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Your grocery store is a bewildering sea of overly processed food. Here’s why and what to do (edition.cnn.com)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/news@lemmy.world
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[–] 2 points 8 months ago (1 child)

I would argue that most people don't make their own clothes mainly because the time and effort required to make clothes is VASTLY disproportionate to the time and effort required to buy clothes.

For food, it's the same. Learning to cook palatable meals from ingredients (anywhere on the preprocessed spectrum not just raw) requires a lot of learning and often new kitchen equipment.

Especially if you're truly starting from 0, as in no cooking knowledge was taught to you by family or community and you didn't inherit any equipment.

Why should we expect people to sacrifice the time, money, and energy that their job is demanding more and more of from them as time goes on? Is cooking really different from all the other domestic skills that are no longer expected to be known by at least one household member?

More importantly, if encouraging cooking really is a more efficient way to improve average nutrition, why are we so quick to scoff at people who don't know this skill, instead of acknowledging the myriad of reasons they were discouraged from acquiring it and using that knowledge to help us campaign more effectively?

(not saying you specifically were scoffing but def other people in this thread and people I've discussed this with IRL have, including myself in the past)

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    because learing to cook is way easier and cheaper than becoming someone who makes clothes. like orders of magntitude.

    cooking for yourself requires a few pots and pants.

    i scoff at them because the people who refuse to cook are often the ones for whom it would require minimal effort. but they act like it's some cruel undue burden. and then they also WHINE that ubereats is so expensive. you can't have it both ways.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago

    The point isn't that cooking is hard to learn. It's that it's harder to learn than continuing to eat convenience food. But it's still not the easiest thing and therefore not realistically going to be people's default unless we encourage them by somehow making it worth their while.

    For some, just spreading awareness of how much healthier it is can be enough. For others, they'll need systemic changes like access to healthier ingredients, metal health treatment, and jobs that don't exploit them so harshly that they have no leftover energy to cook.

    cooking for yourself requires a few pots and pants

    Yeah, you can start out with just pots and pans to make pasta, rice, beans, boiled or stir fried pre-cut vegetables, and other simple things. No knife and cutting board, no whisk, no cheese grater, no vegetable peeler, sure you can cook but it's going to be challenging. Now you're asking someone to go from being able to microwave a fully assembled frozen meal in 3–5 min, which they're used to doing, to making a meal from ingredients with a substandard set of tools and little to no experience.

    By the time they're done cooking they're going to be tired and frustrated by the result. If they're lucky they'll have the motivation to keep trying, building skills, and purchasing more equipment.

    If they're unlucky, they'll see people on the internet belittling them for lacking a skill and tool set that not everyone gets handed to them by family and circumstance.

    It costs you minimal effort to not be judgmental and discouraging to an entire category of people comprised of widely varying individuals whose circumstances you know nothing about. But you're acting like that's some cruel undue burden.

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