> I have friends who eat out every single meal of every single day.
I have friends who do too but it's not because they don't know how to cook, it's because they don't like to and don't wanna bother and can afford the luxury of having someone else to do it for them.
I have a suspicion this kind of living, in part, explains why so many people are miserable. I feel like removing every inconvenient thing from your life, and "having someone else do it for you" must make your ability to handle discomfort atrophy to the point where the tiniest unpleasantness feels like a catastrophe. Like muscles, your brain, your immune system, etc., we need a little discomfort / struggle once in a while to grow. Systematically removing all discomfort from our lives seems both expensive and self-destructive.
Or freeing up time spent on minor inconveniences (buying ingredients, cooking, cleaning) gives me more opportunity to deal with more major inconveniences and challenges, or anything else I want to do.
I used to cook but stopped years ago. I like having a huge variety of food options on-demand. I like being able to order delivery, do something fun and/or productive while waiting for the food, and then continue as soon as I finish eating. Or I can walk to a restaurant and get some exercise in before and after eating.
I have a small kitchen and a short attention span. I could stockpile it with dozens of fresh ingredients every day and cook from 7 different cuisines every day of the week, but it's much easier if I don't have to do that. Time is the most valuable resource in the universe, and I don't get much enjoyment from cooking, so having the privilege to eat out for every meal has made me a lot happier on average.
I don't buy the argument that removing those sorts of obstacles and inconveniences makes you depressed. Maybe in cases where physical activity is greatly reduced, but that's just a correlation and not a given. If you're self-sustaining and not mooching off of others, I think you should do whatever makes you happy, and if that includes never cooking, cleaning, or driving again, odds are you'll be happier and better-off for it. If you enjoy cooking, go for it, but if you don't and don't have to, why do something that doesn't make you happy and erases a not-insignificant proportion of your entire existence? Life has more than enough hardships and inconveniences to throw at you in other ways.
I agree. Before my burnout I used to order food every day of the week, eating while coding, etc. Taking the time to cook a simple meal is a piece of mindfulness. It helped a lot in my burnout recovery. I can highly recommend the YouTube videos of Gennaro Contaldo. Quick, easy and healthy meals. Few but high-quality ingredients is key. Parmigiano Reggiano saved my life.
I agree with your general sentiment. However, in my anecdotal sampling of people who frequently cook vs frequently eat out, tolerance for discomfort is greater in those that frequently eat out. Especially in relation to food, where those who frequently cook almost can't tolerate food cooked by others. Further on the food front, people who cook seem to be more heavily affected by fasting, or less willing to tolerate it. (For my sampling, eating food supplement such as huel or soylent goes under the frequently eat out category)
With respect to the ancestral comment about getting confused looks when refusing to eat with someone, they likely aren't confused because you would eat food you cooked, they are confused because you don't want to spend time with them. Personally, eating out for lunch with my labmates, coworkers, friends, family, etc. is the highlight of my day.
>Especially in relation to food, where those who frequently cook almost can't tolerate food cooked by others.
OMG, this was definitely SO true of my grandma when she was alive. She would frequently go gambling and the casino gave her free food and she wouldn't eat it. She'd claim she didn't like it, all of it, couldn't stomach it, not even a bite. So she'd pack a lunch.
It kinda bothered me because as far as I'm concerned if food is free as long as it's not rotten/unsanitary or meat (I'm a vegetarian) and I'm hungry, I'll happily eat it, even if it doesn't taste good.
Food biz is a low margins cut throat affair, quality is not something that is easy to get.
"Just fine" is very low bar, my mom is an excellent chef, to get the same tastiness and attention to detail you have to pay quite a lot of money. Even eating her sandwiches on the go can be better than a high end fast food stall.
> where those who frequently cook almost can't tolerate food cooked by others.
I suspect this is because people have a small repertoire of food which is largely designed specifically for their palette. I know that I have a very strong preference for the way I cook foods. But I also can't handle certain foods, notably olives, mushrooms, and raw tomatoes.
> Further on the food front, people who cook seem to be more heavily affected by fasting, or less willing to tolerate it.
This has not been my experience, but N=1 because I'm the only person I know who regularly fasts. I'm fine cooking for others while fasting too.
You just described pretty much every day of my life for the past 8 years.
I think there's nothing wrong with this. (Though of course I'm biased.) The intermittent fasting seems to benefit my concentration and energy, even if the fasting happens to be unintentional and due to distraction or laziness. The only externality is if you end up eating a lot right before sleeping, which tends to impact my sleep and digestion. As long as you avoid that and are getting enough calories and nutrition, I don't see the issue.
