Please Stop Telling Poor People to “Just Cook” to Save Money

There’s a meme making the rounds again comparing the amount of food you can get from KFC for $20 and the amount of food you can get from the grocery store for the same price. The implication is that stupid, poor and lazy people are throwing their hard-earned tuppence away on fast food when they could be cooking at home, being healthier and richer in the process.

Give me an absolute break.

The basic premise of the meme is correct, and by basic I mean whoever made it had half a thought and didn’t bother with the rest. It IS cheaper to cook at home than get most take-out… in the long-term. A recipe is far more than the ingredient list, and things like utensils alone can make what seemed like a simple, cheap dish into something more costly than going by the drive-thru would have been.

Cooking is not just a trip to a grocery store. You need a basic set of cookware for starters. I’ve been on a $70 Tools of the Trade set for more than a decade, and trust me, it really wants to retire. You’re going to need some knives for chopping, butterflying, mincing, etc. The low-end of those starts at $20, but they are absolutely essential. Of course, you’ll require a cutting board as well.

These things add up quickly. The dish in the headline picture is my take on the basic the McCormick Rosemary Chicken and Red Potatoes recipe. It’s cheap enough and easy as pie, but do you have a 5 quart mixing bowl? You need one if you don’t want to be chasing escaped potatoes all over the kitchen. Another question, do you have a 15x10x1-inch baking pan, heavy duty foil, and cooking spray? All this just added another $20 onto the price of a meal if you don’t have them. The McCormick’s recipe is at least kind enough to recommend garlic powder rather than fresh garlic. Most recipes not put out by spice companies don’t. Better learn the fresh-to-powder ratio or buy a press.

houstonpress.com/restaurants/telling-poor-people-to-just-cook-is-stupid-10102260

That’s another $8. Over time, this even outs, but setting up a working kitchen can easily cost as much as a used car depending on where you start from.

As the primary cook and grocery person in the family, I’m very used to poverty substitution games, which I am slavish to even when money isn’t tight because it’s become second nature. You swap vegetable oil for olive oil, water for stock or broth, table salt for sea salt, etc. All of it in an effort to shave just a few more dollars off the grocery total, and all of it produces a slightly lesser version of what you’re hoping for. That’s if it even comes out good and you’re not forced to order an emergency pizza to cover a cooking goof.

Now, these days for me, cooking is absolutely cheaper for virtually anything. I’ve got nearly two decades of pan, utensil and spice acquisition to prep for. If I want to make turkey chili some night, I can probably do so for less than $2 a serving because odds are my spice rack is full and I have everything else I need ready to go. Again, the chicken pictured at the top? All I had to buy was the meat and potatoes. Everything else was handy because I’ve bought it piecemeal over the course of years. If you’re observant about sales and coupons, good at meal prep and have a fair-sized freezer, you might not even need to go buy those. Alton Brown has given me a lot of good advice, but the best is still “freeze the ingredients you don’t use.”

But that brings us into a final discussion: time. You know why people go through KFC? Because, in terms of total resources it is the most efficient family meal you can provide in a 20-minute timespan. I have three fried chicken recipes. Most of them require at least an hour or more including store and prep time. Time is, well, not money, exactly, but it is something that is precious and in short supply when you’re coming home at 6 p.m. on a Tuesday.

Let me make something very clear. I love to cook, and it is a handy way to save money. That said, one of the ways we make that happen is that I work from home within hiking distance of the grocery store. I can pull myself away from an assignment and go get whatever we need for a spinach quiche whenever I want. If my wife, who works 12-hour shifts at the hospital and often doesn’t get home until 8 p.m., were doing this without me, I imagine there would be a lot more KFC in my daughter’s diet.

