Have you tried making your sandwiches at home?
Hooray! The ingredients cost 30 dollars and I get to eat sandwichs everyday for a week or watch the ingredients spoil. Wow greatest country in the world.
Yeah seriously, the “cOoK aT hOmE” crowd really annoys me sometimes. Unless you only buy non-perishables, more often than not it’s just not economically practical for one or two people. Grocery stores are optimized for families.
I don’t know what it’s like where you live but I’ve never had that problem and I mainly just buy groceries for myself.
From personal experience, it’s a personal failing and not an environmental issue. The only time I have issues with food spoilage like described above is when I over buy, forget about, or get tired of something. If I properly plan out my meals (lol) and space out purchases and freeze leftovers when necessary, I have very little issues with spoilage.
And having sandwiches regularly without having ingredients go bad is something I do all he time.
When ever I hear how expensive it is to cook I know I’m dealing with a young person who’s clueless. Have parents not been teaching their kids to cook?!
Reminds me of visiting my niece and her husband for dinner. They never cooked but made a nice meal that night. But they said it just wasn’t economical when they totaled the price vs. portions. They did the math and proudly claimed it was cheaper to eat out. My wife and I were stunned.
Well, duh? Now you have leftover ingredients. Add to those and plan another meal. FFS, they had to buy salt and figured that into the total meal price. They literally started with nothing. Yes, it’s expensive to spin up a fridge and pantry, but once you’re rolling it’s cheap to eat.
Eating out in the US used to be famously cheap. Now that people have been conditioned that way and everything belongs to a few oligopolists, they’ll squeeze every last drop of blood out of people.
For what it’s worth no, my parents did not teach me how to cook, and none of my friends’ parents taught them how to cook either
I was taught to cook so poorly I had to start from scratch and learn how to make food taste good. There’s no shame on not having been taught basic life skills, but cooking is definitely a skill worth learning. Begin by talking to the laziest home cooks you know, figure out their tricks because we tend to live off cheap and easy stuff
eg. black bean tacos: two cans of black beans, rinsed, cooked in water and store bought taco seasoning until it’s been sufficiently absorbed, put on store bought tortillas, salsa, sour cream, and cheese are optional, I’m partial to jarred nopales as well. Experiment at will.
If only there were some method available, allowing you to search for and obtain information on any possible topic! Maybe in some sci-fi future world, this incredible information resource will also include instructional videos!
Look, all I’m saying is that sometimes I just want to buy a little bit of parsley or cilantro for a dish, but can’t. I gotta buy the entire bundle and waste most of it. And that’s just one such example I can think of on top of my head.
Then you chop it all off and freeze it, put it in a ice cream box or something and then use it for stews or soups where it’s not so important to use fresh
Been there, done that. Produce doesn’t freeze well at all. It just turns soggy and mushy. It’s a non-option but thanks for trying.
Yeah…I almost never order out unless I have company in town or I’m completely out of food to cook after work and I’m lazy (which is like once/mo). And even then I’ll usually scrape something easy together like cereal or pasta/red sauce or even just toast/butter if I’m really desperate.
I’m not constantly throwing out food or eating the same things. Just every week or so I’ll grab enough to make like three separate dishes plus a few staples and just like that I’m set to scrape together something new or eat at least three different set meals. Or I can run down to grab one extra ingredient and make an entirely new dish combining what I have.
I definitely get eating out is delicious and much easier, but let’s not pretend it somehow saves you money lol
what? I have never had this problem for myself. it seems people just want an excuse to eat out
Well I’m glad that you’ve found a way to reuse the same ingredients several days in a row, but the GF and prefer to have variety in our diets. By the time comes around that I have second use for the ingredients I bought, they’ve already gone bad. We got sick of wasting so much food.
Edit: You keep making the same arguments over and over again. I’m not buying too much. Produce tends to be sold in large bunches and can’t be easily frozen. Meat is sold as several pounds and goes bad before I can finish it all. Same goes for milk and eggs. They go bad too quickly.
I think you guys need to buy more versatile food then if you get so bored quickly. you need to look into spices. I don’t mean to sound rude, but if you want to save money, you have to come to a point where you go “yeah i had this 2 days ago but beats ordering food” because it saves you money that you could be using for something else (saving etc…)
Plus learn to buy in smaller quantities, to me this seems nore like an issue of buying more than they can eat.
Also, has no one heard of a freezer?
If you want to get fancy, vacuum pack it. I’ll admit, I cannot stand even the slightest freezer burn. It makes me gag immediately. Vacuum packing basically eliminates that.
Freeze your food and eat more?
