[bregma]

It smacks of entitlement when dining at a restaurant is considered basic necessity and preparing your own meals is considered a luxury. Think about history. Think about the vast, vast majority of people on earth. Consider just how entitled one must be to have the help prepare your basic necessities of life.

[dagw]

By that argument, indoor plumbing and safe running water can also be considered luxuries. Which, while true, is rather reductivist.

And if we want to talk history, having food made for you by other rather than making it yourself is not a new thing. Having a servant or a wife/mother/grandmother making you dinner was far more common in the past than it is now. I'd probably guess that more people know how to cook and cook their own food today, than at just about any other time in history

[mkr-hn]

It's remarkable how much those restaurants they uncovered in Pompeii resemble modern versions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermopolium

[atatatat]

Stirring Mac and cheese or warming a Hot Pocket is not on the same level as roasting a pig and such, but I agree with the local point you're making.

[Werewolf255]

These are all just spinning food products around or on a heat source, sounds like we could just abstract and reuse that module without coding up a behavior for each 'new' cooking technique.

[Broken_Hippo]

Fast food has been a staple of life since antiquity: For centuries, folks went to the baker to get bread, since home kitchen facilities were very limited. Women have been stuck in home kitchens for eons, with male family members not learning even basic skills unless they were employed as cooks or bakers.

I think we've been depending on others for food prep for a very, very long time.

[bregma]

> Women have been stuck in home kitchens for eons ... we've been depending on others for food prep for a very, very long time.

Did the slightly more than half the population throughout history also have someone else cook for them too? A woman's woman perhaps?

No, I'm not buying any argument that says a person is not privileged to have someone provide for them just because they consider the provisioner to be a lesser being like a woman or a slave. Quite the contrary in fact: I consider that a reinforcing argument for a privileged existence.

[dagw]

A woman's woman perhaps?

Servants and maids where much more common in the past than now, especially among the middle class. Also it was more common to have several generations living under the same roof, so 1-2 people would often be preparing meals for 6-12 people. Today it is much more likely that you have 1-2 people preparing food for 1-4 people.

I strongly suspect that the proportion of people eating a meal they cooked themselves is almost certainly higher now than at virtually any point in history.

[jbluepolarbear]

That’s extremely sexist. I for one am an excellent cook, I’m not a women, and I haven’t been employed for my cooking abilities. I learned to cook because I wasn’t able to experience restaurants. I was tired of the bland boring food my parents made. I started cooking our meals and I would copy from tv shows, magazines. I wanted better food, but couldn’t afford to have it prepared for me so I learned a skill. Any restaurant food is considered a luxury to me. I aggressively budgeted so that I could start going to restaurants as an adult. My cooking abilities only got better when I was able to taste the food that I’d been mimicking for so long. For me a normal family meal cost $20, a single value meal at McDonald’s is $10. So for my family a meal at McDonald’s would be $40 minimum. That increases as the greatly as you transition into sit down meals; where a meal is $15 per person and that’s before tip so $80. How are these not luxury expenses? 1 meal at a restaurant cost as much as 4 at home and those home meals will also produce leftovers for lunches. Before COVID I would eat out 1 times a week with my family and 1-2 times a week for lunch. At that frequency it’s still a lot of money and I have always treated it as a luxury expense that is part food and part entertainment.

[prewett]

Recounting historical realities is sexist? How does one talk about history then, since history is chock-full of inequalities? And might there be some decent, non-sexist reasons why women cooked and men didn't, consistently, over large periods of time and many different cultures?

[imwillofficial]

“That’s extremely sexist.”

No it isn’t, GP was recounting historical norms. Get off your high horse.

[Broken_Hippo]

I'm the poster you responded to, and I think you've taken some things out of context. Of course there is sexism. I was talking about history, and history has a lot more sexism than a lot of western, more "liberal" countries retain - and this is a fairly recent development.

[chalst]

In developing countries, the urban poor frequently don't live in places with cooking facilities and have to eat prepared food.