This week, we scour campaign finance reports to reveal strikingly partisan preferences for various restaurants, with few more polarizing than McDonald’s.
I always thought fast food was incredibly expensive, but maybe that’s just me. When I was living hand to mouth during college and shortly after, I found that a big bag of rice and beans (even canned, although dried would have been even cheaper) went a long way in my food budget. Fast food was a luxury I almost never did.
I want to live in a world where people can eat beyond rice and dried beans within their budget.
It’s 2024. Eating a thin mash of bulk grains like you’re a medieval peasant isn’t a plucky story of resilience. It’s the story of a failed economic policy.
Oh, of course. But it’s just that I’ve never found fast food to be particularly cheap, ever. And eating off the dollar menu rarely lived up to being all that cheap, either. It certainly seemed like a very bad meal (but lived up to its name: fast) - it usually did not seem very nutritious and certainly not the least bit healthy.
But maybe that’s because I grew up with not a lot of money, I don’t know. Building up a basic set of spices and learning a few simple meals based around beans and rice definitely worked a lot better for me when it came to finances and to how satiated and how good I felt. The grease bombs of the typical fast food fare usually felt okay in the moment, if I could afford them, but terrible for energy levels, GI tract, etc…shrug. I know the Taco Bells and the McDs of the world are convenient, but it didn’t seem like very great food and it didn’t seem all that cheap, at least to me. I considered it splurging if I went to McDs and got a quarter pounder or a Big Mac back in those days…
There was like a 20 year period where they had things like a dollar menu to get people in and it really could be cheap to eat fast food. Those days are gone.
In the mid 90’s a whopper was a buck. That’s a bit over $2 today with inflation. I think whoppers are like $7-9 now. Sure compared to rice and beans it was probably expensive back then too, but not what I’d call incredibly.
Same. My mom only took us out to eat fast food either when she was super stretched for time or when she got a little extra money. This was in the ‘80s.
Yep, same. Both my parents worked and worked weird hours, however, my mother had frugality imprinted on her (and knew that fast food was mostly just hot garbage when it comes to health and nutrition - it seems it has not gotten any better, by the way.) so fast food was a once-in-great-big-while thing. Soda was almost a never kind of thing.
I always thought fast food was incredibly expensive, but maybe that’s just me. When I was living hand to mouth during college and shortly after, I found that a big bag of rice and beans (even canned, although dried would have been even cheaper) went a long way in my food budget. Fast food was a luxury I almost never did.
I want to live in a world where people can eat beyond rice and dried beans within their budget.
It’s 2024. Eating a thin mash of bulk grains like you’re a medieval peasant isn’t a plucky story of resilience. It’s the story of a failed economic policy.
Oh, of course. But it’s just that I’ve never found fast food to be particularly cheap, ever. And eating off the dollar menu rarely lived up to being all that cheap, either. It certainly seemed like a very bad meal (but lived up to its name: fast) - it usually did not seem very nutritious and certainly not the least bit healthy.
But maybe that’s because I grew up with not a lot of money, I don’t know. Building up a basic set of spices and learning a few simple meals based around beans and rice definitely worked a lot better for me when it came to finances and to how satiated and how good I felt. The grease bombs of the typical fast food fare usually felt okay in the moment, if I could afford them, but terrible for energy levels, GI tract, etc…shrug. I know the Taco Bells and the McDs of the world are convenient, but it didn’t seem like very great food and it didn’t seem all that cheap, at least to me. I considered it splurging if I went to McDs and got a quarter pounder or a Big Mac back in those days…
There was like a 20 year period where they had things like a dollar menu to get people in and it really could be cheap to eat fast food. Those days are gone.
Just curious: what time period was that?
90s through maybe 2010.
In the mid 90’s a whopper was a buck. That’s a bit over $2 today with inflation. I think whoppers are like $7-9 now. Sure compared to rice and beans it was probably expensive back then too, but not what I’d call incredibly.
Same. My mom only took us out to eat fast food either when she was super stretched for time or when she got a little extra money. This was in the ‘80s.
That’s my experience. Then it got cheap for some years and then expensive again.
Yep, same. Both my parents worked and worked weird hours, however, my mother had frugality imprinted on her (and knew that fast food was mostly just hot garbage when it comes to health and nutrition - it seems it has not gotten any better, by the way.) so fast food was a once-in-great-big-while thing. Soda was almost a never kind of thing.