Everyone should learn to cook. It’s an essential skill, but the answer is way more complicated than “just cook, you lazy poor!” I’ve yet to buy a single recipe book that didn’t take at least one $20 purchase for granted as they casually told me to run something through a food processor. Cooking costs, and that’s one of the reasons some tired parent working two jobs stops by McDonald’s on the way home for the cheapest, most nutritious food in human history.

didn't read lol kys

you can get a full set of kitchen supplies at the goodwill for like 20$

Hmm. Counterpoint: You're a faggot

tl;dr tbqhwy

You're comparing a meal cost + a whole set of cookware + items you don't need to buy more than once in a while to the cost of some KFC. If you're being realistic, it doesn't take long for cheaper starting equipment and cooking for yourself to quickly dip back under the cost of continuing to eat nothing but fast food and takeout.

It varies by region and socioeconomic status, but if you want to talk more realistic barriers then let's discuss health education, prevalent stress and health issues common in the poorest amongst us, and food deserts.

I see the point on everything else, but I have a really hard time believing McDonald's is the "most nutritious food in human history." I guess I haven't been there in years to witness any changes, though.

So basically you just got kicked out of your parents' house and are living on your own for the first time? Cool story. We have this thread every day, but usually the OP isn't a fucking retard.

It depends on what you order also the strongest point the author makes imo is that people don't have a lot of time in their lives and picking up food quickly is faster then making it when you are exhausted.

His whole argument is rife with bad logic and inaccuracies, but dubbing McDonald's the "most nutritious food in human history" is truly the cherry on top of the stupidity sundae.

Well-intentioned post but complete bullshit, 1/10.

Can get them for free on places like Craigslist and Gumtree.

Rice, beans and chicken. You can get fit, healthy and in a cheap way. Way cheaper than ameriburger restaurants.

FUN FACT:

Contrary to popular myths, American blacks actually get FATTER & more obsese as they make more income.

>most nutritious food in human history
it provides fat, carbs, protein (ie nutrition) at a very small cost, that part isn't incorrect.

>now you're going to change the definition of nutrition to healthfulness.

That is interesting.

>fat, carbs, protein
>nutrition
Those are macronutrients.

>now you're going to change the definition of nutrition to healthfulness.
Health IS part of the definition. Calling McDonald's nutritious because it's fast and easy calories doesn't make you right.

Finally some real fucking data instead of all this hyperbole bullshit.

Do you throw away the pots/pans after you use them or something?

So, poor people are poor because they lake the ability to plan long term. The cant invest. They can put a bit of money aside every month to buy cookware.
Also, as far as cookware 1 stainless steel pan and a spatula can be 90% of what you need.
Also, i have a very well stocked kitchen. I have pretty much every piece of cookware i could ever want. I got everything for a couple dollars a piece second hand.
If you go 2 days eating rice for dinner and save that $40 you can pretty much well stock your pantry as well.

>Those are macronutrients.
where do you think nutrition comes?
>Health IS part of the definition.
Only in that it provides nutrition and thus keeps you alive.

>Durr, what's a micronutrient?

Defending your ignorance with a shitty attitude doesn't make you any less wrong.

What are the basics you need in a pantry and what is a mid range price for each one?
Flour- $2
Rice- $5 (for a big bag because its rice)
Wine- $3
Stock- $2 per type you use
Canned tomato- $2 for a couple of cans
Seasoning- up to $10 for a decent variety
If you want to be picky you can add another $5 for staple veggies
This is not a huge investment.
This is very managable for even poor people. I worked with the homeless and even those fuckers carried their own spices.

This is like that Gwyneth Paltrow tweet.

You can't buy second hand shit. You can't cut on a 3$ bamboo cutting board. You can't just throw the chicken in the largest enamel or stainless steel pan you have, you have to follow the recipe exactly. You can't just buy off brand garlic powder for 50 cent.

What a silver spooned faggot.

>Durr, what's a micronutrient?
Obviously you don't know.

do you think you get nutrition from rocks and sand?
Do you look at people who die on deserted islands and ask "why didn't they just eat the sand"
Are you this braindead?

The time aspect is the only part I can agree with. When I worked two jobs it was always easier to stop somewhere instead of even bothering to pack a lunch.
Work in hospitality so there is typically leftover food given to the staff which offsets having to get take-out. But when one is exhausted a drive thru window is way more appealing than cooking at home.

