Especially for people living in poverty/low income. Most of the tools that make cooking more efficient can be really cost prohibitive, so people working long hours/multiple jobs don’t have time to make every meal themselves and who don’t have access to things like Instapots or even just quality ovens that heat quickly and evenly, etc etc. factor in food deserts and many people just don’t have realistic alternatives to quick, cheap, sugar-laden foods.
And some people just don’t even know how to realy cook. My husband grew up in severe poverty with very neglectful parents who would literally do things like hand him a box of snack cakes when he was 9 years old and that was his “dinner.”
He has no idea how to do most things in the kitchen (and to be clear he does probably 90% of the cleaning in our home, it’s definitely not weaponized incompetence due to laziness). I grew up cooking with my parents and being involved with it as soon as I was old enough to stir the batter for the pancakes. So much of it is so second nature to me that I forget there are a lot of nuances to cooking well that I take for granted.
Eg, We watched the episode of Schitt’s Creek where Moira and David can’t figure out how to “fold in” the cheese and my husband asked me what it meant because he had never heard of that before, either. Knowing certain techniques, knowing how to use different tools, having basic recipes memorized, knowing what kind of spices go together for what kind of dish, if you don’t already know these kinds of things it’s time consuming to have to look it all up and learn. Overworked people don’t have that luxury of time and access to good learning resources.
Especially for people living in poverty/low income. Most of the tools that make cooking more efficient can be really cost prohibitive, so people working long hours/multiple jobs don’t have time to make every meal themselves and who don’t have access to things like Instapots or even just quality ovens that heat quickly and evenly, etc etc. factor in food deserts and many people just don’t have realistic alternatives to quick, cheap, sugar-laden foods.
And some people just don’t even know how to realy cook. My husband grew up in severe poverty with very neglectful parents who would literally do things like hand him a box of snack cakes when he was 9 years old and that was his “dinner.”
He has no idea how to do most things in the kitchen (and to be clear he does probably 90% of the cleaning in our home, it’s definitely not weaponized incompetence due to laziness). I grew up cooking with my parents and being involved with it as soon as I was old enough to stir the batter for the pancakes. So much of it is so second nature to me that I forget there are a lot of nuances to cooking well that I take for granted.
Eg, We watched the episode of Schitt’s Creek where Moira and David can’t figure out how to “fold in” the cheese and my husband asked me what it meant because he had never heard of that before, either. Knowing certain techniques, knowing how to use different tools, having basic recipes memorized, knowing what kind of spices go together for what kind of dish, if you don’t already know these kinds of things it’s time consuming to have to look it all up and learn. Overworked people don’t have that luxury of time and access to good learning resources.