Yesterday’s edition of The Wall Street Journal featured a piece about how, while a segment of the population is turning to cooking because they can’t afford to eat out anymore, in many cases it is more expensive to prepare a meal at home.
The reason? The yuppies who are taking up cooking tend to be using recipes that call for expensive mushrooms, gourmet olive oils, and pricey cuts of meat – all of which add up to do-it-yourself meal solutions that can be a problem for the bank account.
The WSJ quoted the Food Marketing Institute (FMI) statistic showing that 85 percent of Americans at home-cooked meals at home three or more times a week during the past year, compared to 74 percent a year earlier.
The reason? The yuppies who are taking up cooking tend to be using recipes that call for expensive mushrooms, gourmet olive oils, and pricey cuts of meat – all of which add up to do-it-yourself meal solutions that can be a problem for the bank account.
The WSJ quoted the Food Marketing Institute (FMI) statistic showing that 85 percent of Americans at home-cooked meals at home three or more times a week during the past year, compared to 74 percent a year earlier.
- KC's View:
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We happen to be big fans of the new WSJ Personal Journal section, in which this article was found.
That said, we have to admit that this was one of the most annoying articles about food that we’ve ever read, and suggests that the editors of the WSJ need to emerge from the vacuum-packed, upper class bubble in which they appear to be living.
We suspect that the FMI statistic illustrates far more than a new fad that has been embraced momentarily by spoiled rich kids who only know how to turn on the stove because their trust funds and stock options have dried up.
Plenty of people are eating at home more because of the down economy, but are doing so by using consumer packaged goods that have been designed to help them feed themselves and their families economically. The beef or seafood that they are choosing isn’t necessarily coming from gourmet stores, but from traditional, mainstream supermarkets that survive on the notion that good food can be made available to virtually everyone at affordable prices.
The picture painted by the WSJ piece was so unreal as to be almost unrecognizable. Sure, there are some people like that. Perhaps they are even WSJ editors. But most of us are happy with inexpensive mushrooms, plain old olive oil, and we don’t need expensive cookware to get supper on the table.
And that’s really what it is all about. Getting supper on the table.
Nothing fancier than that.
