I mentioned to Critch (Academician on LW) awhile back that I was considering learning how to cook, and he responded that it’s not worth my time. I blinked, remembered approximately how much I valued my time, and more or less had to agree. This is a time/money tradeoff that many people whose time is valuable may not be navigating sensibly. There are lots of ways to pay other people to prepare food for you—restaurants, hiring a personal chef, meal delivery programs, etc. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a social network of some kind where people offered to cook for other people, and if there isn’t someone should make it.
(I currently obtain food partially through restaurants and partially through a combination of fruit, hard-boiled eggs, and whey protein.)
If you enjoy cooking, then time spent doing it isn’t a pure cost. Many people enjoy cooking. I happen to be one. You might turn out to be one too.
If you pay money for food, all the money is gone. If you spend time cooking, you can do other things with some of the same time—if there is someone else around, you can talk to them; you can listen to the radio or (intermittently) read; etc. So beware of simplistic time/money tradeoff analyses.
Cooking is a useful social skill as well as a way of getting edible food for yourself. (You can invite people over for meals, which is by no means socially equivalent to inviting them out for meals.)
Good restaurant food is quite expensive. (Admittedly less so in the US, where I think you live, than in the UK, where I live.) If your tastes aren’t cheap, eating out a lot may not be such a great tradeoff even if you regard your time as very valuable.
The time-cost of eating out is not zero. Depending on where you eat, it may be distinctly more than the time-cost of cooking for yourself. (Though, again, you can do other things while you wait for your food.)
I am not accusing you or Academian (or anyone in particular) of making this mistake, but: Beware of simple-minded time/money tradeoff analysis where you assume the value of your time equals (or even is well approximated by) the amount you are paid. That’s a safe assumption if you actually have the option of adjusting your working hours ad lib and your behaviour is perfectly consistent, but not otherwise. (I could save myself some time by not cooking. I am paid quite well. But since I’m paid an annual salary rather than an hourly wage, I can’t simply spend less time cooking and more time working and get more money at the same rate as I’m paid at.)
Cooking for yourself may well get you a healthier diet; you need to consider how you value your health as well as how you value your time.
I’m quite sure there are plenty of people for whom cooking isn’t a good use of their time, but I suspect there are fewer such people than a simple comparison of costs with pay rates would suggest.
If you enjoy cooking, then time spent doing it isn’t a pure cost. Many people enjoy cooking. I happen to be one. You might turn out to be one too.
Sure, but the OP, at least, doesn’t sound like one of these people, and I doubt he’s alone.
Cooking is a useful social skill as well as a way of getting edible food for yourself. (You can invite people over for meals, which is by no means socially equivalent to inviting them out for meals.)
Even if I learned how to cook, it’s unlikely that I would end up being the best cook in my social circle. If I want eating-at-people’s-houses events to happen in general, I can subsidize the best cook in my social circle instead of cooking myself. If I personally want to be the cook to win friendship points with my friends, that might be a good strategy, but it’s probably worth thinking about whether I have other strategies that play better to my comparative advantages for winning friendship points.
Beware of simple-minded time/money tradeoff analysis where you assume the value of your time equals (or even is well approximated by) the amount you are paid. That’s a safe assumption if you actually have the option of adjusting your working hours ad lib and your behaviour is perfectly consistent, but not otherwise.
Agreed. I’m basing my current conversion rate on approximately the hourly rate I can get tutoring, and I have substantial leeway to adjust how many hours I spend tutoring. (LWers looking for extra cash who have good academic credentials and haven’t considered this possibility should do so; with good credentials and in a reasonably well-off area you can safely charge $60 an hour if not more, and you can use a service like WyzAnt to minimize the time cost of advertising your services.)
Cooking for yourself may well get you a healthier diet; you need to consider how you value your health as well as how you value your time.
Sure. This is why I no longer eat at restaurants for all of my meals; again, for health reasons, half of them consist of fruit, hard-boiled eggs, and whey protein (none of which require cooking, really; hard-boiled eggs are very easy to prepare).
