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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25595 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026

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I think any attempt to ban categories of items is doomed to fail. There really are no strict categories once you get down in the weeds of what's available at a typical grocery store. Or, there's as many categories as there are products, which isn't helpful at all. I advocate for starting from zero and adding foods you want people to purchase. Surely "whole raw onions" does not accidentally also cover something in the frozen frankenfood aisle.

Yes, it would be hard to do this and there'd be gnashing of teeth, etc. A big problem is that most people don't know how to cook. What used to be a survival skill at some point became a luxury hobby in some sense and for some people. I don't know what we should do about that. Maybe just live with the fact that the very poor will eat like the blue collar/lower middle class.

In my experience there's a bit of a "barber pole" effect that goes on, the underclasses don't cook, they depend on a mix of cheap pre-prepared meals and charity. The working and lower middle classes cook for economic reasons, it's far cheaper to feed a family or a house full of roommates by buying bulk goods (beans, cheese, eggs, rice, ground-beef, that kind of thing) and preparing them yourself than it it is to buy pre-made. Middle class strivers and broke college kids often don't have time or space to cook so it's back to either pre-prepared meals or eating out. For the upper classes cooking becomes either a hobby, or a means of status competition, IE "look at this fancy meal I put on", "why yes we did just have the kitchen remodeled, again".

For the upper classes cooking becomes either a hobby, or a means of status competition, IE "look at this fancy meal I put on", "why yes we did just have the kitchen remodeled, again".

That's a PMC thing, especially with the male partner doing the cooking.

The upper classes have personal chefs.

I feel like there's a lot of sloppy equivocation going on in this thread at both ends of the spectrum. Between people in the upper 90th percentile of income and multi-billionaires at the high end, and between "working class" (janitors, waitresses, delivery drivers, et al) and people who don't work at all at the low end.

Define 'upper class'. The US has plenty of full time housekeepers but only literal billionaires have personal chefs.

only literal billionaires have personal chefs

Why though?

I would imagine to hire a good chef that could otherwise have his own restaurant, you'd have to offer a good 6 digit salary; maybe somewhere between 200 000$ and 800 000$ depending on experience and details such as whether it's a live-in, exclusive or flexible position. Is that unattainable for mere multihectomillionaires?

An executive chef earns near six figures or lower six figures, $80-$120k ish. But executive chefs don't personally cook, they oversee line cooks who do the cooking and do the training, menu, and quality control side of managing a kitchen. Doubling that to account for executive chef level responsibility and line cook level work is probably generous but in the right order of magnitude. Private chefs exist, you can hire one for your next party, but the business model assumes an occasional extravagance for entertaining, not one regular client.

I suspect that the merely wealthy either like cooking(possibly as a status symbol) or go to restaurants, or have their housekeepers do enough low level cooking to not worry about it.

You do raise an interesting point that they probably go to restaurants; after all, having a access to all chefs in a city would offer more variety than a single chef would. But the situation I would imagine one would consider a private chef is for those who have a large mansion away from a large city's restaurants.

Not in the UK they don't, unless we're talking about the real super-rich older people with 10s or 100s of millions.

How are you dividing the PMC from the upper classes? Most of the upper class are PMC these days. Or do you mean it in the American sense where it's only big capitalists like Warren Buffet?

Have to work for a good living vs do not have to work for a living.

Many Americans who don't work due to just having money have a full time housekeeper who does some cooking, but a personal chef would be for billionaires only. Maybe the lower cost of labor in Russia changes things over there.

Okay, that works. FWIW none of the people I know in the UK who fall into the latter category have chefs or full-time staff, though they often have cleaners a couple of times a week.

Correct, people don't know how to cook, but you're way overrating how good of a cook most women were in 1950 or whenever. When America was much poorer a high percentage of the population just ate unappetizing food. If you were stuck eating whatever you and your wife could throw together, you ate it regardless of quality.

As a society, we've decided that noone should have to eat unappetizing but cheap food. School lunches don't serve those weird rectangular pizzas anymore. Workplace and college cafeterias have professional chefs. Those box services have no stigma(and also no profit); hellofresh and factor and the like come off as responsible coded in a way that TV dinners used to be seen as an occasional extravagance that was only acceptable if you had kids to feed and a lot of overtime or something. The lower middle class does not eat rice and beans at home(or vegetables of any kind); they eat fast food, frozen dinners, pizza, etc- just like the welfare dependent poor. 'Having to eat bland food' is the lot of the world's poor historically, but it's an indignity that, in America, is reserved solely for prisoners.

There already are categories for SNAP EBT: you can't use it for hot foods (rotisserie chicken is probably the most common complaint). WIC also exists and has comparatively tiny set of eligible products.

We should do better about teaching basic cooking, though. Removal of life skills from k-12 education (compared to what my parents' generation talks about: home ec, shop class, etc) has been, IMO, a bad choice overall. Although I'm not sure I'd bring those back exactly as they were.

you can't use it for hot foods

That's exactly my point. They're trying to say what people aren't allowed to buy and it's too hard to get right. Instead they should only say what people are allowed to buy. And rotisserie chicken should be one of those things IMO (whole chicken, cooked on premise, no breading... or something specific like that so it doesn't accidently include hungry man chicken dinner or KFC). And anything not on the allowed list won't be covered by food stamps. But I'm not a policy expert on this topic (or any topic) and there are probably good reasons why it isn't done this way.

Everyone who has thought about the policy design says that you should just give people money. Money is fungible, so if you restrict EBT to actual necessities (i.e. things someone paid cash would need to buy anyway) then you are not modifying their budget constraint. There is no policy design behind eligibility lists for this kind of benefit, and nobody has suggested one (as opposed to grandstanding particular examples of upmarket food being bought with an EBT card). In particular, products are eligible for WIC because the industries that make them bribe politicians and/or employ a lot of people in swing states.

Going back to @tomottoe's OP, the practical effect of making fancy mushrooms EBT-ineligible was that someone who had enough cash-plus-EBT income to afford them had to split one transaction into two, delaying @tomottoe and everyone else in the queue behind them. If you phase out SNAP rather than cliff-edging it (which as a matter of creating correct incentives, you should), then there will exist people with jobs and EBT cards who have cash-plus-EBT income sufficient to afford an occasional small luxury, which will sometimes be food. Making said small luxury EBT-ineligible achieves nothing.

The people who think it is worth modifying SNAP so you can't buy luxuries with EBT cards are mostly people who think the programme shouldn't exist at all.

Going back to @tomottoe's OP, the practical effect of making fancy mushrooms EBT-ineligible was that someone who had enough cash-plus-EBT income to afford them had to split one transaction into two

This assumes that people behave like perfect rational machines.

Also, see the classic Beware Trivial Inconveniences post. Trivial inconveniences like having to buy things separate are a huge influence on actual humans.

Everyone who has thought about the policy design says that you should just give people money.

Sure. That way when they give people money and the recipients spend it on booze and drugs and are still "needy", the proponents can use that to push for an increase in the amount of money given.

Right, if I get $X in food stamps and earn $Y at work, what will stop me from buying "proper" food with stamps and everything else with my own money?

That's also the argument about whether or not government funds are "being used for abortions", is it not?

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