Memes of Production

imagine feeding 4 on $500… 3 pets and 2 adults, we Average $230/week…

I don't think I could spend that much on my weekly groceries if I tried. Most weeks my groceries are around $80ish but some items that come in large quantities and/or get purchased infrequently make that more like $120 some weeks. $500 is a pretty fair average estimate for our current budget and food preferences. Admittedly we do eat a fair amount of frozen foods and pre-prepared stuff like frozen pancakes, frozen veggies, frozen pizzas, bagels, trail mixes, pre-sliced sandwich meat and cheese, etc.

The biggest costs is usually the proteins and certain pre-prepared items like frozen pizzas, basically the most labor-intensive items because labor is the most expensive component of any price where I live.

I'm really thinking alot of you must be in north America near the grain belts or something…

Yes I'm in the Midwestern US. I was thrown off by your use of the $ sign. Funnily enough the majority of the food in the US gets shipped a pretty long distance. While I live in a small town surrounded by farming communities, other than dairy products and eggs almost all of what is grown near me isn't for eating. It's almost all feed corn and soybeans and a good chunk of that just gets turned into ethanol. My frozen veggies usually indicates on the packaging that it was grown in the global South, my potatoes get shipped from Idaho (over a thousand miles away) and the fresh fruits and veggies also are often also grown in the global South and shipped in outside of specific times of the year when they're in season more locally. The obvious thing when looking at what costs more or less when it comes to food is the biggest cost is labor. Prepared foods that require multiple steps to prepare cost more, meats which realistically require quite a bit of human labor to both rear the cattle and later to butcher the meat into appropriate cuts is usually the largest cost per line item on my grocery purchases. Fruits and veggies are either imported from countries with lower labor costs or heavily mechanized or both, so they tend to be fairly cheap, and processed foods tend to be more expensive due to the amount of facilities that have to perform each step of the process adding in labor costs and profit margins

also 30 minutes maximum for pasta is average in our house. 10 minutes of prep/brown, 8 minutes to boil, 9-12 cook time. considering we have 1.5hrs to eat and a 2hr commute… it’s exhausting some times.

I've been there. Last year I worked a job that involved getting up at 6am to immediately get ready and go to work, then not getting home again until 6pm, at which point I'd need to quickly prepare some food, wolf it down and start getting the kids to bed at 7pm, then I'd have about 2 hours to tackle every other obligation before I needed to go to sleep and repeat the process. It sucks. My kids would ask if I was "ever coming home" on many days. I hope everyone who lives such a life can find balance and a better life.

But that's not the point that was being made. The person your replied to was talking about someone they know spending all of their money on doordash and skipping meals because they couldn't afford to doordash more food. That's not doordashing to survive a capitalist hellscape, that's spending shitloads of money to avoid picking up a basic life skill. If you can't afford to have someone else cook and deliver your meals and pay each an extra profit margin plus tips you can't be relying on having someone else cook and deliver your meals. Heck it might even be cheaper for such a theoretical person to hire someone local to meal prep for them if they truly don't want to put in the effort, but even that is obviously going to cost more than going to the grocery store once a week and learning how to boil some water and do some basic cooking

Again, I'm not criticizing people for indulging in things that improve their enjoyment of life. I just spent $500 on my model railroad, so I'm no stranger to enjoying things that other people might think is a waste of money. Heck my criticism isn't even of people lacking life skills. Shit happens and sometimes a person learns a life skill much later than they might otherwise ideally have learned it My criticism is of people who never learned basic life skills choosing to spend themselves deeper into a growing hole instead of trying something different. There's too many people who do this because they "aren't money people" and it boggles my mind

The value of anything is relative and only definable against that other circumstance.

Please allow me to introduce you to the concept of “opportunity cost.” Turns out you’re just using faulty logic to convince yourself that a burrito taxi is saving you finite resources.

This entire conversation is frustrating for a few reasons: it’s increasingly common (particularly in online spaces), it adopts the trappings of a logical conclusion while eschewing the necessary underlying frameworks and requirements of intellectual honesty and consistency, and it stems ultimately from a purposeful and willingly architected delusion.

oh I am? so your time has no value?

That's not what they're talking about. Time is still a straight line. In the time it takes to order Doordash, sit and wait, and eat, that is still time ticking by. What are you doing in the meantime? Watching TV? Reading a book? Playing a game? Still using time. That time could instead be spent cooking. I struggle sometimes to cook meals for myself and my partner but when I do I have fun. I'll put music on in the kitchen, my partner joins me and we have in depth conversations, and we make something that we need to survive (rather than a bridge, as your example).

Yes, if you choose to factor in the labour of making your own dinner into the cost of that dinner, it might end up a wash. But in terms of actual dollars when people are stretched thin enough in their wallet as it is, it's free to just make your own dinner with what you already bought.

I'm likely making frozen perogies for us tonight. I already bought everything for them. We already have the perogies. We already have oil. We already have green onions and sour cream. That's just things that already exist and money spent, most of which just exists here in perpetuity. I bought the perogies a week ago. The sour cream around the same time. Oil is just a pantry staple so it's always here. So in reality, when I make dinner tonight it costs me, tonight, in terms of dollars, absolutely nothing. No money spent. Just vibing in the kitchen making perogies.

so spend more on subpar cold food instead of learning skills like.... cooking in order to save time to.. relax or ???

also, you know order food is actually more unhealthy for you. higher fats, sugars, sodium etc... which inturn makes you feel more burnt out, and tired (and gain weight) which then using your justification means you need to conserve time so order more food. rinse repeat.

I see it as a compounding issue of poor health, caused by crap food, causing poor energy for your body then justifying the poor energy by thinking not doing a super simple task of... cooking...because it'll cause more burnout so just order food.

honestly.. I don't see your point. if anything I see you justifying the problem instead of just fixing it at the root issue... the food.

It's fascinating to me how you managed to contradict your own argument with this comment, that it's actually more expensive to order out than it is to buy groceries and even factoring in 'labour costs' to make your own dinner.

it’s way cheaper to buy a bag of self rising flour, and active yeast, make your own bread. and grow your own potatoes endlessly from making seed potatoes from half of every potato you harvest.

We literally do that. You can grow potatoes in dollar store plastic pots. You can make your own bread and just let it rise while you sit on your ass. There are so many small things anyone can do anywhere to save money. My partner and I drink every day and it's expensive. So next week we're starting a home brew to help cut alcohol expenses.

Yup. I'm ADHD and work a rather demanding full time job. My partner is disabled and AuDHD. We both struggle with task management and avoidance sometimes. But sometimes you just gotta throw a pack of ramen into boiling water and eat something.