Maybe stop doing that then. I can get a weeks worth of food for that kind of money and it tastes good.
I am fortunate we have enough mental energy to go to stores to buy ingredients to cook our own meals most days.
Its similar, to what is referred to as “adhd-tax” I am still in this picture more then i would like.
Doesn’t really matter what your mental energy is if you don’t have the money to have any other choice. Few years ago I was comfortably living on under £100 a month after paying rent for a bedroom, then putting the last £75 or so of my income into savings.
Also half of Americans live in “food deserts” with limited or no options for fresh, healthy food/groceries. Often their only sources of sustenance are the dollar store and fast food.
Maybe, but I hear the same things here and I am not aware of food deserts being a term in the UK.
I mean it matters in the sense that you just won’t eat if you can’t muster up the mental energy to make a meal.
E: this was me
What do you mean bread isn’t a meal?
I mean its not like there was a dark where i lived on a single bag of chips a day or the occasional cup noodles or anything.
Very affordable lifestyle, but you do feel even worse long term.
For a while I got discounted veg at the end of the day and threw it all into a slow cooker that I kept running all week. Take a meal out and top up with more of what ever cheap ingredients I could get.
People I shared the house with had started to steal my food which is why I switched to storing everything in my room and the slow cooker in my room. No fridge/freezer but you can even store meat for several days in a slow cooker. 22:55 the local coop sometimes had sausages for pennies.
Thats kinda cool,
Like a modern day perpetual stew.
That is what I used as inspiration initially and it worked pretty well. A slow cooker is probably more reliable at keeping the temperature than a log fire too.
I’m disabled and homeless and eat veggies, fruit, pasta, bread, cheese and protein on a daily basis at about $7 a day. people eat fast food because they are lazy, not poor.
Food deserts are a thing.
People are homeless because they’re lazy, not poor.
Or unable to get a stable full time job, maybe none exists, or not enough for everyone.
I don’t think they mean it literally. I think they’re pointing out the irony of calling people lazy when your own situation is often reduced in the same way.
People are homeless because of mental illness and drugs.
That’s people on the street, the majority is people couch surfing or sleeping in their car. Where the only issue is money, not mental health at all.
I can get a weeks worth of food for that kind of money
Well, maybe one week, and you still have to get creatively frugal there.
But I see your point.
Yeah, this is beans and rice with little to no protein kind of money for a week, at best.
Didn’t used to be the case, but orange dipshit keeps causing inflation.Beans, famous for not having any protein… Why do people look down on beans so much? They are great. Just bought a pack of broad bean seeds today as I plan to grow them and I ran out of the last pack. You don’t need to eat the weight of the average American in meat ever year.
That’s a good point, yeah, I was thinking like most Americans that you’d want some meat thrown in there for flavor.
Mostly a vegetarian as well so I agree with you is what I’m saying.
For flavour? Just add some soy sauce
I stopped eating most fast food for this exact reason.
funny how all the local places are still tasting just as great yet corpo places are slinging literal shit for food.
Not just food, it’s the new business model. Just give them something for their money, it doesn’t have to be good, or work properly, it just has to be profitable.
Optimize for minimal complainability, maximal annoyance and minimal effect of actual complaints
That’s what I’ve been screaming about AI since the beginning.
Take self checkout kiosks for example. Anyone that is old enough to remember what the grocery store was like before the kiosks would know how much faster a human cashier was then the stupid fucking machine. There was no tabbing through 20 screens of fruit to find the plantains, there was no “sorry you have to scan every pencil individually and place them in the bag one by one because we can’t do multiples”, and there was never, ever, an unexpected item in the bagging area.
The doctor I go to has replaced all their front office staff with self check-in kiosks. You cannot check in with a person anymore. If you are unable to use the machine you have to press a special button and wait for someone to come from the back and press the buttons on the kiosk for you. The time to check in for an appointment with the person used to take under a minute. The kiosk takes 10+ and has a 25% error rate.
But none of that matters, because the machines don’t draw a paycheck, and they don’t care about anything else.
Many businesses have calculated that they’d rather save the paycheck, and live with a drop in customer service. That attitude will increase, and eventually customer service will be one of those unreasonable things that only stupid customers expect.
“You gave me your money, you got your thing, we’re done here, now you’re just bothering me, so get out!”
Except it’ll be more like Idiocracy where they charge her for the fries and don’t give her anything, migrating towards a built in failure rate to what customers will accept vs profits.
The best burgers I have had, have been from small back alley places. Had one a couple of months ago, lovely quarter pounder with chips (fries) and a drink for around £6 here in London.
Had less of an upset stomach too, although I do still check the hygiene ratings for the places which helps in this regard.
TIL the UK has publicly available hygiene ratings. I like that.
US does too. Or at least California does.
Ah thanks for pointing that out, I forget not all US States have it.
Nearly every restaurant I’ve been to, and take away place, has proudly shown their hygiene ratings as a sticker on the window. These can be verified via a website too. It’s very useful as I get an upset stomach rather easily.
