In my limited experience, families with working women were very happy to eat out. Families with stay-at-home wives or who lived with parents were often keen to invite me for family dinners. Many did have "servants".

I don't want to overthink this but some of the value in "eating in" sometimes feels like taking advantage of the fact that there's usually a woman at home whose 'job' it is to cook.

> > In West eating out is the default choice

Huh? if you're fresh out of school, maybe. Certainly not in families.

> > even those who can't afford it will choose to eat out

How does that even work? Anyone piling on debt to eat is, well, seriously lacking in financial planning.

No, only a very few houses have cooks. It is usually the housewives that cook the food for the whole family.

Would be interesting to look at this through the lens of 1 vs. 2 working adults in a household.

I grew up solidly middle class and we never went out to eat besides occasional fast food if we were on a roadtrip, I wasn't even allowed to purchase school lunches. However, I had a stay at home mom that cooked everything!

Now, that I am an adult none of my friends that I would call "middle class" have a spouse that stays at home. Only those families that are very well-off have 1 adult that doesn't have to work and they tend to be rich enough that cooking most meals vs. going out doesn't matter much for them.

I think this is a case where "middle class" can mean a million different things. I don't think someone is colloquially middle class if they can't afford the crappiest house within 2 hours of their office (slight exceptions for major cities), yet others define it differently.

Sibling comment by 'firstplacelast seems to have been downvoted to [dead]? Why? Why are many of her comments in that state? I can't see anything in her history that should have led to a hellban.