>Let me make something very clear. I love to cook, and it is a handy way to save money. That said, one of the ways we make that happen is that I work from home within hiking distance of the grocery store. I can pull myself away from an assignment and go get whatever we need for a spinach quiche whenever I want. If my wife, who works 12-hour shifts at the hospital and often doesn’t get home until 8 p.m., were doing this without me, I imagine there would be a lot more KFC in my daughter’s diet.

Maybe if he wasn't such a shitty journalist he wouldn't have to be in a relationship with some destitute foreign nurse.

>Jef Rouner is a contributing writer who covers politics, pop culture, social justice, video games, and online behavior. He is often a professional annoyance to the ignorant and hurtful.

Fuck me sideways someone nuke this godforsaken rock.

There is a reason why Mexicans can handle just fine getting paid well under minimum wage and panhandling or doing side shit like walking dogs or landscaping while poor white people end up living in trailers getting high and black people robing each other and that's because Mexicans know how to be poor and how to survive hardship
You won't see a family of two adults and 3 kids, they live together with their extended family and there is at least one woman who works taking care of everyone else as in she cooks for 10 people, cleans after 10 people goes grocery shopping for 10 people (and has to figure out what to buy where because every penny matters), looks after the kids, etc. That woman works harder than ten feminists put together and knows more than a hundred gender studies graduates, she doesn't eat McDonald's because she is too busy or doesn't have the right spices, if you know how to cook you wouldn't be missing any spices anyway because you would have figured out that Asian food uses the same spices for the most part and italian food uses Italian spices and so on so you wouldn't be making tacos and one day curry the next

I would add a $5 rotisserie chicken, since that can be stretched out into a variety of meals depending on the amount of people being fed. Even the bones can be tossed in a crock or stock pot to make broth.

Milk
Oil
Eggs
Some kind of pasta
Papper towels
Salt
Pepper
Cornstarch
Baking powder

/thread

>Evidence of societal trend toward group stupidity
OP, you are a fucking idiot, and a piece of shit for spreading misinformation to shill for fast food.

I can't tell if you are retarded, autistic or legit insane. Maybe even a McDonalds Shill

I can easily feed myself on 20$ a week. Ovens and countertops come with every rental apartment where I live. So that leaves like what? A once in lifetime cost of 100$ for Pots Pans, and Knives? Or even once a decade you would spend 10$ a YEAR for cooking wear. Or little under 1$ a month. MAYBE another 5 to 10$ a month for spices and oils if you are generous (That's half the cost of ONE KFC bucket) . As for time most dishes I do can be done in under 30 minutes or you can prep in bulk on the weekend. That's probably less time and definitely less gas money then it takes to drive your fat ass to KFC standing there in line and then driving back. You only have to shop for groceries once every week or two while you have to pick pick up the unhealthy slob that is fast food every day.

Don't get me wrong I love the occasional fastfood Burger or Taco, but it's a goddamn LUXURY not a necessity.

>You know why people go through KFC? Because, in terms of total resources it is the most efficient family meal you can provide in a 20-minute timespan. I have three fried chicken recipes

Holy Shit it's absolutely not. It's just lazy people being stupid with their money. Not only is cooking more time and cost effective it is also fucking way more healthier and probably safes a lot of medical bills in the long run.

TLDR:

Just cook, you lazy poor!

go to a cheap shit chink shop or the 99cent store and buy a sharp knife for 1 dollar and a plastic cutting board for anywhere between 50 cents and 3 dollars.

There is every tool you'll ever need for the vast majority of food prep.

For cooking, go to a 2nd hand shop and buy the cheapest hunk of metal in the shape of a bowl you can find that happens to have a handle. There. you have both a frypan and a pot. This'll cost you roughly 5 dollars.

So for roughly 10 dollars, you have yourself a fully functional kitchen.