Yes, there are reasons people cook. My point was more to provide a defense on specific issues related to not cooking, particularly the idea that it makes one weak willed.
I would assert that most people who eat out regularly have spent some time amount of cooking for themselves (once again anecdotal) and are not just ignorant of the concept of cooking. Their cost calculus weights time, socializing, and mental load greater than their refined taste preferences and the cost saving. I really doubt anyone who is over the age of 20 hasn't cooked a cycle of meals for themselves.
We are becoming one trick ponies, only defined by the work that we do. There is something about cooking, doing things with your hands that is fundamental to the human experience. I cook, but I also like to order in, sometimes I just microwave stuff. It depends on your mood.
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
This, so much. Saying this in earnest, I've stopped tying my identity with my work and it feels liberating. I'm not bothered by people who think I "can do so much more". May be but I'm happier.
I have thought about this a lot while cooking, and I also think it comes down to the fact that cooking is both very creative but also very destructive (fire, oil, cutting, smashing, boiling, melting! such fun).
It satisfies those two core urges we all have to some degree.
> There is something about cooking, doing things with your hands that is fundamental to the human experience.
I agree that doing more has plenty of avantage, but is there something specifically about cooking?
Have you ever sew piece of clothes that you regularly wear? Most people never did... yet for something that will be used for hundreds of hours, we pay 20$+ for it instead of taking a few hours to do it. Why are we arguing about cooking ourself but not sewing our own clothes?
Cooking our own food is simply a tradition that stayed with us, nothing else. It doesn't make more sense to do it ourself, than making our own clothes.
I mean sustenance and cooking is one of the fundamental activities required to continue living. Defintely ranks higher than any other skill i.e. sewing etc. Although, still quite important to do that as well.
I am also skeptical of "optimizing" every part of our lives. Cell phones allow us to do so many things more efficiently than in the past. But what are people actually doing with that freed up time?
I had to wait in line at a bank a few months ago (how quaint). It made me realise how little 'off' time we have compared to my parents' generation. It was peaceful.
Sure, websites and phones save us so much time but there's always another thing to do. If we're not doing something we are wasting time aren't we? The opportunity cost gets higher every time technology becomes more efficient. Some of us aren't even safe from the constant feed in the toilet.
I believe that your comment is spot-on. As one part of the population goes further and further towards living in a world where we get everything we need from a smartphone, another part of the population has figured out that this is the road to misery and is running quickly in the other direction, embracing stoicism, cold showers, and Crossfit workouts.
A podcast I listen to calls this "ordinary misery" and stresses the need to bring as much of it into our lives as we can stand.
Sounds like you're projecting the habits of your personal circle onto the masses: most people are nowhere remotely near the point of removing every inconvenience from their lives. I don't know a lot of miserable rich people either.
Yeah, seems very weird to judge someone so harshly for simply not wanting to cook and then go on to accuse them of being miserable. I mean, does someone who's spouse does the shopping and cooking get the same judgement? Absolutely not! Neither do people who hire a landscaper instead of doing their own yardwork. Nor do people who drive a mile to the store instead of walking or biking there. Nor do couples who have multiple cars when one of them doesn't work (or they both work in the same direction)
Anyways, these people I'm talking about upthread still go to work everyday, do their own laundry, clean their houses, scrub their toilets, do their yardwork, do their taxes, work out regularly, run errands, and probably hundreds of other things that cause minor inconvenience. It's not like they are doing nothing but sitting on the couch poking at their phones.
It's not my kinda thing, personally. Mostly because food in general just isn't at all important to me.
To me it's just ascribing all these benefits to your little hobby horse that other people surely lack since they don't share your interests, even going so far as to hint that it's evidence of some sort of decline in society. I've seen HNers say the same thing about people who don't care how computers work to people who can't take a walk without headphones on.
The atrophy of personal cooking in the United States is a broad and pretty well documented phenomenon: "The percentage of daily energy consumed from home food sources and time spent in food preparation decreased significantly for all socioeconomic groups between 1965–1966 and 2007–2008" [1]
It is not about discomfort..I don’t want to waste my time on things that take up a lot of my time for very little return. Hired help for cooking, cleaning, child care, outdoor and home maintainance is pretty common. If I had spare change, I would even hire someone to drive me around. My time is important.
