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Tell HN: Food is too expensive now

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Re: Tell HN: Food is too expensive now

#31

Post by antoniuschan99 »

armchairhacker wrote: post #5

Learn to cook. Seriously though. With only a bit of practice you can cook restaurant-quality food at home. And you can buy high-quality ingredients, but they are actually cheap because you’re buying them unprepared and in bulk. There are many high quality recipes and tutorials online. Look up Ethan Chlebowski, Adam Ragusea, and Joshua Weissman. These are videos for basic recipes with grocery-store ingredients, not fa…

I’ve been watching Gordon Ramsays Ultimate Cookery Course from 10 years ago. There’s also a book you can find that has all the recipes in the vids

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTzMGnJjrsSyDJU9XClzZtuJ6...

Re: Tell HN: Food is too expensive now

#32

Post by zarzavat »

techsin101 wrote: post #8
armchairhacker wrote: post #5

Learn to cook. Seriously though. With only a bit of practice you can cook restaurant-quality food at home. And you can buy high-quality ingredients, but they are actually cheap because you’re buying them unprepared and in bulk. There are many high quality recipes and tutorials online. Look up Ethan Chlebowski, Adam Ragusea, and Joshua Weissman. These are videos for basic recipes with grocery-store ingredients, not fa…

Cooking can easily take up 2-4 hours a day. 1 hour for prep, 1 hour for cooking, 1 hour for cleaning up afterwards (stove, utensils, dishes, table, kitchen floor, sink, etc)

Buy a home wok burner, a wok and a rice cooker. There's an entire genre of cooking built around making things in 10 minutes. Chinese, Thai, Indian food.

Western home stoves are underpowered compared to the typical asian home stove. So western recipes are designed for slow western stoves.

Once you use a wok for the first time you realize you've been using the stove equivalent of a car that can only go 30mph all your life.

Re: Tell HN: Food is too expensive now

#33

Post by yadaeno »

armchairhacker wrote: post #5

Learn to cook. Seriously though. With only a bit of practice you can cook restaurant-quality food at home. And you can buy high-quality ingredients, but they are actually cheap because you’re buying them unprepared and in bulk. There are many high quality recipes and tutorials online. Look up Ethan Chlebowski, Adam Ragusea, and Joshua Weissman. These are videos for basic recipes with grocery-store ingredients, not fa…

I chuckled at the stereotypically american answer "dont rely on society, just do it yourself".

Even if you know how to cook, life is significantly better in a society with quality inexpensive restaurants. Most cities around the world have this.

I usually eat out socially, im not going to invite people to cook for them because its weird, and very inconvenient. When im on a vacation or visiting a friend in another city im usually not cooking either.

Op's complaint is valid, life has been worse since food doubled in price. If I want to unwind and grab food or drinks with friends on a weekend, I am easily spending $80+, that is absurd. When I lived outside of the US I would not spend more than $20.

Re: Tell HN: Food is too expensive now

#34

Post by ampgt »

The cost of takeaway/delivery has gotten absurd. I was looking at my deliveroo account the other day (UKs door dash) which has my order history all the way back to 2018. The drop-off in my usage and the increase in price post-Covid is interesting to look at. The nice thing about being in the UK is I can save myself a few bucks and just walk down the street to pick up the food myself. To be honest though, prices are so ridiculous I don’t even bother doing that anymore. It’s significantly cheaper to just do it myself (and I find myself eating healthier).

Highly recommend learning how to cook. There are a lot of easy dishes out there that you can throw in a crock-pot or oven with almost no prep, the trick is all in the spices. Chicken, pasta (with lean ground turkey!), salmon.. all low maintenance. Get yourself a steamer/rice cooker and most of the “cooking” is just waiting for your timers to go off.

Re: Tell HN: Food is too expensive now

#35

Post by bruce511 »

junofan wrote: post #16
bruce511 wrote: post #11

So clearly there's a range of restaurants, and I suspect most fees a family for under $170,so I'm going to assume you are thinking more high-end places here, not necessarily day to day eating. It's worth noting that food costs in restaurants is only a part of the puzzle. Rent is a huge part (especially in SF/SV) then there's labour, decor etc. And I'm guessing you are not eating "local" so assume some serious transpo…

> see Japan in the 80s and 90s Japan’s CPI doesn’t include fresh food. > Maybe raise taxes to reduce consumer spending to lower demand? Come on. The poster is clearly talking about a supply-side solution. > Rent is a huge part (especially in SF/SV) then there's labour, decor etc. The government artificially restricts supply of the first two items you list. Relaxing those restrictions would be a decent place to start.

OK, I buy that. Instead of focusing on demand, govt could look at the supply side.

Let's be generous and assume lower wages is not the solution. I doubt the goal here is cheaper food at the cost of misery to others.

So there's rent as the obvious contender. In some parts of the country rent is high because supply is low. In NY there's not much one can do about supply, but in say SF property supply is very much under govt control. So loosening up zoning there, and allowing for more development would be a step. Of course there are a lot of people invested in that not happening - specifically landlords - which means the govt has to pick winners and losers (or more accurately choose different winners, since they are already choosing winners and losers.)