Now you can easily make rice dishes, beans, potatoes, pastas. Each of these will cost on average 3 dollars for 4 serves of food. For 10 dollars you can feed 2 people for a week if you know how to cook.

For 10 dollars i can buy enough food for 2 days at mcderp.

there's a large disconnect here between thinking you need a fully kitted kitchen and cooking to survive.

This. Plus they teach their kids skills. My dad was a machanic. Didnt teach me shit about cars.

Yeah Mexicans amirite. Never doing anything illegal despite being poor. Always hard working.


I hope you are meming.

fucking Commies, Farm Rick Mozzarella sticks are amazing.

there are plenty of mexican rapists, drug dealers and gangs but the ones actually interested on family and kids still have conservative values that nobody else has
if there was a fallout scenario in america who would be more prepared for it? be honest

>and food deserts.

just say ghettos.

>The dish in the headline picture is my take on the basic the McCormick Rosemary Chicken and Red Potatoes recipe.
is it though?

option b is still shit
>dont have this higly processed crap
>have this other higly processed crap

>Yeah Mexicans amirite. Never doing anything illegal despite being poor. Always hard working.

When a mexican commits a crime, we don't count it as a crime silly. It's just a "part of their culture" like drug wars and beheadings.

I suspect by calling McDonald’s “most nutritious” you mean that in terms of caloric value and not vitamins and minerals.

I agree with your post. My niece used to have to cook out of one frying pan and with one of two wooden spoons for cooking utensils. You can build a shelter out of next to nothing but that doesn’t mean you would want to live there full time just like you could prepare your own meals for next to nothing (pb&j for example) but that doesn’t mean you would want to subsist off them if you don’t have to.

>For 10 dollars i can buy enough food for 2 days at mcderp.
5 bucks a day for 3 meals isn't that bad desu senpai.

>falling for the unprocessed meme

OP acknowledged that already when he said it is cheaper “in the long term”. You are paying for convenience 100%.

>beheadings
those are muslims not mexicans, you fucking racist

there is barely any nutritional value there, the fact that you added corn as the vegetable is the worst part
have you ever heard of chhicken? as in the entire bird? it doesnt come in single servings, there arent any instructions under the box

>has no idea what the cartel does to literally anybody that gets in their way
Oh look, a butthurt beaner that's clueless about his atricious excuse for a culture.

ok, I'll start telling poor people to eat at McDonald's everyday instead. Thanks!

>Macronutrients
...Are still nutrients! No one said you would thrive off a McDonald’s diet but you won’t starve to death either due to those MACRONUTRIENTS.

thats how single moms think, thats why they produce most criminals

He's mistaken skinning alive and leaving in public with beheading.

>wouldn't thrive
>defending the guy who called it the most nutritious food in history
mcfucking kill yourself, retard

>'murrica has no drug gang violence problems fighting over turf to control the trade to white suburbanites
LMAO at your delusions!

STFU igorant white kid. Stop larping & trying to speak for us. You obviously don't know shit about what's happening here.

Cooking yourself CAN be a lot cheaper.
If you buy shitty overpriced meme ingredients because your YouTube chef told you so it's your own fault.

>I lose my wits and act emotional instead of logical when cornered with logic.

>buy Pinto Beans
>buy Kidney Beans

am i retarded for not even knowing what to do with these things? i guess you can put them in chili or mix in some sauce but i have no idea what id do with a pound of boring beans that i need to live off of for a week.

Is this the thread where we all larp and pretend to be mexican but don't know shit about mexican history nor culture?

>You obviously don't know shit about what's happening here.

noone cares, abdul. hang yourself.

