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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
Take this comment as being slightly trollish but one thing I've noticed in the discourse online about this is the conspicuous absence of right-wingers pointing out that cooking for oneself isn't a man's job but a woman's one. A hundred years ago a young single man in the United States would have bought prepared food or gotten food with their lodging instead of being expected to cook and clean by themselves. It's genuinely weird that the position of some conservatives is that we've moved backwards in division of labor since the 1920s, and that this is a good thing and young men should be learning domestic chores to save money.
Cooking isn’t gendered coded. Different places and different times had different genders cooking.
Professional chef if anything is male coded slightly. Grilling meat is heavily male coded.
Cleaning is feminine coded. Not cooking.
Food preparation / cooking is predominately or exclusively done by women in 98% of studied primitive societies, and there’s no history of men cooking for themselves in European civilization. I remember reading a study on Italian men living alone, a country with a highly masculinized image of chefs, and the diets they wound up keeping were horrible. IMO the sexual division of lifestyle is one of those load-bearing pillars of civilization that we disposed of to hastily as you’re just not going to get working men to cook healthy meals for themselves. It doesn’t matter how possible this is from a purely theoretical biomechanical analysis if men across the world simply do not cook good meals for themselves. It almost seems like the only men doing this are into bodybuilding, so maybe it helps if you pretend you’re Goku and home cooking is an integral part of your transformation into a fantastical hero.
Well, this is their choice and their problem. If they see cooking as something so degrading that they prefer failing heath and early death to such dishonor, who are "we" to dissuade them.
It’s probably not that they find it degrading as much as that men have little instinct to want to cook a healthy meal for themselves, or cook at all, and so they don’t. But if you’re trying to design society so that your citizens have the best health, you may want to consider how evolution designed the sexes — is there a particular sex which naturally enjoys colorful things, and preparing beautiful things, and nourishing others, and is especially receptive to praise from male authority figures? Maybe it’s better if this half of humanity masters the art of cooking and then uses this skill to lure in a husband, and then they can live within a mutually-beneficial symbiotic relationship happily ever after. And this is not unlike how humans have lived since the advent of fire. Otherwise, what, we curse a quarter of the population to ill health, every generation? Unless we find some intervention that actually works to make men cook. Or we can just subsidize healthy meals, which isn’t a bad idea and would probably save us money in the longterm and health expenses.
The last thing I want would be to "design society". And if you have such grand ambitions, you know well you ain't going to make it all the way up to the post of Supreme Leader.
There ain't any "we", they curse themselves. You do not have to go full boomer mode to accept that cooking is today cheaper and easier than in all recorded history.
And if such situation is really so grave, it will not last long. If you can't survive without slave who will feed you, pick your garbage and wipe your ass, you ain't going to survive, and you wouldn't be missed.
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Men also have much dirtier homes. This isn't just about food.
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When I was young the answer to this was "steak". Quick and easy to make a good one, gentle learning curve to make a great one, feels manly to cook, pairs with any sides, great for protein+iron.
But although I'm trying to hold back from adding to the "$20 burrito" discourse (with at least two links and a page of ranting), I have to admit that steaks actually are becoming steadily more expensive, even adjusted for wages.
Right? If you can talk yourself into going all-in on the protein power of lean chicken, that's still affordable and also a decent meat with which to practice cooking skills, but making chicken (at least with a stove top or oven; grilling every day can be a hassle) instead of beef you just don't get the same "primally in touch with my caveman ancestors", "top of the food chain over mammals 5 times my size", "nature red in tooth and claw and steak knife" vibes.
Shrimp have become cheaper over my adult lifetime even in nominal dollars, gone from luxury to staple prices in real terms, but that might be even trickier these days? IMO making fancy scampi for a date feels manly, but for young men self-conscious about their masculinity I'd worry that the "I will not eat the bugs" meme may deter them from literal arthropods.
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The older I get the more I hate data and academic papers and just want to trust my instincts. Because it’s virtually impossible to read thru studies and figure it out; and more times than not it seems like my instincts end up being correct after someone does a thorough literature review.
I enjoy cooking. I can do it as a hobby. There are a lot of famous male chefs and my gut says more than females. Some reason evolution made me enjoy cooking and I feel like I know plenty of men who enjoy cooking.
There does seem to be something with meat especially that men enjoy doing. Men love barbecuing. And men doing the hunting, starting a fire, and making meat safer to eat is a story I can believe we did a lot of evolving around. Girls do seem to have a stronger desire to do things like baking. So perhaps your statistics are picking up activities like that.
Perhaps it’s a pre-civilization trait that was ditched in most agricultural societies but is still a significant gene in the male population.
Cooking doesn’t feel like work to me. It probably would feel like work if I did a 12 hour shift in a factory, but in white collar world where your not physically tired it seems like a hobby for a lot of men.
I personally cook because I'm the better cook vs my wife but my dad, male cousins, brother, and friends don't cook. One of my friends, he actually taught me a lot about cooking when we were roommates but he doesn't cook most of the time because it's a hassle as a single guy.
So, one data point in that it doesn't seem to be a hobby for a lot of men. It may be popular in some social niches for some men, though.
Heck, most of the women in my age group don't really cook either, compared to my mom and grandmother's generation.
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