[ SECRET POST #4706 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4706 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 31 secrets from Secret Submission Post #674.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I actually think that having frequent, balanced home cooked meals made with nutritious, healthy foods is an indicator of a certain amount of financial privilege. Not by any means an unreasonable amount of privilege, mind you. A good amount, an amount everybody should have. But not everybody does.

What. The. Fuck.

This is so fucked up I don't even know where to begin. Cooking from scratch is more expensive than takeout, to the point it's considered privilege?? Where is, this, America? Jesus.

[(Anonymous)]

I assume you're being sarcastic, but if you're not... yes, America. When you're poor and don't have the money to maintain a pantry of staples and spices (which are expensive unless you buy that tasteless Dollar store crap), or time to prepare things from scratch, then dinner for $1 at McDonalds sounds like the most cost effective option.

[(Anonymous)]

Read the comment again, dude. If you even read it the first time. No where in it do they say anything about takeout.

[(Anonymous)]

Pre-packaged is not takeout. Did you even read the comment you're replying to?

It cannot be a surprise to you that a can of ravioli is cheaper than a piece of chicken, spices, brown rice, butter, fresh veggies, and some kind of dressing? If you can make the latter for $1 flat, I wanna know where YOU live.

[(Anonymous)]

Well personally, I live in Canada, and takeout isn't quite as cheap here as it is in the US. Which is why I didn't ever say anything about takeout. But heat-and-serve or boil-and-serve shit out of cans and boxes is a LOT cheaper than fresh food, and frankly, that's true all over the place. Maybe not everywhere on earth, but it's true in far more places than just Canada and the US.

[(Anonymous)]

DA

I mean you did say Kraft Dinner, did they really have to ask? <3

[(Anonymous)]

Hahaha! Canadians, represent! Mac and cheese never had it so...average.

:P

[(Anonymous)]

It's not. Anyone who believes that is just perpetuating a fallacy and is either too lazy to learn to cook or do the actual math to see the cost breakdown. I cut my monthly grocery bill almost in half when I learned how to cook for myself instead of living off prepackaged shit.

[(Anonymous)]

Expensive prepackaged shit exists. I could go to the grocery store rn and buy a $4 TV dinner and a tiny $3 tin of canned "Thai chicken casserole." But you're extremely deluded if you think a one dollar canned meal is "more expensive" than anything you can cook at home with raw ingredients. Like, I'm not even sure how a person can be that deluded, tbh.

[(Anonymous)]

Where do you live that you can get an entire canned meal for $1?

[(Anonymous)]

I'm Canadian, and cans of no name ravioli are 97 cents at Walmart. You can almost always buy name brand ravioli at Dollarama for $1.25. There's usually some kind of shitty canned alphabet pasta that costs 97 cents, too. A box of Kraft Dinner is also 97 cents, and there's multiple types(!). You can probably afford to toss a pre-cooked no name chicken wiener in there; they only cost 15 cents per wiener. Or you can have Mr. Noodle ramen for 37 cents a pack. Or, like I said, a microwave burrito for 61 cents. At that price, you can even afford to melt some cheese on it. Or you can head on over to the frozen aisle and buy four pizza pops for $1.97 (they're "on sale" for that price about 85% of the time) - two of those are a meal for me.

[(Anonymous)]

Those aren't meals, though. They won't keep you full for more than a couple of hours at best.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't know what to tell you, they're meals for me. And I'm a 5'8" female who is slim but not underweight. The meals I described have enough calories in them to be meals. My 6' tall father would eat 2 burritos instead of one, making his meal $1.22. He'd have his beefaroni on two pieces of toasted break to bulk it out. That kind of thing.

To be clear, it's a shitty diet. It's bad for you. But when you have $100 dollars a month, it's how you eat. It is the cheapest way to have enough food.

[(Anonymous)]

Not ayrt, but see, I would consider $1.25 for a pre-prepared single person meal farly expensive. I can get 500g of uncooked pasta for 50-60 Euro cents and a bottle of tomato sauce (which will last for many meals) for 80 and cook a suitable meal for the entire family.

[(Anonymous)]

Exactly, around here you can get chicken thighs in bulk for 99 cents a pound and a pound feeds four people. Cook those up with some rice (which is pennies a serving) and some generic frozen veggies (which are also super cheap if you buy them in bulk) and you can make four servings of food for a little under $2.

[(Anonymous)]

The downside to buying in bulk is that it assumes that you have either have a significant amount of storage space or ability to eat 5lbs of chicken thighs and accompaniments before they spoil. If you’re feeding one or two people, buying in bulk isn’t the savings extravaganza you’d imagine, especially when you can get a week’s worth of Chinese takeout leftovers for $8.

[(Anonymous)]

I can assure you, that is not remotely the case where I live. The absolute cheapest I can get chicken thighs (with bone and skin) is $3.60 per pound, and that's if I somehow have the freezer space to store a bunch of them. If I want to buy a manageable amount, I can expect to pay around $4.75 per pound.

