It's quite a tired take that the obesity epidemic is because Americans have too much affordable access to good food. America has affordable access to terrible food and while people can keep their bellies full on that actually eating healthily is a luxury.
You're misinformed. Cheap healthy options are readily available at the grocery store. If you don't want to spend time on food preparation you can substitute canned vegetables for fresh which is slightly less cheap but still cheap.
In the extreme case you don't even need a proper kitchen - a microwave, a rice cooker, and some large bowls will suffice. You can reliably find all of those things at thrift stores in the US. You also have the option to purchase dry staples in bulk (rice, oatmeal, pasta, etc) in 10, 25, or even 50 lb sacks if you can find a local place that stocks them (costco for example).
This is provably untrue. It is such a tired trope to constantly refute. I guess I need to start a google doc with citations.
It is FAR cheaper to buy staples and cook your own food at home. And healthier. You do not need to eat farm to table veggies and local meat for this to happen.
Anyone who tells you it is cheaper to eat fast food and prepared junk foods is misinformed or outright lying with an agenda.
Just look at every single immigrant community that migrates here. They know how to prepare food for cheap.
Yes, it takes a time investment and skill. No, the trope of "single mother with 3 jobs" is not a thing. Those people are already feeding their family healthy foods for the most part since they have self-selected for caring and putting effort in. I lived in communities with many such folks, and the ones holding down three jobs in no way fed their kids fast food or microwaved meals on a regular basis.
If anything is a luxury it's being able to eat prepared fast foods for the majority of your diet. Growing up McDonalds was a twice a year treat for special occasions. Peeling potatoes and baking bread from actual flour and yeast was the daily chores.
People who can afford crappy fast food can afford chicken breast and rice with veggies store bought and made at home. Just easier to kick back with a Big Mac and fries after work. Personal responsibility is key
Personal responsibility is code word for "I do not want to look at causes of issues, just find someone powerless enough to be blamed." So you pile ever exceeding expectation on that most powerless people in the system and blame them for predictable society wide failure.
“Made at home” means time. I cook 3 meals a day in my house and it’s a significant dent in other things I could be doing. The more stress I take on from work, the less effortful food I make. I have taken years in my adult life to get good enough to “throw something together” that is healthy and is something I enjoy eating and would choose over a burger. I still eat a lot of burgers.
Personal responsibility sure but that often comes with utter ignorance of the systems that people find themselves in, especially poverty and mental health. The bottom 50% own nothing, have no security, and everything that makes their lives a little easier are things they’ll consider.
You don't need to cook 3 meals a day, eating 2 or 1 meal a day is perfectly doable. And cooking once and eating it over 2-3 days is perfectly doable.
Or you can just eat bread with 1-2 topics of choice. Perfectly viable and fine for a long work day. Its only a problem if you eat to much.
> and everything that makes their lives a little easier are things they’ll consider.
Consider it, but don't cry about cost when you door dash 5 times a week. This is actually pretty common. People Door Dash, pay with Klarna and then pay Klarna with Credit cards.
Great. So stop saying it's cheaper. It's more convenient, sure. Takes effort, yep.
I was obese most of my adult life. It absolutely cost me more to eat cheap (as in nutrition) shitty fast foods than prepare things from base ingredients. It was more convenient and it was the easy path for sure, but absolutely in no way a means to save money. It costs vastly more. I could only afford to get fat once I started making money. Growing up we were too poor to eat that horribly.
Your story is your story and nobody can say it isn't, but it reads strange to me to comment about cost when the crux of my statement was about the relative time and effort to cook rather than cost.
But since you'd like to speak about price it seems, I'd posit that for a good long while there, dollar menu items were genuinely about as cheap as you could get for food - $4 on the way home from work and get an hour of time back to unwind? It was worth it to me - heck, a lot of the time I used that time to be in the gym.
I'll grant you that pretty much any restaurant you'd sit down in where you don't pay at the counter is utterly more expensive - 3x the ingredient cost at least.
But we're not comparing steaks and chicken entrees here, we're comparing rice & beans and chicken breast vs a McDouble or $5 footlong. Weeknight roasts that you have to plan ahead for, Sunday meal prep days. Its all time - I recognize this because I choose to take that time on, and its time that I don't get to spend on other stuff.