Even if I learned how to cook, it’s unlikely that I would end up being the best cook in my social circle.
Most people resolve this by specializing in certain dishes. You could probably never be a better general cook than your friend’s wife who really loves cooking, but you could learn to make a single night’s dinner better than her with a small amount of practice. Just keep repeating the same appetizer, the same entree, the same two sides, and the same desert.
I have a friend who can only make Eggplant Parmesian, bacon-deviled-eggs, and chocolate covered strawberries. As long as he doesn’t host more than twice a month, nobody notices this lack of variety because each of the dishes exceeds restaurant quality. He can’t cook outside of that, but he’s still considered amazing at cooking because that’s how people’s memory works.
If I want eating-at-people’s-houses events to happen in general, I can subsidize the best cook in my social circle instead of cooking myself.
You know, this seems socially naive to me, in a way characteristic of ideallistic young introverts. People do not usually respond well if you offer to pay for stuff they would otherwise enjoy doing for free, under the right circumstances (such as reciprocal dinner invites).
But I may be wrong, give it a try and report on the results, one of us will probably learn something.
People do not usually respond well if you offer to pay for stuff they would otherwise enjoy doing for free, under the right circumstances
I think you’re right, and I think the reason you’re right is that paying a friend to cook for you introduces a social relation—and, importantly, an implicit power relation—that wasn’t there before, and that people tend to be cautious about adopting those sorts of things. If you want to pay the best cook in your social circle to cook for group events, all of a sudden that person is no longer some random friend; they’ve become your employee. Which is, among other things, a status move and one that creates asymmetric obligations.
There are ways of exchanging goods and services in most social circles without creating status implications or inflexible long-term obligations, but they’re usually somewhat less conducive to ongoing arrangements. Probably the best in this situation would be to create some sort of regular social event that requires expenditure on your part, and ask your friend to do the cooking as part of a general division of resources. For example: “Want to start going fishing every couple of weeks? I’ll drive if you cook.” Usually you’d want to do a trial run first, of course.
I can cook crockpot dinners with 15 minutes total time (prep, check time, washing/cleanup), even though it takes hours to cook. This will prepare ~5 meals for both myself and my girlfriend that cost maybe 1.5 mins each to reheat later. At a total time of 30 mins input for 10 meals worth 5 dollars of saving each, that’s a cost of $100/hr.
That’s a ridiculously efficient use of time. Even if you’re a third as efficient and take 45 minutes prep (the 15 mins to reheat should be constant), you’re still running $50/hr, which is still excellent. The initial learning cost for crockpot cooking is very low as well.
Do you calculate this as 4 hours spent (fire time) or 30 minutes (your time spent)?
You can do similar things with stews, rice+stock dishes (gumbo/jambalaya/etouffee/paella), sous vide, and roasts/loafs. These are the easiest. Once you get better at cooking, you can expand and cook other dishes a similar way. As you get better, you spend a smaller and smaller fraction of time actually attending to fire.
Why do you think it’s bizzare? I don’ t hate reheated food, but the difference between food that’s just been prepared and food that was cooked, refrigerated, and reheated is really obvious to me. It’s huge.
I don’t think so—it happens with any fridge. What bothers me is that the food is drier (though that probably might be fixed by pouring water into it and stirring when reheating it), and the noodles/beans/grains of rice/whatever stick together (which I’m not sure it’s possible to undo even in principle).
Are you in a position where you can convert your time to money freely as-desired?
I expect that people on Less Wrong are demographically more likely than most to be able to do this, but most people have jobs which take up a certain amount of their time, beyond which they are not at liberty to convert more time into more money at a comparable rate should they so choose. So time/money tradeoffs which fail to account for whether the time being traded off is actually employment time, and thus valuable at that rate, will tend to be misleading.
hiring a personal chef is pretty fucking expensive. How much is your time worth?
In general, eating out is at least as if not more time consuming than eating at home, and costs way more. Cooking is easy. Anyone who can reasonably think their time is worth so much they can’t cook should be able to learn to cook well within a few hours.