If I can make double or triple what a maid service charges per hour, it makes no sense to do the lower wage jobs by myself. It’s the same thing with hiring delivery services. Take amazon prime for example..When you can get caught Bay Area traffic for 40-60 mts at a time, it makes no sense to do a milk and bread run. I spend less, waste nothing, save time and eat better because I know exactly what to order and how much.
It reminds me of my childhood back in India when the corner store would deliver provisions and vegetables every weekend even without us ordering because they knew our eating habits. Same with milk man, vegetable vendor, flower girl and even the plumber/electrician who came once in 3 months for a check. There was no contract, no insurance and no order forms. It was small communities making sure there were jobs and income for all within small neighborhoods. They operated as clusters even with one billion people. Compared to that, it’s pure chaos here wrt domestic time management. I really appreciate all the services available these days. I have been american for a few decades and it wasn’t like so earlier.
How do you measure return? Not doubting your approach - just curious how you measure the return of various unrelated tasks (e.g. cooking vs. spending that time working)
Example: I grew up in a large joint family. In the family kitchen, everyone had a chore. Often around 20-40 mts time investment each benefited 12 people’s meals. Cooking for myself or even two people is at least one hour. My time is better spent doing other things. I would rather hire a cook.
Otoh, it’s also a timesaver and money saver if we could have a hired a cook to feed 12 people, but the family had seniors, kids, teens and working adults and stay at home moms. It was also a way for our grandmother to teach us family recipes and chores. That was invaluable. We also learnt time management, budgeting and cooking informally. Those are life lessons. Priceless. Now this..As an adult in a nuclear family, it’s a drain on my time. And time is money too. Ditto with driving.
Example: it costs $6.99 for A2 milk from Whole Foods delivered free. $5 tip for $40 worth of deliveries. The cheapest A2 milk in a store is 9.99/three cartons at Costco. That’s one hour shopping+driving plus gas. And I can’t buy in small quantities. I can’t manage groceries on a week to week basis. Net net, the seemingly more expensive option is the cheapest one.
Not including the carbon footprint benefit. One person delivering to ten homes on a route is better than 10 people driving to different stores to pick up milk. Time. The arrow of time goes in only one direction. Can’t reverse time and hence it has become more valuable. Take communal time and communal value for money too.
If I were a mom dropping off my kids at two different schools, that time shopping and driving for milk runs is better spent as quality time with my kids. Even if it’s pure comfort factor. Kicking back and watching a movie is totally worth the money. It’s hedonism at a very small price. Discomfort is not a virtue nor is it a teachable moment.
There is a quality I’d like to call ‘slack’. It’s the stress adjustment factor. If your inner space is taut and always stretched end to end, it would snap. Makes you inflexible. Frayed. No ‘give’ to personality. That has a huge impact..esp with relationships even if it’s with yourself. Slack makes it better. Let’s you live longer and better without snapping. Avoiding discomfort is a survival skill.
Having said that, discomfort is essential to children. It is an experience and a teachable skill. Interestingly, I have been observing that we pad our younger generation’s life and make them soft by catering to their every need while parents fray and become brittle. When the kids grow up, they are never going to understand ‘discomfort’ and when it becomes unavoidable (as it goes in life) and unable to adjust, they are going to break down.
Adults need to embrace slack and pass on discomfort to the next generation. They have rightly been dubbed entitled. And we are no longer children and our time in discomfort training camp is over.
Cooking plus cleaning is usually a 2 hour experience. So you really need to enjoy cooking to do it or if you have no choice. Yes I see most cookers here omit cleaning which is part of the deal
But one day I was watching Gordon Ramsey work with a home cook and the home cook was trying to keep up with Ramsey.
It was amazing because Ramsey kept his whole cooking area so clean and organized, and the home cook's area looked like a tornado passed through. At that point I had an epiphany and started trying to keep organized like Ramsey.
Pretty quickly I became very efficient and clean in the kitchen. This is a skill that takes practice and experience and is as integral to cooking as the actual cooking.
Now I think about the order I do things, the order I use my tools, tool placement, tool cleanup, and surface cleanup as I cook. The result is that very rarely do I have more than a single pan (or two) to wash after cooking, and the kitchen is usually cleaner when the meal is done than when I started.
I put this to the test, last Thanksgiving when I cooked a large meal for 5 people over the course of several hours and when I was done I did not have a single dirty dish (other than those being used for serving/eating) and my dishwasher was empty. It felt good because just a year prior I would have had a destroyed kitchen with a sink full of pots and pans and dirty counters.
