Home was where we were supposed to meet

When I moved out of my parents house, my mom gave me this cookbook so could save some money. The idea is that each of tge dishes in here costs less than $4, which was the typical daily food stamp budget in 2015. In addition to recipes, the book also has some solid advice on meal planning and waste reduction.

Ten years later, minimum wage is still the same.

Lets see how this Obama-era cook book stands up to 2025 prices.

(To be clear- this is not a criticism of the author, who did a lot of research and math for this.)

We are going to shop for the Half-Veggie Burger today, which in 2015 money was 90c per serving, 7.20 total.

So. One of the challenges is that its so much cheaper per unit if you buy in bulk. This is great for families like the one I grew up in (2 adults, 2 kids, chest freezer) but a little harder for my small family (2 adults, no kids, budget fridge in my rental house).

So I had to think about some things.

Bell pepper at 99c plus buns at 1.79 = 2.78

Divided by 8 = .34

I had to think about the beans. Dry beans have to be soaked before they can be cooked ( ive gotten sick from someone not soaking their beans first). I am a fan of paying the ADHD tax up front to get canned beans for myself.

Each can is something like.... a cup and a bit. So I would have to get three of them. 3 cups of lentils i think might be 3/4 the bag.

.89 × 3 = 2.67 ÷8 = .33

1.69 ×.75= 1.26, ÷8 = .16

Now meat.

Beef is expensive, there is no getting around this. If i had a bigger freezer, I would be getting this monster.

Which portions out at 5.66 a pound. But, because I'm being practical about my lifestyle, I chose the smaller roll at 6.99/lb.

16.99 upfront cost, 5.66 ÷8 = .70

6.99 ÷ 8 = .87

And now eggs, which... I lucked the hell out with a flash sale.

Which they normally sell at 2.69.

Which makes this hard to quantify because you cant always expect eggs to be inexpensive, especially as we get into colder months.

So I will give totals for both what I bought versus what a typical price range might be.

1.49 ÷ 12 = .12 ÷8 = .02

2.69 ÷ 12 = .22 ÷ 8 =.03

Now let's add it up to different totals.

The first total is the big roll of beef with bag lentils but regular price eggs.

Upfront cost:

24.15 (but remember that the eggs, meat, and lentils can be used in more recipes.)

Cost per burger:

1.23

Now my adhd tax beans, practical amount of beef, and very lucky eggs.

13.93 up front cost.

1.56 per burger.

_____________________

So a 20-40 cent increase per serving doesnt sound bad. We are still under $4. But 20c per meal can get a little hairy over the course of a year.

Food prices are an interesting subject because they do fluctuate and its not always even how prices increase. Tariffs do things. Weather does things. Bird flu does things. Local markets can get weird on their own.

But this does affect everyone, and its something thats been on my mind since January. And with the possibility of losing SNAP next month, I think it was good for me to look at the reality of the situation.

Anyways- I do suggest this book. Prices may be out of date, but the recipes are really good.

Here is the rest of the recipe for y'all to try.

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

Curious pebble (2/?)

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.