Some randomGooglehits suggest that you can hire a personal chef for something like $13 a meal if you shop around. That’s certainly in the right ballpark for someone to reevaluate how they’re navigating this particular time/money tradeoff.
In general, eating out is at least as if not more time consuming than eating at home, and costs way more.
I currently live a few blocks away from various restaurants. It takes me at most half an hour to eat out (from the time I head out to the time I come back), and I pay an average of $8 per meal I eat this way. How long does it take you to prepare a meal, how much money do the ingredients cost per meal, and how long do you spend eating it?
I’ve found huge pot types of food like curry/chili/soup get pretty cheap. The ingredients are usually $30 or under and they take 2-3 hours to make and last you most of the week. Although there’s a weird balance between the comfort of having food and the tendency to get sick of food after eating it for a week. But I think you can freeze them also. And you’d need to figure out how much you hate chopping things, but you can listen to music or podcasts while you do it.
I’m pretty surprised by the hostility of some of the comments on this thread. This works for me only because I grew up chopping veggies and eating these types of food my whole life. There’s a ton of restaurant food I wouldn’t try to make.
While might they take 2-3 hours in total to make, IME for most of that time they can be left in the oven/on the hob, and you can do other things.
In the UK at least you can buy already chopped vegetables quite cheaply. I don’t mind chopping veg these days, but when I used to hate it they were brilliant!
Home cooking includes shopping and clean-up. It would be hard to figure out the exact average time costs per meal, but it isn’t nothing. When you’re waiting at a restaurant, you can read.
At least some of these costs can be reddemed by listening to podcasts. I often find myself going on hour long walks while listening to podcasts for the sole reason that walking around listening to podcasts is more enjoyable than sitting down while listening to podcasts; more productive uses of my time (for example cooking) might be able to increase value.
How long does it take you to prepare a meal, how much money do the ingredients cost per meal, and how long do you spend eating it?
The meal I make most often (pasta, bacon, frozen veg, pasta sauce): about half an hour to cook and clean, maybe £2, and variable time (probably 10-20 minutes) eating at my desk (which time is less valuable than time spent not eating at my desk, but not that much less valuable). I make two meals at a time, or sometimes three when I estimate quantities poorly.
it generally takes me about half an hour to 45 minutes to make and eat food, and the cost is usually something like 5-8 dollars.
Almost any place I go to for food would take half an hour to get and eat food before you count travel time, so I guess your choices are a lot faster and closer than anything to me, as well as being cheaper (I generally pay 13 or so dollars when eating out). Are you counting places like mcdonalds?
I guess I don’t view it as having a personal chef if they make meals and then freeze them, but that’s still cheaper than I would’ve assumed.
I live in Berkeley and there are various relatively cheap and fast restaurants (not chains) catering to the university crowd here, so I might be in a relatively good situation in that regard.
Note that learning to cook—if you plan to ever actually do any cooking—will make me less interested in accepting you as a housemate because I am bad at sharing.
I didn’t downvote it, but I’m not sure I understand the comment. The only plausible reason why being bad at sharing + someone else cooking = unhappiness seems to be that Alicorn herself enjoys cooking, and so wouldn’t want to share cooking space and food storage with someone else who cooks. But this is a very odd statement, because generally people enjoy spending time with others who share their interests. Also, I had to spend a couple minutes coming up with that explanation, the first draft of this comment just said I had no plausible explanation.
I hate sharing a kitchen; the more I have to do it, the less I know where all my stuff is and the less I can expect to find it available for my use whenever I like. (A lot of my skills turn off when there is another human in the room with me, so working around another person isn’t usually an option). I guess my comment wasn’t right for a public setting; I was mostly addressing Qiaochu, who knows about my kitchen thing and is planning to move in with me and Mike later this year.