Now granted the original poster was clearly talking in the context of restaurant food prices, not actual "food prices" - but its worth noting that zoning changes wouldn't affect general food prices, and the impact on restaurant rents would be long term, not short term.

The other big input cost, direct and indirect, is energy. Fuel for cooking, and perhaps more significantly for transport.

I'm not sure the govt can do a whole lot there - yes there are taxes in there, but they are low compared to global standards, and reducing them just means making them up elsewhere. (which might not be a bad thing, but tax policy moves very slowly.)

The price of oil is not really in govt hands, pricing there is international and very fluid. Unlike most oil-producing countries, the US does not determine local supply.

So we're back to labour? But even there labour isn't over controlled by govt. Min wage is already pretty low, and given the high employment rate labourers can afford to hold out for higher pay. Its not like people working is restaurants are rich, even most owners barely break even, so again this doesn't look like an area where govt could do much - except encourage poor immigrants maybe? (in the UK low-end posts are getting hard to fill since brexit)

And I'm not sure lower restaurant prices at the cost of human misery is really the goal here.

So, in summary, what other govt options are in play? Zoning would have an effect in some locations. Is there anything else that would have an impact? Especially in a short time scale?

Re: Tell HN: Food is too expensive now

#36

Post by _8j50 »

All I know is Asian (chinese, indian,thai,japanese too but mostly bento boxes) places have large enough portions to make the cost worth it. If you are getting burgers and bbq, if the cost is an issue then they are fairly easy to replicate at home.

There are prepared frozen foods as well with competitive pricing. <$10 frozen pizza vs $20(with tax+fees+tip) for delivery pizza for example.

Re: Tell HN: Food is too expensive now

#37

Post by 8note »

armchairhacker wrote: post #5

Learn to cook. Seriously though. With only a bit of practice you can cook restaurant-quality food at home. And you can buy high-quality ingredients, but they are actually cheap because you’re buying them unprepared and in bulk. There are many high quality recipes and tutorials online. Look up Ethan Chlebowski, Adam Ragusea, and Joshua Weissman. These are videos for basic recipes with grocery-store ingredients, not fa…

If I'm cooking, I'm missing chances to leave my house, which with all the WFH are harder to come by

Re: Tell HN: Food is too expensive now

#38

Post by bruce511 »

bergenty wrote: post #22
db48x wrote: post #4

Most of the price of eating out is the cost of wages. After all, someone else is cooking the food, cleaning the dishes, etc. If the cost of labor goes up, so must the cost of eating out. Nothing the government can do about that.

You would hope the economies of scale of cooking large amounts of food at a restaurant would help bring down the costs though.

Labour in restaurants does not scale well.

Servers can only serve x tables, chefs and cooks can only make x meals per hour. Valets, barmen, bussboys all scale pretty linearly.

Plus rent doesn't scale well either. More meals translates to more staff, more staff translates to more space. And that's also linear.

Food-scale happens in factories, think frozen meals in your supermarket not restaurants.

Re: Tell HN: Food is too expensive now

#39

Post by physicsguy »

ampgt wrote: post #34

The cost of takeaway/delivery has gotten absurd. I was looking at my deliveroo account the other day (UKs door dash) which has my order history all the way back to 2018. The drop-off in my usage and the increase in price post-Covid is interesting to look at. The nice thing about being in the UK is I can save myself a few bucks and just walk down the street to pick up the food myself. To be honest though, prices are s…

Well yes, wages have gone up for low paid industries in the UK after COVID and Brexit due to shortages of workers (my local McDonalds is advertising at £12 an hour now), and fuel and gas is largely being driven up by cutting off Russia. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.

Re: Tell HN: Food is too expensive now

#40

Post by db48x »

bergenty wrote: post #22
db48x wrote: post #4

Most of the price of eating out is the cost of wages. After all, someone else is cooking the food, cleaning the dishes, etc. If the cost of labor goes up, so must the cost of eating out. Nothing the government can do about that.

You would hope the economies of scale of cooking large amounts of food at a restaurant would help bring down the costs though.

I’m not sure that there are economies of scale, except perhaps in special situations.

Someone has to chop all the vegetables, slice all the fruit, bake all the desserts, fold all the napkins, mop the floors, clean the restrooms, etc, etc. The staff often begin work hours before opening, and leave hours after closing. Those costs don’t go down if you have more customers, they go up.

Batch cooking only works in some cases: you can bake a whole cake and then sell it by the slice, so there is an economy of scale there. Do the same thing with spaghetti noddles, on the other hand, and half your customers will get overcooked noodles. I suppose buffet–style restaurants benefit more from economies of scale, since they can cook a whole tray of something and take it out to the buffet all at once. Or cook a whole roast or ham and then carve some off for each customer. But then I suppose you have to pay someone to stand there and carve, so perhaps not.

Thanks, now I’m hungry, and there’s not a Luby’s within a thousand miles of here.

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