I'm working on it! I have a little NUC that I'm learning Linux (Is that the proper term?) on. I plan to self host a few services for myself and host family photos on it someday.
I'm going through a "Deep, Vast, Trough of Learning" at the moment :>
I get the optimization thing. I also replay situations in my head and how it could have gone better. I even save notes/reminders/mindmaps for the next time I talk to someone or I'm in a particular social situation. That's just how my mind works, and I can't remember everything.
I also second your approach. I have a todo.txt file of various restaurants, experiences, places my gf wants to visit. Next time I want to plan a date, I look up the list ("Hey babe, let's go that that [RESTAURANT MENTIONED 3 MONTHS AGO] tonight. It's proven to be a very good system. <3
It's one my my favorite hobbies; I've been playing since I was a teen (not that I'm any good at it lol). Outside of Florida and California I don't think many have heard of it. Though I believe there are a few places in Europe that play (Belgium I think?) but don't quote me.
I’m fairly sure that “wallball” played in most elementary schools around the US is a different game than what is being referred to here. Growing up in New England, what we called wallball involved throwing a tennis ball against a wall and attempting to catch it before someone else, while the NYC handball/wallball is closer to racquetball, but played outside against a (usually) freestanding concrete wall with palms used instead of racquets.
We played both handball and 4 square in southern california, though I don't recall it being a thing at the school I attended in the midwest, nor do I remember having played it in virginia.
Interesting! The mention of California made me think that was likely but Florida had the opposite effect. In terms of culture trends, Utah seems to lag behind California by 2-3 years (from my lay-observations) but I’m not sure about Florida. The geographical distance had me thinking it was a more-likely national phenomenon.
To continue with Kid's games, we used to play 'JailBreak' a kind of tag/capture the flag. you'd try to get your fellows, who were trapped out of jail, if you sneaked up and tagged them with your hand without getting tagged and captured. We played it in the evening sometimes. That was in suburban NJ near Philadelphia.
Yeah, that reminds me of part of how I played capture the flag as a kid, rather than its own game. One could be “caught” (tagged) and jailed if they were on the opposing side looking for the flag and they had to be tagged by a teammate while in jail to escape (still free game until you’re on the friendly side of the line).
I grew up in Denver, and we had handball courts in some of the city parks. It seemed to be super popular with central and south Americans. The tennis courts were super popular with African immigrants, mostly Nigerians.
Don't know if they're still there, or if they have been turned into a pickleball court like every other place on earth.
I'm originally from near Philadelphia and we played a variant of Handball where we'd bounce a racket ball off the ground onto the wall and then wait for it to hit the wall then back to the ground then the other would hit. It was sort of a made up version, very different from the hard ball straight at the wall with a glove that they play on the handball courts here in NYC.
Belgium plays a completely different game with the same name, also called Olympic handball.
Your form of handball is played in Ireland. The world championship location alternates between the USA, Canada, and Ireland. In Ireland, it's administered by the GAA, so is strictly amateur, while in North America it's a professional game.
3 Days late but this is a funny comic! (I'm more WandaWant than say, alGorithm so some of the coding references go over my head but the jokes are funny all the same!)
Don't underestimate yourself. My version of wandaWant would never admit that anything went over her head. She'd just pretend that she knew what we were talking about. So you're way ahead already :-)
Nice catch, ExtraRoulette! You're the first to notice.
This project is new. My plan was to write a "comic generator", where I would just input parameters and it would generate the comics.
It worked even better than I expected. In the last 6 months, it has generated 2700 comics from my inputs.
Then I realized that if I launched 7/1/23, it would take 10 years just to post what I already had, even at one per day.
So I just reset my start date from 1/1/23 to 1/1/14. I wanted to launch with a lot of content so people could explore.
I also wanted the site to be evergreen which is why I try not to dig too deep into specific technologies. But COVID was obviously too big to ignore.
I sorted my backlog a few weeks ago based on many factors, but I guess 344 slipped through the cracks. I think I'll leave it there to see if anyone else notices.
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