Donald Trump’s agriculture secretary has been mercilessly mocked after boasting that the government devised a new way for Americans to eat for just $3 per meal amid a nationwide affordability crisis.
Brooke Rollins claimed in a TV interview that her team had “run over 1,000 simulations” to find the most optimal nutritious dinner on a shoestring.
Over in c/cooking I include the price per person for every meal I post along with disclosing any cost cutting variables like using backyard eggs. It is very possible to cook for less than $3 a meal as long as someone in the house has two or more hours a day to do the cooking.
Assign value you to your time and that’s beyond $3
The rich trade money for time, the poor trade time for money.
If I charged for my meals I would. But I could set the labor rate to a million dollars and it wouldn’t change a thing.
That sounds like a lot more time than necessary.
Depends on your priorities. Restaurants do not even offer the food I get cravings for. So even if I could afford the $15 to $20 per person they would charge I’d be getting not what I want for substantially more money.
Then there is the issue of time. I work for myself in a situation where I can’t work an extra hour or two to buy this over priced food that I don’t want. So it’s not like I can work to buy the crap meal. So I make the food I want with the time I have for the price I can afford. Which is, kinda ideal. Definitely worth it.
I’m not spending two hours making boxed Mac and cheese. I’m spending two hours baking bread, making tortillas, slow cooking venison chilli. And two hours is on the long end. I can food a lot. So sometimes I might spend a few hours canning three gallons of chili but the day I want to eat the chili it’s 50 minutes because I want fresh made cornbread with it. Why do meal prep a week in advance when you can do it a year in advance?
That’s kinda my point - I cook in large batches as well, and the vast majority of nights it’s a combo of prepared food that’s being reheated or assembled in a matter of minutes. And a lot of that preparation, like with baking bread, is passive while you let the food do its thing.