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