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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.

by pjc5056 minutes ago|

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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.

by AlexandrB16 hours ago|

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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.

by foxyv14 hours ago|

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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.

by jandrewrogers14 hours ago|

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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.

by somenameforme5 hours ago|

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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&...