
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I know a lot more millennials these days that starve themselves to be like the Kardashian girls
Just like my sisters did in the 1970's. It's not exactly a new phenomenon.
Also, there used to be roughly 2 gender choices and sexual orientations. Now there are about 70 or something
No there are not, no matter how much "conservatives" want it to be true, no-one really thinks like that, except trolls on the Internet.
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How are they going to get that just right size booty if they are starving themselves? I think they have it bassackwards.
It's easier now to cook, and FAR cheaper. (Score:4, Interesting)
The grocery stores and food producers are extremely hostile toward customers. Cans of Tuna, for example, went from 6.5 ounces to 6 ounces and the reduction continued to 3 ounces. [amazon.com] They found a weakness in the customers. The customer may remember the price, but may not notice that the can size has been reduced by 0.5 ounce, and the amount of water has increased.
It's good to make your own bread. For example: Adm Whole Wheat Flour # 17688, $13.98 / Unit (50 lb) [smartfoodservice.com]. When you buy bread, it may be $2.50 per pound or more, and the weight includes the water in the bread. You can buy the flour used to make bread for $0.28, 28 cents per pound.
There are many examples like that.
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There have been continuous price increases in the United States. ... Cans of Tuna, for example, went from 6.5 ounces to 6 ounces and the reduction continued to 3 ounces. [amazon.com] They found a weakness in the customers. The customer may remember the price, but may not notice that the can size has been reduced by 0.5 ounce, and the amount of water has increased.
Similarly, toilet paper went from being (typically) 4.25" x 4.25" to slightly smaller (and now often not square) without a price reduction - which is, effectively, a price increase. People often simply shop by package price w/o noticing the unit values.
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I guess you also have to consider how much your time is worth to you. If you make a very basic loaf it will take about 10 minutes of your time to prep it, cook it, clean up afterwards. Even if you are somebody like creimer or 10101101010, 10 minutes of your time is worth maybe $5.
Which doesn't even consider the cost of energy.
I suspect people are just buying more ready-made food at the supermarket. Cooking for yourself doesn't make economic sense - it's more like a hobby.
Re:It's easier now to cook, and FAR cheaper. (Score:4, Interesting)
Cooking for yourself doesn't make economic sense - it's more like a hobby.
If you cook for yourself though, you will probably use less salt; you will almost certainly use far less sugar; and you will not add any of the commercial preservatives, emulsifiers, bulking agents and dyes that are added to the majority of store-bought meals. Your food should therefor be healthier and significantly less fattening.
People have hobbies because they enjoy them. They are objectively good for you because they reduce stress and increase happiness. If cooking is in fact your hobby, that's a good thing for your health and sanity.
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FYI, bread is made from high-gluten flour, which costs a lot more than plain flour around here.
If you ever tried to make your own bread from cheap flour, you should have noticed it is not at all the same.
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FYI, bread is made from high-gluten flour, which costs a lot more than plain flour around here. If you ever tried to make your own bread from cheap flour, you should have noticed it is not at all the same.
Or you could make soda bread which uses plain flour and no yeast. Just saying...
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Or you could make soda bread which uses plain flour and no yeast. Just saying...
So eat bad bread, AND go to the effort of making it, for maybe 30 cents. Using proper flour and yeast will cost me $1/loaf but make delicious fresh bread.
Or I could buy a loaf of supermarket's cheapest bread for $1 (Australia - so I assume less in the US?)
Pasta and rice are very cheap too. Why would anyone go to the effort of making their own bad bread, even with a machine, to save a buck or less? Even on US minimum wage that makes no sense.
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When you buy bread, it may be $2.50 per pound or more, and the weight includes the water in the bread. You can buy the flour used to make bread for $0.28, 28 cents per pound.
Did you amortise the time value of you cooking the bread and the electricity needed to run your oven?
The goal in life is not to do everything as cheaply as possible. I could build my own house for a small fraction of the cost of buying a place too. I don't because I want to do other things with my time.
Sidenote: I actually love cooking, but baking sucks badly. Give me an expensive cake from a patisary any day.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IH-QqV1Fjak&ab_channel=timecapture
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