That said Lidl is making aggressive inroads into the country and that MIGHT have an impact long term. They have legitimate and affordable fresh bread.

https://www.walmart.com/tp/bread

This is Walmart's store brand (as cheap as possible): https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Wheat-Sandwich-Bread-...

Ingredients: Enriched Flour (Wheat Flour, Malted Barley Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Water, Whole Wheat Flour, Sugar, Yeast, Contains 2% or less of the following: Soybean Oil, Wheat Bran, Salt, Vital Wheat Gluten, Molasses, Calcium Propionate (Preservative) Vinegar, Dough Conditioners (Monoglycerides, Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, Ascorbic Acid, Calcium Sulfate, Enzymes), Potassium Iodate, Monocalcium Phosphate

I just don't even understand how that works, even if you have enough income, how do you have enough space to like store all the trash for the week?

Don't you just get tired of restraunt food at some point?

In most cities there are usually many options for restaurants nearby and Uber Eats for anything further out. For everyone else there's McDonalds and friends: https://www.qsrmagazine.com/content/ranking-top-50-fast-food...

Besides asking for studies that may or may not be there, what was your experience with this? I hadn't heard of this before.

Not OP, but I've lost >100 lb. three separate times in my life, so I suppose I qualify.

It affects you in ways that are analogous to overindulging in adult entertainment.

You need higher peaks (e.g. more salt) and, in my experience at least, you gradually lose the ability to pick out subtle flavors.

You start to prefer food that you can scale as you see fit. Lots of rice. Lots of potatoes. Lots of popcorn.

They charge a fee if you do that in my county, and the "flat rate" is dependent on the size of your bin, as a proxy for how much trash you generate. If you have more trash than fits in your bin you have to buy stickers for the extra bags to pay for them to be picked up.

Where are you? I'm in the US

Garland TX, a suburb of Dallas, has a flat rate per bin, with free curbside large item/landscaping waste twice a month. Throw your old washing machine on the curb and move on with your life!

My mother in law, lives about 50 miles outside the DFW Metroplex and pays a flat rate based on the average of her trash usage. She rolls 2 bins up to the curb once a week. She can put more out and they will take it, but if she consistently puts out more trash, they will bill her extra when it comes time to renew every year. The guys on the trash truck keep a rolling tally of your "usage" and then the office works out who needs to pay more if the customer skews towards more usage than they signed up for.

I live in Europe now and moved here last year. I pay $12 PER PICKUP for residential trash here in the Netherlands. The catch? They pickup that bin ONCE every TWO MONTHS. If I want to throw more stuff away, I need to somehow transport all my trash to the local dump, pay a fee, and unload and sort it all myself.

On a more positive note though, recycling plastic is free. Some of my neighbors generate an entire large bag of plastic every day. My wife and I fill up one bag a week. Our "normal trash" bin is usually half full when it's time for pickup.

Pricing for waste is largely dependent on the municipality as well here in the Netherlands.

My household typically throws away 3 or 4 ten gallons bags per week leaving the bin maybe a quarter full. The neighbors across the street are constantly having food delivered and routinely fill two bins.

> Today, 82 percent of the meals Americans eat are prepared at home, a much higher percentage than a decade ago, according to research from NPD Group Inc. cited by Bloomberg.

Uncited comments on HN are frequently confidently incorrect, especially when they are descriptions of average American culture

Maybe if you're a highly paid SWE in California with endless takeout options you never cook but that's an absurd proposition for flyover country

https://www.foodnetwork.com/fn-dish/news/2018/9/americans-ar...

The vast majority of the people I see actually buying produce at the grocery store are older people and immigrants. Almost everyone else is buying the processed crap in the aisles.

This is the crux of the matter: we can only buy what is on our shelves. If we have to start looking at ingredients lists, I think we've already lost the plot. Why are these questionable things on our shelves in the first place? Likely because they're cheaper to make, or worse, there's some government subsidy involved. And I don't mean "questionable" as in plain junk food, because even then, we have to decipher labeling like chocolate vs "chocolate flavored candy". It can be hard to try to be reasonably healthy once you leave the the edge of the super market.

Here in Southern California there are plenty of food desserts that sit adjacent to immigrant enclaves that provide critical mass for amazing grocery stores with a wide variety of higher quality, cheap produce and a diverse collection of nutritious processed and ultraprocessed food simply because that's the stuff that their communities demand. Replacing such a supermarket with a McDonalds would never work within these communities because most families simply don't consider fast food an alternative to their existing diets. These are huge supermarkets that are often similar in size to Costco or Walmart stores (see Shun Fat, 99 Ranch, Zion Market, etc).

We could do with a little more culinary elitism among consumers in my opinion.

If you think American cuisine consists of massive chains; TGI Fridays, Olive Garden, Red Lobster, Hooters, Texas Roadhouse, etc, then no wonder you don't think highly of American cusine. But if you branch out from there, there's a ton of food culture, and Southern California's a great place to experience it.

If people want to stay ignorant and economically and nutritionally disadvantaged it’s not something I pity. I can’t but help feeling disgusted and scornful toward people with these attitudes. Cave people made bread.