I call it "kitchen craft" (like field craft) and if you work to practice it, it gets better every time you cook. And it makes cooking so much easier. For instance, making something like tortillas from scratch used to be a huge endeavor because I'd have such a big mess to cleanup afterword. It seemed daunting. Now I will make tortillas on a whim because I wan't a breakfast burrito and my kitchen will be clean before the pan is even hot enough to cook the tortillas.
Theres two approaches to solving this. If there is more than one of you, or you have kids, then the person who cooks doesn't clean. The other (more sensible approach) is once you enter the kitchen, you don't leave it until the meal is done. If a meal takes 30 minutes from prep to plate, chances are a lot of that time is waiting. Cleaning during that time is how you minimise that cost. I cook every other night (and we have leftovers in between) and we have food on the table, with everything but serving dishes within an hour from when I get home most evenings.
I find it pretty hard to get cooking down to 30 minutes of actual clock time spent working, not counting cleanup (I do a decent job of cleaning as I go anyway). Most recipes with short nominal "hands-on time" achieve it by not accounting for the prep to have all the ingredients ready, as specified in the ingredients list (dicing vegetables, grinding & mixing spices, cutting up meat, that sort of thing) and usually the shorter the nominal time the more important it is to have all that stuff ready from the start, as there's little slack to do that as you're cooking.
Yeah true but a lot of time it ain’t happening, kids too young, wife too tired, or you cooking for yourself etc. So there is always a situational thing going on unless you have a military style home rules. The best is still to enjoy it. Even when cleaning I find a way infuse joy, like having a system and always find ways to improve speed, then marvel how fast and good it was done
My struggle is that I look at it as a time/cost relationship. I'd rather use my time more wisely because the cost of me maintaining a pantry, cooking, and cleaning for one outweighs the cost of getting takeout. It's probably an excuse more than anything but my work schedule can be irregular and makes it more difficult to plan.
I don't understand it, but I can eat the same thing at home for breakfast every day of every week for years and not get bored of it. If I ate at the same restaurant every morning, I'd be sick of it before the end of the week.
Who says you would have to eat at the same restaurant? When I was always eating out I was going to multiple restaurants. I avoided going to the same place too often so I wouldn't get bored with it.
Yes, but if we are talking strictly numbers, we have to consider opportunity cost. I do love cooking, but I can make way more than $10 in 1 or 2 hours.
I love cooking sometimes, but then again, other-times I would rather spend my time working on a client project. When you add up the time spent:
1. planning meals (may be minimal if you can ad-hoc quickly)
2. walking/driving to the grocery store
3. cooking
4. cleaning
It can easily be more expensive for an individual person (or even a couple) to cook than it is to eat out. (I think this makes intuitive sense too, since there are economies of scale and efficiencies with how restaurants are run.) If you love cooking, then you are doing it for fun---thats great! But I think for people who don't like cooking, it can be rational to eat out for most meals.
Many people are not paid at an hourly rate, so this analysis may not make sense for them.
(Also, where I live, there are plenty of healthy and cheap places to eat out at.)
If you care about it, it's easy to save money by cooking yourself with this one crazy trick: leftovers. It takes very little extra effort to make a much larger batch of whatever you're cooking. It's pretty simple to cook ~10 servings of a solid meal that costs ~$0.25 (e.g., Chana Masala w/ brown rice) each with about ~2 hours of time all in with grocery shopping + cooking + cleaning. Sure, if you're making $200+/hour and would do none of these things, it might be slightly cheaper to get delivery. But... I suspect that scenario is very uncommon.
Sure, but now you're eating the same thing for a week. I lived that way in college, it was great for saving money. Now i can afford to do a combination of delivery and blueapron style box'o'ingredients and enjoy the increased variety with less mental overhead (buying, prepping, and storing multiple servings for one has its own issues).
The trade off here is that now you're eating the same meal for 10 meals straight. Most people would rather not do that if they could afford not to.
It doesn't particularly bother me to eat the same thing everyday, but some people absolutely hate it. I am good friends with someone who absolutely refuses to eat leftovers, ever.
I think this is why the usual advice is usually 'learn a few dishes you like', not 'cook something new every day'. Once you have a few recipes nailed, you don't need to spend time planning etc, and you can work out a pattern whereby you know exactly what to buy each time you go to the store (which you'd be doing anyway) without needing to think. And for washing/cleaning up, there are dishwashers.
It's not about affording it dude, I got a cook who comes and cooks for me, have a meal delivery service as well, but I also like to cook.Period. Nothing to do with luxury BS.
I have friends who do too but it's not because they don't know how to cook, it's because they don't like to and don't wanna bother and can afford the luxury of having someone else to do it for them.