US Congress rules that pizza is a vegetable

[Farmageddon]

Jexy said:

mrstickball said:

 

1) Even if you do spend money on a decent cookware set, the expense is greatly offset by the savings of making your own food vs. purchasing pre-made garbage. One of your arguments were about Healthy Choice meals. In general, you are going to spend $3 on those types of meals, when you could easily make the same thing for under $2. That is a net savings of $1 per meal. Over the course of a year, you would save a significant amount of money - more than enough to buy a brand new cookware set.

2) When I moved out, I knew almost nothing about cooking. Yet I make 99% of meals for my wife and I. All I did was go to AllRecipes.com or borrow cookbooks from the library. Cooking is very easy to do. It just takes the desire to apply yourself to reading and repeating the instructions. If people cannot cook, then they are to blame. There are too many resources out there to prevent anyone from making homemade, nutritious meals and saving huge on monies.

3) Generally, the junk food is significantly more expensive. Yesterday, I splurged on a bag of salt & vinegar chips and a mountain dew. The cost? $4. If I made the chips at home and instead made a Mt. Dew substitute like kool-aid, my actual cost on the entire endeavour would of been $1 plus my time. Given fact that I could of made a large batch of kool aid, I could of easily saved myself $10/hr by preparing the food myself. Quick? Not entirely. But we live in a society that no one wants to bother learning to do anything for themselves. That is what is killing us. No one can survive by themselves, and would rather export doing something to someone else. Let me tell you: It feels awesome when you can cook, repair your car, fix a leak, or any of those things by yourself. You also invariably save a lot of money doing it yourself, too.

Yes, well if only those things were taught in school.  Art and music get cut first along with shop class and all that fun stuff.  I know I never had a cooking class (that would be sexist teaching women how to cook, despite men being in the class), and we weren't allowed to work on cars and stuff because of "safety" ... All it takes is one kid getting hurt and lawyers prevent all of that from happening ever again.

Also keep in mind that 5 bucks here and there seems a lot cheaper than $100 all at once.  When you live check to check, you can't afford to go too into debt, and people can't see anything thats not right in front of their face, like the future prospect of saving money down the road.  And like I said before, time is a big issue.  Most people don't have the patience to cook for a long time after working all day and probably being pissed off because their job sucks.  People can't learn if they don't know where to go to be taught.  Keep in mind, the less money people have, it probably means the less educated they are, and the less internet savvy they are.  It's just how it goes. 

I don't know, I'm from a different country and all that, but to me te idea that poor people wouldn't have a stove and some pans or know how to cook is ludicrous. Either you're very out of touch (and I don't mean that as an offense) or our definitions of poor are far too different. Be that as it may, getting cookeware and learning to cook is not that big obstacle you make it out to be. Fact is that eating is kind of really important and as people get poorer it's importance is made all the more obvious. So poor parents teach their kids these kinds of things, who in turn help them out.

I realise what you're referring to as poor are probably not people at any risk of actually going hungry. But just as the miserable cook, so could them. It's their option not to.

But none of this really matters when discussing meals on schools. Getting cooking equipment wouldn't be that expensive, specially not if the mid term is seen, provided they can cook cheaper than they can buy frozen pizza, let alone the long term with all the possible health ramifications.

So the only question really is wether they could. Now, maybe you guys have amazingly cheap frozen pizza around, but in most poor places in the world it seems like it's pretty obvious to people that the more local and less processed your food, the cheaper. So if the cheapest of the cheapest people do it, it sounds kind of non-sensical that it's too expensive to be done, while fast food kind of stuff is not.

Then again, I don't really know what is actually served or any of that, but as a principle it should hold.

Oh, nothing really much to do with this, but a few days ago we were buying things for a barbecue and this girl wanted to buy some Ruffles. The price of that shit is scary. I calculated it, and it was as expensive as twice it's weight of bacon. A couple days earlier I had bought sardines by the pound (well, kilogram actually) and they were just shy of nine times cheaper, pound by pound, than that "economic" bag Ruffles. Wtf, who buys this shit :P