You can prepare and freeze meals.

Shit, fresh vegetables can be hard to obtain in many parts of the US.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert

We've got ~20 million people who don't live near a grocery store with fresh food at all.

Buy some flour, take a cup of flour, mix some water, maybe some salt, squish it some and bake it.

The downfall of society will happen within arms length of wisdom and knowledge.

You need to be there for a large part of the process. The first mixing and kneading takes the longest, maybe 5 minutes. After that every 20 minutes you need to come and fold for a minute 3 times. After that, let it rest for 8-16h (depending on dough temperature, amount of yeast, environment temperature). Then you do another 2 minutes of work. Half an hour later preheat the oven. Half an hour later put it in.

Doing this over night you save a lot of time. I.e. you can start at 8pm and finish by 8am-9am if you wake up at 6am. But a lot of people can't stay home that long in the morning.

So it's very little work in essence, but it's spread over a whole day. Perfect if you work remotely. Takes less time than most coffee breaks. But you need to be home.

If you have time on the weekends only you can do amazing bread and freeze it. I prepped it on Friday or Saturday evenings, baked it the next morning. Cut and froze it and had enough for the week. That's how I survived in Canada.

But there are so many super-local bakers around the world. Single neighborhoods are willing to pay full-time wages to a baker just so they don't have to make their own bread. Explain why they do that if daily bread-making isn't a pain in the ass.

Or is this just that you don't think I should use the word "hard" to mean "pain in the ass"? It comes out of your money/time budget either way.

> Freshly baked bread can be hard to obtain in many parts of the US. For me if I wanted fresh baked bread every day and not make it myself, I'd be looking at like 40-60 minutes of extra time per day if I drive there every day.

and

> But there are so many super-local bakers around the world. Single neighborhoods are willing to pay full-time wages to a baker just so they don't have to make their own bread. Explain why they do that if daily bread-making isn't a pain in the ass.

Which I have two thoughts on, first, I'm pretty sure most people are buying bread at the grocery store. So, the availability of fresh bread (which is also frequently available in the grocery store bakery) has more to do with lack of demand than it does with lack of availability. It seems like the convenience of pre-sliced bread that doesn't go bad in a couple days is just vastly preferred over fresh bread.

As for the local bakeries, I'd argue that those bakeries exist because they bake a variety of bread (and cakes) that are more involved than simple bread. I'd be shocked if the majority of the money they make wasn't from specialty items with wide margins.

The top level point I'm trying to get across has to do with the article and top level comment though, fresh bread is available to anybody with an extra few minutes every couple days. And, frankly, if you're doing any amount of cooking during the day, you can do it at the same time. There's usually some down time in a recipe that you could sneak in throwing a few ingredients into a mixer. Or put it together while watching whatever netflix show you're watching or podcast you're listening to.

Bread was certainly much more work but a stand mixer is not that expensive, especially compared to the amount of time it will save you if you cook semi-frequently (and even better if you make the bread you eat frequently). There are a plethora of modern conveniences that make bread so much easier to make than it used to be (and it was already pretty easy...).

No my point is that going to the grocery store daily or near daily for fresh bread adds like an hour of time to my day, because there's no very close grocery store. Not even talking about a dedicated bakery

That said, a DIY/health POV, what's given here (no yeast) can be relatively quick.

However there is some amount of time commitment that I think might be hard if you don't have the luxury of working from home or being/having a stay at home partner.

The second best thing might be using a bread baking machine, that takes most of the work from you. It doesn't taste as good, but it's similarly healthy I'd guess.

This demented site is a Dunning-Kruger hall of mirrors populated by arrogant fools.

A tiny bit of practice and perspective change to get something you like and you can have fresh bread daily for the rest of your life.

heh... we have over fresh bakery shops IN EVERY STREET so you are no more than 10 house lengths away from one. It has no yeast, around 3% is salt but is made fresh and goes bad in hours so it is consumed HOT. I wonder if stuff like our centuries old tech can be replicated in more "modern" nations?

Hyper-Local stores would only keep most essential in demand products while you'd have to go out and buy from big stores something niche.

Add the ingredients in the evening and enjoy fresh bread in the morning.

Talking about processed bread, here is an example from Sam's Club [0] for sourdough boules, at $6 for four (about 1kg total). The ingredient list contains nothing ultra-processed.

[0]: Soudough boules at Sam's Club https://www.samsclub.com/p/members-mark-sourdough-boules-4-c...

That is the problem, people aren't going to take the effort to look.

It's remarkable easy to bake your own bread (as many tried in during the pandemic). Yeah, it takes time, but it's a good way to reduce your carbs intake. i.e. if you don't bake it, you can't eat it.

I'd love to make my own bread but I know I'd gain ten pounds the fastest ever.

Each bread I bake is cut in half (even before I taste it) and put in the freezer for next soup time.

Is that a climate thing? In my (temperate) experience, bread lasts for several days, even in summer.

Additionally, you can buy sourdough, which tend to have longer shelf life then yeast breads.

It also costs $5+ a loaf when you can get the cheap stuff for $1-$2, so a lot of people just wouldn’t spend the money anyways because they don’t know or care about the difference.