Get your own void; this one's mine.

With an update since getting it back:

Anita Bryant takes a pie to the face October 1977.

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AI industry groups are urging an appeals court to block what they say is the largest copyright class action ever certified. They’ve warned that a single lawsuit raised by three authors over Anthropic’s AI training now threatens to “financially ruin” the entire AI industry if up to 7 million claimants end up joining the litigation and forcing a settlement.

I mean at any given time you’ve got a huge box of cans of tomato sauce, a huge bag of rice, a bunch of spices in your cupboard, a bunch of noodles and pasta just kicking around, and several cans of soup and frozen dinners for when you’re feeling lazy.

When one of my cousins moved out for the first time my aunt got her stocked up on staples. Flour, canned veggies, spices, sugar, rice, anything that doesn’t go bad in a few days. All that cost over $400 upfront.

After that initial investment in all that stuff though, living gets a lot cheaper. All your staples almost never run out all at once. So in one week you probably just buy some perishables like meat and veggies and maybe buy another giant bag of rice because your current one is sort of getting low.

So when people on the internet tell you that they can teach you how to make gourmet ramen for less than $3 they’re technically right but they’re also assuming that you just have a lot of these staples lying around and can afford to buy in bulk. Maybe the amount of miso paste you used only amounts to 10¢ but the entire bag cost $12.

If I only had 20$ to eat this week I’d already have a bunch of canned stuff and grains in my cupboard and I could probably afford to buy some cheap vegetables and meat. But if someone couldn’t afford to pay $400 to fill their cupboards up the first time they can’t rely on there already being rice when they only have $20 at the end of the month. They need to buy food as they want to use it. So in their situation it makes sense to buy a $1 hamburger from McDonald’s or a box of Mac n cheese and some milk to cook it with. Not vegetables that cost just as much as that box of Mac and cheese and won’t feed nearly as many people.

My dad and his siblings spent a good chunk of their childhoods being poor after their dad’s business went under and something they often tell me is that “the poor can’t afford to be thrifty.”

A lot of cheap stuff can be made to taste absolutely amazing if you already have a variety of spices laying around.

I swear by the dollar store’s $1 garlic powder, black pepper, lemon juice, sugar, and soy sauce (hit all the main flavor groups for a month for $5) but being able to casually use smoked paprika, nutmeg, or oregano adds a lot of morale. Higher quality spices are more expensive up front, but you can also use less of them.

I’ve never had someone buy stuff in bulk for me like that, but I definitely grew up with staples in the cupboard as a kid. Potatoes, noodles, rice, flour, etc. and cans of vegetables, and a decent spice cabinet.

So, I started this blog back in college because it was my first time being confronted with exactly how much money and work went into having to feed yourself, without that assumption of “oh I’ll just microwave a potato and season it” to fall back on. The first time I didn’t have a vehicle, and had to haul my groceries back on a bus, and only had space for a mini-fridge to store perishables.

My first paychecks went into getting that stockpile back - spices, noodles, rice. - it makes choosing where your money goes a lot less stressful when you don’t have to worry “what if I can’t eat this week” by choosing to pay a bill instead of betting groceries. There’s always butter noodles or plain rice.

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I like eating nice food. I REALLY like making my own food.

I also think a lot of chefs and food bloggers (and myself at times) forget that high quality food and cooking is locked behind some impressive paywalls.

The cost of pots and pans.

Of spices, and accessibility of ingredients when you don’t have a vehicle or live in a food desert.

Being able to do a Costco run (or equivalent) and get a bunch of basics makes life so much easier, but it's not an option available to a lot of people. They don't have the money to buy all of that stuff upfront, or the space to store it, or the means to transport it from the store to their home.

“Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of ok for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.” -Terry Pratchett, Men At Arms

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