I mentioned to Critch (Academician on LW) awhile back that I was considering learning how to cook, and he responded that it’s not worth my time. I blinked, remembered approximately how much I valued my time, and more or less had to agree. This is a time/money tradeoff that many people whose time is valuable may not be navigating sensibly. There are lots of ways to pay other people to prepare food for you—restaurants, hiring a personal chef, meal delivery programs, etc. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a social network of some kind where people offered to cook for other people, and if there isn’t someone should make it.
(I currently obtain food partially through restaurants and partially through a combination of fruit, hard-boiled eggs, and whey protein.)
A few words of possible dissent.
If you enjoy cooking, then time spent doing it isn’t a pure cost. Many people enjoy cooking. I happen to be one. You might turn out to be one too.
If you pay money for food, all the money is gone. If you spend time cooking, you can do other things with some of the same time—if there is someone else around, you can talk to them; you can listen to the radio or (intermittently) read; etc. So beware of simplistic time/money tradeoff analyses.
Cooking is a useful social skill as well as a way of getting edible food for yourself. (You can invite people over for meals, which is by no means socially equivalent to inviting them out for meals.)
Good restaurant food is quite expensive. (Admittedly less so in the US, where I think you live, than in the UK, where I live.) If your tastes aren’t cheap, eating out a lot may not be such a great tradeoff even if you regard your time as very valuable.
The time-cost of eating out is not zero. Depending on where you eat, it may be distinctly more than the time-cost of cooking for yourself. (Though, again, you can do other things while you wait for your food.)
I am not accusing you or Academian (or anyone in particular) of making this mistake, but: Beware of simple-minded time/money tradeoff analysis where you assume the value of your time equals (or even is well approximated by) the amount you are paid. That’s a safe assumption if you actually have the option of adjusting your working hours ad lib and your behaviour is perfectly consistent, but not otherwise. (I could save myself some time by not cooking. I am paid quite well. But since I’m paid an annual salary rather than an hourly wage, I can’t simply spend less time cooking and more time working and get more money at the same rate as I’m paid at.)
Cooking for yourself may well get you a healthier diet; you need to consider how you value your health as well as how you value your time.
I’m quite sure there are plenty of people for whom cooking isn’t a good use of their time, but I suspect there are fewer such people than a simple comparison of costs with pay rates would suggest.
Sure, but the OP, at least, doesn’t sound like one of these people, and I doubt he’s alone.
Even if I learned how to cook, it’s unlikely that I would end up being the best cook in my social circle. If I want eating-at-people’s-houses events to happen in general, I can subsidize the best cook in my social circle instead of cooking myself. If I personally want to be the cook to win friendship points with my friends, that might be a good strategy, but it’s probably worth thinking about whether I have other strategies that play better to my comparative advantages for winning friendship points.
Agreed. I’m basing my current conversion rate on approximately the hourly rate I can get tutoring, and I have substantial leeway to adjust how many hours I spend tutoring. (LWers looking for extra cash who have good academic credentials and haven’t considered this possibility should do so; with good credentials and in a reasonably well-off area you can safely charge $60 an hour if not more, and you can use a service like WyzAnt to minimize the time cost of advertising your services.)
Sure. This is why I no longer eat at restaurants for all of my meals; again, for health reasons, half of them consist of fruit, hard-boiled eggs, and whey protein (none of which require cooking, really; hard-boiled eggs are very easy to prepare).
Most people resolve this by specializing in certain dishes. You could probably never be a better general cook than your friend’s wife who really loves cooking, but you could learn to make a single night’s dinner better than her with a small amount of practice. Just keep repeating the same appetizer, the same entree, the same two sides, and the same desert.
I have a friend who can only make Eggplant Parmesian, bacon-deviled-eggs, and chocolate covered strawberries. As long as he doesn’t host more than twice a month, nobody notices this lack of variety because each of the dishes exceeds restaurant quality. He can’t cook outside of that, but he’s still considered amazing at cooking because that’s how people’s memory works.
You know, this seems socially naive to me, in a way characteristic of ideallistic young introverts. People do not usually respond well if you offer to pay for stuff they would otherwise enjoy doing for free, under the right circumstances (such as reciprocal dinner invites).