As for what the other anon was saying about pasta and tomato sauce: The pasta is dirt cheap, of course, but the sauce is not nearly that cheap. You can buy a can of no name tomato sauce for $1.27, but it is basically ketchup. I know because I've eaten it. If you spend $2 you can get a can that's slightly better than ketchup and will probably be enough for 3-4 people. But if all you're having is 50 cents worth of pasta and 50 cents worth of tomato sauce, you've still spent about as much as the pre-packaged food would've cost you, and frankly, your meal took longer, tastes blander, and has even less nutrients than a lot of those canned meals have.

[(Anonymous)]

SA - Plus, if all you're having is pasta and canned tomato sauce, then you basically are eating a pre-packaged meal anyway. *shrugs*

[(Anonymous)]

Pasta anon - I wasn't arguing you'd get the most amazing meal out of it, just that by cooking myself I can feed 4-5 people for about the same price of a one of those single person premade meals (and I'd also argue healthier, since both the pasta and the sauce I can get for that price would be fairly decent quality. Though I could also buy fresh tomatoes and make sauce from scratch and make it even healthier and cheaper).

I get prices vary vastly by area, I was merely arguing that a $1.25 meal can definitely be more expensive than anything you can cook with raw ingredients in some places. In response to the "you're deluded if..." part above. If that was from a different person apologies.

[(Anonymous)]

Wow, where the heck do you live? $3.60/lb is around what it costs for the fancy organic, air-chilled chicken here. If you just buy the plain old store brand stuff it's a fraction of that.

[(Anonymous)]

Look, I can cook and I almost never eat out or buy prepackaged food or frozen dinners and I can tell you that you're sort of correct, but it's more complicated than that. Cooking requires cookware. It requires a certain amount of pantry staples, including spices. It requires time - time to actually learn those skills, time to plan meals and shop for the ingredients and time to do the actual cooking. And this assumes that you already have a functional kitchen.

All of that requires an upfront investment of money.

I'm a good cook now. When I first started (fresh out of college) I was terrible and it took years of trial and error before I got OK at it. I had the luxury of having time and money because I didn't have a full time job. If I'd had to get back home at 5:30pm after a long day of being underpaid and THEN start cooking, my learning curve would've been even slower. The average beginner might have the choice of spending an hour cooking after buying $20 of ingredients, or...they could eat something off the dollar menu in five minutes.

What I'm saying is, what you said is true for people who have that skillset, ingredients and equipment. It's not true for someone who is starting from nothing.

[(Anonymous)]

+1, it is definitely cheaper, easier and healthier to cook for myself...now that I have the space, equipment and skills. All kinds of takeout are more expensive where I am (even McDonalds level) but you can live off no-name brand tinned baked beans, tinned fruit and ramen pretty cheaply. And I did, because the only cooking equipment I had access to was an electric kettle, cutlery, and some second-hand plates and bowls.

[(Anonymous)]

TBH, as someone who buys and cooks a lot more raw, unprocessed foods now than I used to, it’s still considerably more expensive, even after you have the tools and spices and know how to shop around.

When you say that cooking fresh at home can be cheaper than eating pre-packaged, if you do it right, it’s still only true if you assume the person eating pre-packaged isn’t buying exclusively the cheapest pre-packed shit they can find. The majority of people who eat pre-packaged probably do end up spending more than they think they are, because you can spend $3 on a can of chili stew and think nothing of it. So I do see where you’re coming from. But if you go into the supermarket with the objective of buying the largest mass of reasonably edible food for the least money, you’re not going to come out with much in the way of raw meat and fresh veggies, at least not if you're shopping in North America.

[(Anonymous)]

I can cook a nutritious, fairly tasty bean and veggie soup for about the same price per serving as a cheap, salt laden, blah canned soup. Then I can portion it out into tupperware and freeze it and reheat it when I want it. But I have three grocery stores within less than a mile of my house, and I have a stove and a freezer and a microwave and lots of potted herbs growing and only have to work one job and have no kids. In other words, I have easy access to fresh and bulk food, some spare time to cook in, and the ability to store food once I cook it. Not everyone has those luxuries. I also grew up with parents who could cook, so I learned how early.

[(Anonymous)]

I have to say that this was my experience in the States, when I lived there for 4 months and had very little money - a pack of pre-made burger patties was 3$ on sale, a freaking apple (one!) was 0.89$. The freaking lettuce was imported from Hong Kong as it showed in the price (to this day I don't understand why a supermarket located in Massachusetts had to import lettuce from HK). I had an honest to god cry in the supermarket out of frustration when I first realised that I can afford the unhealthy stuff but I can't afford the amount of veggies I used to eat at home. Maybe that was just the area and there were cheaper vegetables somewhere else, but that really shok me.