I cook at home a lot since 2020 and stuff does not really spoil. I have not seen cheese or yogurt or bread spoil. Veggies not really.
The only thing I am cautious with is meat
Are you under the impression that families are going to the grocery store every day and trying to eat everything within 48 hours of picking it up from the store? No, people are buying the week’s worth of stuff and might not be getting to actually cooking it until 6 days later.
Buy a week’s worth of food, with each perishable item in quantities small enough to go into a few meals per week, out of the 21 meals you’ll be eating that week.
Fresh vegetables and fruit last a week or two. Fresh meat lasts a week. Eggs last a few weeks. Most dairy products last a week or two.
Make meals out of a combination of fresh ingredients, dry goods (pasta, rice, beans, breads), canned/preserved foods/sauces/condiments, frozen foods. With basically one perishable feature ingredient per dinner, it doesn’t take that much planning to feed yourself for maybe 10-25% as much as it costs from takeout or restaurants. Even if your food waste is double as a single person, that’s still 20-50% the cost.
Do you know what a “refrigerator” is?
Did you know that refrigerators don’t stop food from going bad, they just slow the process? And before you mention the freezer: not everything can be frozen. Like most produce, for example. It’s not a temperature issue, either. I regularly probe the temperature in several areas to make sure all parts of the fridge stay below 38°F.
Even with a fridge, most of the groceries the SO and I buy end up going bad before we can use all of the ingredients. It’s cheaper to just eat out most of the time.
most of the groceries the SO and I buy end up going bad before we can use all of the ingredients.
So what you mean to say that for YOU it’s cheaper to eat out given your current eating and cooking habits. But you are generalizing this for everyone. There are lots of reasons buying groceries and cooking may not be working for you. If you really want to save money, there is absolutely no question that it’s cheaper than paying someone to cook for you every meal. Just because you haven’t figured out how to do that doesn’t mean you can say that’s universally true.
This said, it sounds like eating out all the time is working for you and you are happy with it.
So this may not apply to you, but… If you do want to optimize for cost, I’d suggest:
- Don’t buy cheap ingredients. Discounted groceries are old groceries. Buy from a farmer’s market if you can as things are WAY fresher and will last much longer.
- Work out a small set of meals that you can put on repeat, last long and/or freeze well. Make these in quantities for several meals.
- Buy as your base ingredients things that aren’t perishable or can be frozen easily. Dried beans are an obvious example.
- Pool food resources with friends.
Unless you’re doing heavy veggie sandwiches that’s strange to me. I’ve packed my lunch my entire adult life, and sandwiches are the primary staple. Back when I ate meat I was able to mix it up between two different types of cold cuts day by day using the big containers and I can’t remember them ever going bad. Since I quit meat I just do peanut butter out of convenience and it’s similar. Occasionally a slice of bread or two goes bad but with the big whole wheat loaves from Aldi it’s an end piece and a few cents of spoilage. And all this is with me being the only one to eat these things.
The ingredients spoil?! Either you don’t have a fridge or don’t have a clue how to cook. Or maybe turn your fridge temp down?
Lunch meat lasts a month, easy. Cheese? Multiple months. Bread? Depends. 1-day to 2-weeks, forever if frozen.
I get ham slices every trip. Any idea how many things you can do with those?! Fry them for eggs benedict, with melted cheese on a bagel, chop into an omelette, ham and cheese melt, part of a charcuterie board, 20 different kinds of sandwiches, and more.
All of that only talking about one of the ingredients you have bought. Learn to cook or pay someone a premium to do it for you. That’s how it works.
If you save $12 every work day, you save 50%. And you can buy cheaper stuff that lasts longer.
Oh goodie, first world problems. Never get sick of hearing ungrateful privileged people act the most oppressed by their super easiest problems to fix.
sounds like a fucking good time. i love sandwiches.
You know, you don’t have to buy everything in industrial quantities.
You’re right. I could also buy, um… a sandwich.
Signed by the “never heard of a freezer gang”
“Enjoy your tv dinner, micro plastics and preservatives gang”
I prefer macro plastics myself
That’s what your girlfriend said you prefer macro cuckold.
The avocados keep going bad though
I had this problem. If it helps, avocados keep for a good deal longer in the refrigerator.
Eat them
neurotypical propaganda
This only really works when you’re at home.
You’ll be so amazed when you learn about sandwich boxes.
Something funny I noticed at my last two jobs. The people who had their financial act together always brought their lunch. The broke people, like me, almost always ate out. Go figure.
I’m sure these two things have nothing whatsoever to do with each other.
Game changer!