Its an expensive lesson. Life’s education is never cheap
I had a Whopper and fries at Booger King last year for the first time in a couple of decades. With a drink it was like $20 which is pretty absurd. It actually tasted pretty good and the fries were fresh out of the fryer (which is basically what makes fries good), but I just felt so physically bad after eating. I don’t know what it was, probably the massive amount of salt in it.
I sometimes feel like shit if I get a drink with one of the red dyes, red 40 I think? It’s in orange crush, some pink lemonades, and some fruit punches iirc, but it makes it feel like there’s pressure on my gut. Kinda like I have to take a dump but I don’t.
Probably not what you experienced but figured I’d mention it since it took me a while to make the connection, especially since it doesn’t always happen if I have an orange pop (maybe different dye?).
Hmm, that’s interesting. I’m a big orange soda fiend and I drink Sunkist, Crush and Fanta. it does appear that only Crush has Red 40 in it. Sometimes I feel like I have to fart real bad and sometimes I don’t - maybe that’s the dye. I should really be drinking water but I find it so boring.
Ah nice, I see fanta a lot but often skip it because I don’t want to risk feeling kinda crappy. But I’m glad I like water, it’s so refreshing!
Edit: maybe try a filtering system, because after thinking about it, crappy water isn’t very fun to drink, but my reverse osmosis filtered water is great.
The impossible whopper helps with this. I’m not vegan nor do I eat fast food often, but I’m sold on the impossible whopper over the standard when I gotta stuff my maw at immediate, inconvenient, times.
Despite being a childish choice, any new restaurant I go to I order the chicken tenders. It’s pretty hard to mess those up (and they’re usually on the cheaper end).
I like to “get a review” from my wife and friends on their meals, and then I’ll decide if I want to branch out to the full menu if there’s a return visit.
I’m sort of the opposite. I usually aim for their advertised “flagship” meal. If they mess that up, I know it’s not worth returning.
I think your method is probably better, definitely more variety!
Nice username btw :)
I do the same with chile relleno whenever I go to a New Mexican restaurant. It’s a meal that is hard to badly fuck it up and even when it’s only pretty ok, it’s still tasty enough to finish.
I also just love chile relleno so I usually get it anyway
Went to a new pizza place with a friend and she insisted we get the margherita because it is less expensive hard to mess up, and you can tell if the place uses good ingredients.
I’m going to try this method!
Recently got back into cooking. Learn 2-3 easy recipes that can act as a base for the rest of your meal. Get a rice cooker and an instant pot. White rice is quick so its ADHD friendly, plus ricecooker will handle everything in case of distractions. Same for the instant pot.
Watch some cooking competitions for inspiration and confidence building to give more challenging dishes a try.
Chef & My Fridge is a good one, though it’s a subtitled Korean show, but the great thing about it is that the challenges are 15 minutes long and take only ingredients from a Korean celeb’s fridge. I had already started trying some tougher dishes from watching Culinary Class Wars, but CMF (which has a bunch of the same chefs btw) really drove home how it doesn’t have to be a long affair with very specific ingredients to make a great dish.
I still for some reason take forever to get things prepped but once they are ready, I can have restaurant quality soup on the table from scratch in like 30 minutes. The secret is to sear the meats and saute the veggies in the pot before adding water/broth and they’ll quickly release their flavour and make a tasty broth, which then becomes rich when you add a bit of salt, sugar, lemon/lime juice, and soy sauce, like just a pinch or splash of each. Celery, onions, carrots, and poatoes, sliced, diced, and/or julienned. Even better if you start by rendering some bacon and then sauteing the veggies in the bacon grease, which acts as the base of the soup once it’s been tempered with all those flavours.
Anyways I’m rambling. Lol it’s a great thing to hyperfocus on, though not sure I’d say I’ve saved money because of it, what with the knives and other kitchen stuff I’ve gotten.
Also don’t overlook sous vide. I’ve made some heavenly meals with cheap cuts of beef (e.g. shank) recently. Chuck it in a vacuum bag and wait - that’s it! Pull it out and give it a nice sear.
I usually do 2 bags and chuck one in the freezer for reheating at a later date.
If you don’t eat meat, no worries! Loads of veggies are great too, especially roots.
Every dinner in an airport.
I cook dinner 95% of the time and honestly, it sucks. I don’t blame people who have the money eating out constantly, but i can’t afford that crap and i would be 300 lbs.
$25 can get me either a terrible pasta dish at olive garden, or 2 meals at a local diner, so i usually go to local small places. Screw $15 burrito’s and $18 hamburgers, i’ll make them at home.
If I spend that money and it’s not worth the cost, either I’ll try to get it comp’ed or something like that. And if it’s really that bad, I put it on a credit card and then call the company to reverse the charge. Worst comes to worst it goes on debit and I dispute it with the bank.
I spent about this for a burger at one of those char broiled joints. Tasted like a burger you’d get at a park bbq, overcooked cheap meat. I can make a burger at home 100 times better
I like that this post is coming right as I’m planning to tighten my budget a fast more/lose weight.
