Lifestyle

Who in the Heck Convinced You Fast Food Is Cheap, Anyway?

Look at fast food through feminist and capitalist lenses

Once and for all, fast food is far more expensive than cooking at home.

And I’m sick of hearing people who apparently are completely undone at the prospect of cooking an actual meal claim otherwise.

We got what we deserved.

We disrespected all the valuable work women traditionally did, including food preparation. How valuable could it be, if only downtrodden women did it?

Men can brag about the mean pot of chili they make, but women hesitate to admit they like to cook because they fear they’ll sound like a tradwife.

Women who like to cook or do anything that used to be called women’s work are made to feel they are wasting their time. Shouldn’t they be running a start-up or something?

The exception is if she does the sort of upper-class cooking that brands her as a cosmopolitan foodie:

“I learned how to make this totally authentic polenta when we were touring Italy. I took an amazing class and learned the technique. The secret is using otto file corn and stirring it only in one direction!”

We all know that woman.

I don’t need to describe her further.

I can, however, inform you that we ate polenta all the time growing up, but we called it something else.

Cornmeal mush has less of a ring to it. I’ve never seen it on a menu. It’s always called polenta.

Am I saying the peasant dish of cornmeal mush is exactly the same thing as the polenta the hoity-toity people eat?

You bet your ass I am.

It’s dirt cheap and it’s easy to make. I learned by watching my grandma, who did not ever go to Italy. She would have been amused by the notion that the direction you stirred would matter. She stirred that shit however she wanted.

In her younger years, I am sure she used the corn they grew on the farm themselves. They ate local farm-fresh food when that was still a sign of poverty, not a trendy marketing message.

Later, she bought the little canisters of cornmeal right off the grocery store shelves.

Sometimes my family ate it as cornmeal mush.

Sometimes we let it set up in a loaf pan overnight. The next day we sliced it, fried it and served it with sausage for breakfast.

My dad has a huge mug that was a long-dead relative’s “mush bowl.” That relative reportedly ate cornmeal mush every single night, topped with milk, until he moved into town. Then he stopped. He said it was no good without the milk from his own cows.

You can buy a 24-ounce canister of yellow cornmeal for $1.99 at my neighborhood Kroger. It contains 24 servings. So, that’s about 8 cents per serving, not counting whatever you might choose to add to it. Growing up, it was usually just a little butter and salt.

But you can top it with maple syrup at breakfast, or you can top it with marinara and a sprinkling of cheese for dinner. You can cut it into thin slices and use it as you would lasagna noodles.

Tell me about your 8-cent fast food snack hack.

Who started the cheap fast food rumor, anyway?

Each time I talk about fast food being expensive and unhealthy, I can count on someone speaking up to inform me that some people don’t have time and others don’t have kitchens.

I wouldn’t be surprised to learn the fast-food people came up with this messaging themselves.

If people can’t afford an apartment, they sure can’t afford to eat restaurant food at every meal. We do those folks no good by assuming they can always just get a cheeseburger. They need a home. With a kitchen. That’s what they need. Not a fast McFix.

You’re being convinced to buy crap food.

Who benefits when you purchase whole foods and cook them yourself?

You do, but the economy doesn’t. Capitalism would rather you go out to eat, or, failing that, at least purchase something some factory has made a profit producing for you.

Literally nobody but you benefits when you save money by cooking for yourself. So don’t be surprised that nobody but crotchety old misanthropes like me say it.

People who don’t have time are another story.

Yes, I get that. I recall the years of being a single mom working killer hours. Certainly, I did not bake my own bread in those years as I do now, but I couldn’t afford to give up and just do fast food. Instead, I did things like make big pots of potato or vegetable soup on a day when I did have some time.

Soup is great because you can usually throw everything in and let it cook on the lowest setting while you vacuum, get the laundry done, clean the bathroom, or do whatever you have to do. That’s your day to make a huge pot of soup. And you use it for two or three meals.

Not every meal has to be fancy. You can saute some garlic and a bag of spinach in a big skillet and roll it into tortillas with a sprinkling of cheese. Add some scrambled eggs if you want. You can probably have it done in less time than it would take you to get through a fast-food drive-through.

There’s nothing wrong with having a peanut butter sandwich on whole wheat with some apples or bananas on the side when you honestly have no time at all. You can grab hard-boiled eggs you prepare one day a week and a bunch of cut-up vegetables. You can bring that with you for the kids to eat while you’re driving them to their activity.

My daughter always has apples available for my grandchildren to eat in the car during the school and daycare pickup drive, because kids are always hungry then. My grandson used to call the apples eaten in the car “bapples” for no reason I know. He knows better now, which is too bad, because that was so cute.

None of this is rocket science.

Most women used to know how to cook. Well, the world has changed, and now everybody needs to know how to cook. It’s not women’s work. It’s humans’ work.

Start teaching your kids when they’re young. Kindergarteners can make their own sandwiches.

My kids knew how to make muffins from scratch in early grade school. My granddaughter is 9 and has been frying her own eggs for breakfast for a while.

Food is never just food.

It’s so tightly woven into our culture that changing the way we eat changes everything else. That’s another whole story, but the process of keeping people fed — of growing rice or wheat or corn or potatoes and coming up with the best ways to prepare them in local conditions — helped shape our ancestors’ cultures.

Most human beings had a hand in food production or preparation throughout history. Almost everyone was involved, because it took a lot of work to keep a community fed. Now, with machinery and oil, few of us are involved in farming or food production of any kind.

For many Americans, “cooking” means taking something out of the freezer and putting it into the microwave. Others think it’s combining a box of this and a can of that and sprinkling some cheese on top.

Is it not amazing how helpless so many people are?

Should some kind of war or apocalypse hit, a lot of Americans would starve to death even if the fields around them were full of ripe wheat. Once the last can of chicken noodle soup had been ingested, it would all be over for them.

I do sometimes eat fast food when I’m traveling and am hungry and in a hurry. And all of us have days when things go to hell and we eat a craptastic drive-through meal instead of the salad we were going to make.

There’s no harm in having it occasionally.

But most of it is unhealthy, expensive and usually not even very good.

Prove me wrong.

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