I didn't talk about restaurants/cafeterias, I mentioned diners and street vendors for a reason. Specifically these places feature solo cooks who cook complete dishes to order within a few minutes by using a griddle or wok. The only significant amount of time required here is the chopping of the raw ingredients, which they do beforehand so the customers can get their orders in 5 minutes. At home that might take up to 20 minutes, depending how much you need to chop. There are plenty of different dishes you can cook like this.
Of course there are also plenty of other dishes that require a longer time to cook, but that's beside the point. The original comment was complaining that it takes "7 hours a day" and causes burnout to prepare a variety of meals that aren't packed with sugar. This is an absurd statement that at best adds nothing to the conversation and at worst discourages people from attempting to develop simple, healthy eating habits.
7 hours a day is definitely an exaggeration but it isn’t that far from some common extreme cases. My mother in law when we visit her will spend most of her time in the kitchen preparing each meal, but then she kills her own chickens also (this being a low tier Chinese city). She has just done cooking that way most of her life. Then again, when we lived in China eating in was a special case and eating out was cheaper/more time efficient and was pretty healthy if you chose the right stuff.
Sure - but the point is that the original commenter is using an extreme as though it was typical or necessary, when it is clearly not.
I have a curry recipe that takes about 3 hours to execute, however it makes about 20 portions which can then be frozen, and reheated. That’s 9 minutes per portion, and reheating it along with some rice from a rice cooker takes 5-6 minutes of attention. I.e. 15 minutes per meal.
My lunch today will be pan fried salmon with crispy skin, a baked potato, and lettuce.
The potato takes at most 2 minutes to scrub and put into a toaster oven. It takes about 2 minutes to rinse and select a few lettuce leaves. The salmon takes about 10 minutes to pin-bone, season, and cook isolaterally. Again, around 15 minutes.
I learned the salmon cooking technique from watching a 10 minute Gordon Ramsay YouTube video. This stuff isn’t rocket science. You don’t have to spend 7 hours a day cooking, but you do have to accumulate learned techniques steadily over time, just like with anything you want to do yourself.
Our family relies a lot on frozen Tilapia that can be fried up easily enough in a non-stick. It isn't rocket since, 7 hours is an exaggeration (for the USA at least), but...there is surely a better way to do this food preparation thing (outsource to businesses who can scale up and specialize in it, like we did in Roman times).
Yes, that is the problem with the USA. But surely there must be some room for disruption here: food that can be prepared more economically than you could by yourself. It has happened in other countries (even Switzerland has lots of nice cafeterias that are very competitive with home preparation), why not here?
Of course there are also plenty of other dishes that require a longer time to cook, but that's beside the point. The original comment was complaining that it takes "7 hours a day" and causes burnout to prepare a variety of meals that aren't packed with sugar. This is an absurd statement that at best adds nothing to the conversation and at worst discourages people from attempting to develop simple, healthy eating habits.