But I may be wrong, give it a try and report on the results, one of us will probably learn something.
I think you’re right, and I think the reason you’re right is that paying a friend to cook for you introduces a social relation—and, importantly, an implicit power relation—that wasn’t there before, and that people tend to be cautious about adopting those sorts of things. If you want to pay the best cook in your social circle to cook for group events, all of a sudden that person is no longer some random friend; they’ve become your employee. Which is, among other things, a status move and one that creates asymmetric obligations.
There are ways of exchanging goods and services in most social circles without creating status implications or inflexible long-term obligations, but they’re usually somewhat less conducive to ongoing arrangements. Probably the best in this situation would be to create some sort of regular social event that requires expenditure on your part, and ask your friend to do the cooking as part of a general division of resources. For example: “Want to start going fishing every couple of weeks? I’ll drive if you cook.” Usually you’d want to do a trial run first, of course.
Fair enough. Instead of subsidizing I can offer to take care of logistics if they take care of cooking.
I would invite people over and pay for takeout rather than cooking, if I couldn’t cook.
Qiaochu_Yuan’s social circle and your social circle may (or may not) be too different for what one will learn to apply to the other.
In average; but it also depends on what you cook for them or where you take them.
How are you calculating time cost?
I can cook crockpot dinners with 15 minutes total time (prep, check time, washing/cleanup), even though it takes hours to cook. This will prepare ~5 meals for both myself and my girlfriend that cost maybe 1.5 mins each to reheat later. At a total time of 30 mins input for 10 meals worth 5 dollars of saving each, that’s a cost of $100/hr.
That’s a ridiculously efficient use of time. Even if you’re a third as efficient and take 45 minutes prep (the 15 mins to reheat should be constant), you’re still running $50/hr, which is still excellent. The initial learning cost for crockpot cooking is very low as well.
Do you calculate this as 4 hours spent (fire time) or 30 minutes (your time spent)?
You can do similar things with stews, rice+stock dishes (gumbo/jambalaya/etouffee/paella), sous vide, and roasts/loafs. These are the easiest. Once you get better at cooking, you can expand and cook other dishes a similar way. As you get better, you spend a smaller and smaller fraction of time actually attending to fire.
Preparing meals in bulk definitely seems like a much better investment of time than cooking individual meals. I’ll have to look into this.
Fridged-and-reheated food tastes so bad to me, I’d rather just eat low-end microwave-ready dishes.
This is sufficiently bizarre that I wonder if your fridge is inhabited by mold or something.
Why do you think it’s bizzare? I don’ t hate reheated food, but the difference between food that’s just been prepared and food that was cooked, refrigerated, and reheated is really obvious to me. It’s huge.
It’s not that bizarre that a preference would exist, but that it would put leftovers of nice food below “low-end microwave-ready dishes” surprised me.
I don’t think so—it happens with any fridge. What bothers me is that the food is drier (though that probably might be fixed by pouring water into it and stirring when reheating it), and the noodles/beans/grains of rice/whatever stick together (which I’m not sure it’s possible to undo even in principle).
So do you have this problem with things like soup or curry—wet stuff that doesn’t lose that much of its water content?
Not with soup, I don’t. And I’ve never tried to store curry in a fridge for later reheating.
Or maybe he is a supertaster of some sort. After all, some people can’t drink pop :)
Are you in a position where you can convert your time to money freely as-desired?
I expect that people on Less Wrong are demographically more likely than most to be able to do this, but most people have jobs which take up a certain amount of their time, beyond which they are not at liberty to convert more time into more money at a comparable rate should they so choose. So time/money tradeoffs which fail to account for whether the time being traded off is actually employment time, and thus valuable at that rate, will tend to be misleading.
Edit: I missed the fact that gjm has already noted this in another comment.
hiring a personal chef is pretty fucking expensive. How much is your time worth?