>noone cares, abdul

I'm mexican in this thread, dumbass. Get with the program.

you're gonna die on 3 cheeseburgers a day though dude. Rice beans and potatoes fill basically everything you need, throw in the occasional hotdog and pad of butter and you've hit every food group for like a buck a meal

>mexican culture
pretend really hard that you dont mind being poor and the never ending crime while trying to brag about your shitty food because there isnt anything else good about you
>mexican history
they ate each other until they got kicked out of half their land

Pretty much this. Mexicans work their ass off and stay tight with their family. When I built my house and did all the subbing out for work the mex crews were topnotch. They showed up and finished on schedule. The only problems I had were with a couple white crews I hired and they didn't show up on schedule and did shit work. Fortunately I was smart enough not to use whites for the major structural things like foundation, plumbing, framing, brickwork, electric or HVAC. I just used them for cosmetic shit and they still fucked it up, lol.

tl;dr mexicans, at least in construction, are far superior to lazyass, spoiled cumskins.

What did poor people eat before fast food?

>cumskins
how many blacks did you hire? none? they didnt even bother looking for work because they would rather commit crime?

I'm Mexican too. Im not sure what you're crying about but I'm sure you're still a cock-sucking fresh. I don't know why you felt like telling people on a Vietnamese basket-weaving forum you're a dirty indio.

You mean pre-industrial?

The Uncle Phil effect.

fast food
>they fried tons of shit because most of the meat they got was spoiled
>they got the worst cuts too, the kind of shit you feed dogs
>plenty of bread and potatoes and other kinds of carbs

Wow imagine being this wrong and yet writing so much

I eat out because of lazyness and lack of time

ITT

>call the op out on his bullshit
>whisper to the op
hey op yer a fuckboi

HEY OP YU A PHUCKBOI

they're not completely fucking wrong but it's not coming off well

call the op out on his bullshit

>make unfounded claims like every meal takes 30 minutes because rachael ray said it was possible on the teevee

>this guy actually thinks he's logical
Luckily retards like you will never amount to anything or have any impact on society.

First of all this. Second of all, pretty much all the gear ($20 for a knife when you're starving? hahahahah) that OP claims is expensive, can actually be bought second-hand dirt-cheap online or from charity shops or even found free in Freecycling places. In fact I'm pretty sure there are charities that give out such donated stuff for free

>In fact I'm pretty sure there are charities that give out such donated stuff for free
NEET in the basement giving out much needed advice. Thanks NEET!

At least I graduated High school and learned what constitutes a nutrient.

>black construction workers
They didn't have transportation from the ghetto city concentration camp they're forced to live in 40 miles from where I built but I suspect they would have been as bad as the cumskins quite frankly.

>wasting $5 on peanut butter and shitty vegan burgers

Nah, just nah.

>McCormick

Why would I trust anything price wise that has anything to do with the people who try and charge me $8 for 40 cents worth of coriander?

But they're a quality brand...

Life is an investment, not an investment opportunity. Its one thing to not have prior genetic iterations of yourself to teach and provide you starting basics, its another to rely on imported slave labor and welfare bait to provide you your sustenance, simply because you decided putting away $20 a paycheck and spending it not on KFC was a meme.
Honestly consider killing yourself.

>its another to rely on imported slave labor
yes, America, pay them reparations.

>$3 wine
where is this in my life?

Kmart has an extensive kitchen set for $39 that has all the fucking pieces you'd need. You can get a serveware set on top of that for $20.
It's a one-off expense that pays for itself within two weeks.
OP is either legitimately retarded or completely delusional about how lazy he is and how pathetic his excuses are.

...

>I mean whoever made it had half a thought and didn’t bother with the rest.
The pot calling the kettle black.

You fucking liberals. Go to goddamn Goodwill and get a couple pans and spatulas if you're poor like the rest of us. Poor people don't need fancy knives, they can make do with what's cheap

Energy dense does not equal nutritious, user.

On Veeky Forums, you can pretty much define a newfag as someone who’s never seen the Mexican chainsaw decapitation gif.

Way to cherrypick. Black females are opposite of that and white males have almost the same trend black males.

Just cook.

How is cooking it yourself more time efficient? Did you leave out the prep work? Potatoes don’t peel themselves.

>peeling your potatoes
But that's where all the nutrients are.

Fucking Americans complaining about the cost of cooking. You have it so easy you don't even know it, your food is amazingly cheap compared to here.

t. Jealous englishman