Earlier quoted context omitted.
Time, food variety, and cleanup. Most people don't want the majority of their food to come from an instant pot and they don't want to think about things like grocery shopping. There's a level of skill and management involved in making your own food even if you are talking about extremely simple recipes, and it becomes invisible once you get used to it, but I suspect some people don't have those skills or habits built…
> but I do think it's something that can be difficult even for neurotypical people if they're not used to it. Based on the percent of people who were able to do it before there were fast food restaurants everywhere, I think people will manage to figure it out. The only reason they have not is due to lack of incentive (sufficiently cheap food at restaurants).
A good lot of the people from that time are dead and they become fewer every day. Meanwhile, their children, who grew up since then, have radically different baseline expectations about what a meal should taste like, how big it should be, how filling it should be, how convenient it should be, etc
It’s very different to recall the habits of a received culture than it is to adopt a new culture that is completely alien.
In some post-apocalypse, of course people will figure this stuff out, but expecting that to happen just because of incidental market relationships in an otherwise healthy economy is a fantasy.
It takes the passion of a wellness geek or absolute desperation to throw away all your preconceptions about how you’ve related to food your whole life. It doesn’t just happen because prices crept up a little here or sank a little there.