In general, eating out is at least as if not more time consuming than eating at home, and costs way more. Cooking is easy. Anyone who can reasonably think their time is worth so much they can’t cook should be able to learn to cook well within a few hours.
Some random Google hits suggest that you can hire a personal chef for something like $13 a meal if you shop around. That’s certainly in the right ballpark for someone to reevaluate how they’re navigating this particular time/money tradeoff.
I currently live a few blocks away from various restaurants. It takes me at most half an hour to eat out (from the time I head out to the time I come back), and I pay an average of $8 per meal I eat this way. How long does it take you to prepare a meal, how much money do the ingredients cost per meal, and how long do you spend eating it?
What kind of food do you get at restaurants?
I’ve found huge pot types of food like curry/chili/soup get pretty cheap. The ingredients are usually $30 or under and they take 2-3 hours to make and last you most of the week. Although there’s a weird balance between the comfort of having food and the tendency to get sick of food after eating it for a week. But I think you can freeze them also. And you’d need to figure out how much you hate chopping things, but you can listen to music or podcasts while you do it.
I’m pretty surprised by the hostility of some of the comments on this thread. This works for me only because I grew up chopping veggies and eating these types of food my whole life. There’s a ton of restaurant food I wouldn’t try to make.
While might they take 2-3 hours in total to make, IME for most of that time they can be left in the oven/on the hob, and you can do other things.
In the UK at least you can buy already chopped vegetables quite cheaply. I don’t mind chopping veg these days, but when I used to hate it they were brilliant!
Home cooking includes shopping and clean-up. It would be hard to figure out the exact average time costs per meal, but it isn’t nothing. When you’re waiting at a restaurant, you can read.
At least some of these costs can be reddemed by listening to podcasts. I often find myself going on hour long walks while listening to podcasts for the sole reason that walking around listening to podcasts is more enjoyable than sitting down while listening to podcasts; more productive uses of my time (for example cooking) might be able to increase value.
Not needing to do the cleaning up is pretty much the only reason for going out other than variety, for me.
The meal I make most often (pasta, bacon, frozen veg, pasta sauce): about half an hour to cook and clean, maybe £2, and variable time (probably 10-20 minutes) eating at my desk (which time is less valuable than time spent not eating at my desk, but not that much less valuable). I make two meals at a time, or sometimes three when I estimate quantities poorly.
it generally takes me about half an hour to 45 minutes to make and eat food, and the cost is usually something like 5-8 dollars.
Almost any place I go to for food would take half an hour to get and eat food before you count travel time, so I guess your choices are a lot faster and closer than anything to me, as well as being cheaper (I generally pay 13 or so dollars when eating out). Are you counting places like mcdonalds?
I guess I don’t view it as having a personal chef if they make meals and then freeze them, but that’s still cheaper than I would’ve assumed.
I live in Berkeley and there are various relatively cheap and fast restaurants (not chains) catering to the university crowd here, so I might be in a relatively good situation in that regard.
Note that learning to cook—if you plan to ever actually do any cooking—will make me less interested in accepting you as a housemate because I am bad at sharing.
Could some of the downvoters please explain what they found wrong with this comment?
I didn’t downvote it, but I’m not sure I understand the comment. The only plausible reason why being bad at sharing + someone else cooking = unhappiness seems to be that Alicorn herself enjoys cooking, and so wouldn’t want to share cooking space and food storage with someone else who cooks. But this is a very odd statement, because generally people enjoy spending time with others who share their interests. Also, I had to spend a couple minutes coming up with that explanation, the first draft of this comment just said I had no plausible explanation.
I hate sharing a kitchen; the more I have to do it, the less I know where all my stuff is and the less I can expect to find it available for my use whenever I like. (A lot of my skills turn off when there is another human in the room with me, so working around another person isn’t usually an option). I guess my comment wasn’t right for a public setting; I was mostly addressing Qiaochu, who knows about my kitchen thing and is planning to move in with me and Mike later this year.
You poor bastard.… Life is too short to eat whey protein.
I recommend you do learn how to cook, you may well find you enjoy it.