Only a few years after McDonald’s became public enemy number one for serving up almost cartoonish amounts of food to American consumers, it’s back on top, becoming the recession’s shining star of cheap food.
I can’t help but feel this is the Walmartization of dining, the biggest bulk buyer of its particular foodstuffs in the world moving ever onward, creeping in as dining options wane in the recession. There’s a reason that the poor are among the most obese sectors of society - bad food is cheaper than good food, and bad food, thanks to the creep of fast food, is far easier to get than good food. It goes back to my beef with Sandra Lee - she takes an ethic that should result in affordable, fast meals for people with less means and less time, and makes it the same sort of middle to upper-middle class “gourmet-but-not” ethic that dominates cooking at home.
There’s an obvious market niche that’s being underserved here, or at least being served solely by the proliferation of fast-food restaurants. Few people like cooking at home every single night, particularly when home doesn’t look like a Food Network kitchen set. Little’s being done to make home cooking accessible; sure, there are the odd books on how to eat cheaply but they’re fairly sparse and largely focused on college students.
Plus, with McDonald’s taking over the world, I’m just sad that Demolition Man chose the wrong fast food chain. I thought that movie was the future.
My tips to eating cheaply at home:
1.) Build up a stock of dried spices. You don’t need anything fancy, but a basic set of spices like oregano, thyme, paprika, rosemary, cumin, etc. will stretch the same ingredients a lot further. They’re also an investment. Four dollars for a spice may seem expensive, but that spice will probably last you a few months. Olive oil is much the same - spending seven to fifteen dollars for something that isn’t even the actual food part of the meal seems expensive, but it lasts forever and improves the quality of your food.
2.) Use aromatics. Onions, celery and garlic are still relatively cheap. And they make things taste good. Really good.
3.) Think about how much a meal actually costs to make. McDonald’s is cheap, and very cheap at that. But think about what you get for a five-dollar value meal - you get a soda, fries and a sandwich of some sort. Stretch that over four people, and you’ve spent twenty dollars for sandwiches, fries and drinks. You can feed yourself for less than five dollars, and you can certainly feed four people for less than twenty dollars.
4.) Learn to love leftovers. I used to hate leftovers, for the simple reason that I generally made bad food and by no means wanted to save it. Better food means better leftovers, means your dollar gets stretched further. Below the fold is my staple cheap recipe, black beans and rice. And it makes great leftovers, too.