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The online discourse, I've been watching this week is the $20 Burrito. As a super TLDR; this is an intra-right argument that got started by one conservative saying young conservatives are upset about food affordability, and gave an offhand example about '$20 burritos'. The response was a combination of:
Burritos aren't actually that unaffordable, the rate of increase in unaffordability has come down, also you can make them at home for cheaper, also you aren't entitled to eating out.
The response to the response is that this is a losing message to one's own side, avoids accountability for losing focus on why 2024 went Trump, and suspiciously aligned to Iran war support.
Before I address that specifically, a little about my personal burrito.
I am as close to a controlled middleclass experiment as possible.
I live in the same zipcode I grew up in; my kids go to the same Catholic school I went to. I work in the same industry as my father. I aspire to give my family the same life I grew up with. I can't live the life my parents lived.
In the 90s my parents moved us into a new construction. Today, I live in smaller a house, on a smaller lot built in the mid-70s. In realtive terms, I live in a house that is not only smaller, but nearly 50 years older than the one my father did.
My parents had >8 kids. I have 5.
Here's the kicker: My father was an individual contributor, software developer. I am a Director-level at a mid-market software company; This isn't title inflation, I manage an org of about 25, including multiple layers of leadership.
While being considerably more successful than my father in my career, I financially struggle to same life he lived.
I don't disagree with any of the above points, or probably other reasonable ones, but they all miss the point: I want to live the life I grew up in, I am willing to work hard for it, I held up my part of the implied social contract, I think that the failure of the implied social contract is a BAD thing, something to be seen as regrettable, and I want my politicians to focus on fixing it.
Burritos aren't actually that unaffordable, the rate of increase in unaffordability has come down, also you can make them at home for cheaper, also you aren't entitled to eating out.
This is all arguably true. But yet, is a losing message. Especially when your side won on addressing the real and percieved reasons we can't get affordable burritos, and super especially when the other side's solution is 'free burritos for our friends, mass immigration for our enemies'
The US middle class opportunity has changed in negatives ways for reasons that don't benefit me, and I didn't ask for, and instead of my political side agreeing to help address these issues, they are telling me to support a foreign war
My understanding is
Prices differ in different regions of the US. $20 to feed a rural family a quality meal may be easy in a rural town but impossible in a big city.
Food and housing have significantly increased in price since 2020. Under Trump the rate hasn’t further increased, but nor has it decreased. Have salaries increased to match? At least tech have not, but they were high to begin with; I don’t know other fields, but the general vibe I hear isn’t good.
Healthcare is also fucked. I don’t know if it increased but regardless it’s absurd.
Telling people “the general economy is great”, when they specifically are struggling to afford things, is useless at best. Whoever credibly promises to help those people will win their vote. “It’s the economy, stupid.”
ETA: almost everyone should learn to cook. It’s not only cheaper and healthier but tastier; or you can get frozen vegetables, canned meat or beans, and garnish (e.g. hot sauce), and make bland food that is very cheap, very fast, healthy, and requires barely any equipment.
I wouldn't even dunk on frozen vegetables, I find them generally a better choice on every metric compared to out-of-season/long-distance shipped fresh vegetables, which by virtue of having to go through a long distribution chain before hitting the shelves are picked too early. Of course, in-season local vegetables are at the top of the pyramid.
Agreed, fresh meat (or tofu) + steamed frozen vegetables + rice + sauce is a perfect meal.
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Frozen veggies are way underrated. As best as I can tell, there's nothing at all worse about frozen vegetables compared to fresh ones in terms of nutrition, and they tend to be significantly cheaper and easier to store. Different people have different tastes, of course, but personally, I find that the experience of eating boiled or even microwaved frozen vegetables is exactly equivalent to eating fresh ones that have been steamed or prepared in an equivalent way.
Nothing wrong with frozen, and as you say the nutritional content is pretty close to fresh-picked, but idk why anyone would ever boil them. That's definitely gonna kill both nutrition and flavor. Steaming is preferred in every case I can think of.
Haven't had a microwave in ten years so idk about that part. Maybe fine.
Does boiling actually kill nutrition? Haven't experienced that for flavor. I boil them because I can't be bothered to steam them, and boiling is one of the easiest ways to heat them up so that they're palatable.
Yes, boiling vegetables tend to reduce the nutritive content unless you drink the water with it. But not necessarily by enough to worry about.
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Yes, heating anything up that much is going to destroy all sorts of compounds.
Steaming is just boiling with a basket on top.
I think the main sin of boiling as a way of cooking is that the nutrients leach out into the water, which is then usually dumped out. It'll be fine if you poach veggies in a soup you then eat, though.
Sure, but no need to boil a soup! I'd guess I keep it below 180 (f) at all times and only bring it up that high initially. We eat a lot of stew and I'm fully convinced that it tastes better when it's not boiled.
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Any sort of heating is going to nuke the vitamin C at the least. Boiling also leaches stuff into the water.
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Unfortunately, yes. Up to 50% of their water-soluble vitamins are lost during boiling. Especially if peeled. Though, I'd worry more about pesticides in the peels than retaining vitamins. Steaming is better but I share your preferences for making them palatable by boiling.
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The peak is from your own garden. There's nothing like dinner being almost ready and sending your two year old out to the yard to pick some tomatoes and basil. Every time we do that I can almost see the glowing border of the memory as I'll experience it in my old age. The bright colors, the dirt between her toes, her hair in the sunshine. Were I Japanese, I'd see ghostly cherry petals blowing. And it tastes great, too.
You have disciplined two year olds. There is no way any of mine would have made it back with more than one tomato. If they see a tasty tomato then they're eating it.
The bigger issue is that she hasn't quite yet figured out how to harvest the basil without inflicting any amount of unnecessary damage upon the plant. But she's getting better, and basil is pretty hardy stuff anyway.
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