Then we can afford housing!
well but also just born in time to live the golden age of computer games as a teenager. oh man those gorgeous manuals of 1990-2000 era games
As I read your comment, I could smell the manual, hear the gentle crack as I broke the hymen of a new manual, it’s semiglossy pages revealing the secrets of button layouts to me.
Uhhhh phrasing
The joy of using red filters to find keywords to start those games.
The golden age of computer/video game manuals, sure…
But if you think video games have gotten worse overall, then you are playing the wrong games. For one, “indie” games didn’t even exist.
Indie games existed, they were just called shareware
Lol yeah ok, you want to compare the shareware scene in the 80s and 90s to indie games today? It’s not even the same ballpark.
indie games didn’t even existindie games did not have to exist. indie game level of passion for the game you are creating was generally the norm back then. once the process is turned into an industrial pipeline you sacrifice aesthetics for output volume.Have video games gotten worse overall? On average yes. What percentage of the games being produced now can you say is on par with what you would call a creative and good game “back then”. We are basically swimming in a sea of garbage and indie games are a reaction to that. That can not, not be a problem but it also does not mean good games still don’t exist.
If video games have gotten worse overall on average, it’s simply because there are orders of magnitude more games. If you honestly think games are worse, it’s nostalgia speaking 100%. Tons of shovelware will of course bring the average down, but most of us just ignore that shit. You’re playing the wrong games.
Not to mention that I can still play all of those old games anyway, so…
Civ2 manual was probably the biggest book I’d seen as kid apart from Bible
If you’re on board with puzzle games and a bit of Souls-adjacent combat, you should check out Tunic. It is very relevant to the thing about manuals, even as a digital-only game
My local sub shop has great sandwiches for $8
Same. People need to stop buying from giant corporations. Everything they sell is cheap shit sold at a ridiculous price now because investors expect a 30% profit margin.
For real. Who the fuck eats at subway these days, the food quality is absolute shit, they treat their staff like shit, and they charge you more for the pleasure
If my time working in one is any indication, taxi drivers and drunk people. I don’t think those demographics overlapped often, or at least I hope they didn’t
And cups of yogurt go from 25¢ to $1.50 while also going from 8oz to 5.5oz.
I blame Hardee’s normalizing a $6 burger mid 2000’s, oh and greed, a fuck ton of greed.
They couldn’t even offer the $6 Burger for $6 longer than a month or so. They were almost immediately $7 or more. They were also supposed to be comparable to a sit-down restaurant burger. Somehow they cost more and are lower quality. It’s cheaper to get a burger at Denny’s than it is to get a burger at any fast food place these days, and it’s a better and bigger burger.
Yeah chili’s is 10.99 for an app, burger and fries
Why do you have to download an … oh an appetiser.
At least where I was, when it came out it was $5 for the ‘six-dollar burger’, almost immediately after they threw in a bunch of other ‘big’ burgers. Odd that they tried to makr a 1/3 pound burger seem huge when McDonald’s (at least in America) had been offering double quarter pounders for longer than I can remember.
🎶 five dollar foot longggg 🎶
Fifteen*
🎶 five dollar 1¼ foot longggg 🎶
There ya go lol
6.99 a sub for any sub was the last deal, until I went almost ordered 4 subs and it was fucking $40 still. Somehow $28 worth of subs wound up costing a little over $40. Fuck that shit, those are capriottis prices and id much rather have caps.
You can still be a middle-aged Tiktok star complaining about the high prices compared to the good old days.
That option remains. Seize it. Dominate the airwaves. Organize a rebellion.
You are the chosen one
Fif
Fif teen
Fif teen dollar foot longI’m sorry, I have no control.
Jared Fogel made a career out of trying to get into smaller pants.
Fif Fifty dollar foot long
Inch long
It used to be born just in time to order LSD off the Internet. I am sure this is still somewhat possible.
And if you were to find this out…
We’re not getting rich in this economy may as well do drugs
Yeah you can, you just need XMR instead of BTC and the markets have new names.
Saw a canister of alive oil going for almost $50 the other day, tsk
Alive oil comes from the fountain of youth. For a canister that’s a great deal!
Rofl good catch
Climate change fucked the harvest, and probally will continue to do so.
Arby’s had a five for five roast beef…
I remember getting those big matrices of Arby’s coupons like once a week, and they were actually decent.
Used to love me a Big Montana. Back before 99% of fast food turned to shit and went up in price by 10x
They say it’s all about the timing.
I really can’t wait for TikTok to get shut down because the CCP refuses to sell.
I was amazed a McRib combo is only 8 dollars… ONLY 8 dollars…
And that’s still too rich for my blood, fuck you McDonalds, I curse you and mourn that I took the Dollar Menu for granted
