I think nobody in my country would say going out to eat is better than eating at home. Home cooked meals are way better. This is just a list of your personal preferences disguised as the right way to do things.
If you want a small house and flying around to vacations, you can do it without looking down on who decides for another trade-off.
100% agree with home cooked meals. You have the liberty of choosing among 100000 ingredients. No restaurant offers that variety.
And for the "dining room just for parties" argument from above: it is actually possible to invite your neighbours, your friends, your colleagues, ... to dinner more than once a year. I almost never had people turn down such an invitation.
Heck, I have a kid in my life who has a severe peanut allergy. Going out to eat is restrictive as we can't go to some restaurants, so cooking at home is way easier on many occasions.
We also like to sit an eat together "just because", so like you point out, a dining room can be used day-to-day, not just for parties (though it's also great for those).
It has nothing to do with the food, nothing at all, it has to do with intimacy and care. THIS is where I live and I invite you here, I take care of you because I care about you, THIS is food that I made for YOU, I'm sharing a part of my life, this is how I cook because I like it or because that's what my family usually eats or because I tried something new.
Maybe it's because I'm. Mediterranean and it's part of the culture but the idea that you invite someone to eat and it being about the food is oh god so depressing to me. It's like gifting someone a poem and caring about how good the poem is.
It depends on the household, and not exactly on the country and culture. However, those definitely affect prevalence. For example, I like to hold parties during which we cook together. But I have several relatives and friends who already prepares everything before anybody arrive. It’s not even family, because a lot of us do differently than how our parents and grandparents do. It’s a matter of taste.
That’s however a joke that home food is better. There are great home meals, and there are bad restaurants, sure. But the top is obviously restaurants. And not even just because they really know what they do, but it’s even way more difficult to get those kind of ingredients what they use. One time, one of my friends from one of the best restaurants from my home country (Hungary) left some beef loin from his restaurant in my fridge as gratitude. I made the best steak from it, that I’ve ever made. It didn’t matter how expensive meat I bought, or in which expensive meat shop. I tried different techniques, but no. I couldn’t reproduce it. Simply that kind of loin is not accessible for common people there.
> It has nothing to do with the food, nothing at all, it has to do with intimacy and care.
Right. So the act of cooking actually doesn't have much to do with it! Arguably, you are tying the act of making food to "intimacy and care" in a way that makes it feel to me like there's this big social pressure to feed people! There are a myriad of other ways to look after your humans.
I'm not from that culture particularly, but everyone needs to eat, and going to a nice restaurant can be a pain (e.g. transport) and be expensive as well. Having people into your home for a meal is a very good alignment of a lot of things at once; that's why cultures have been built on it.
Order some food, it doesn't even need to be from fancy restaurants. Low-end to cheap catering and delivery services (so not Uber Eats or such). You can prepare some appetizers at home if you really want some home made food.
Depending on where you order the food... people might not even realize you didn't cook it.
Slightly off topic, as we don't do this for guests, but one thing I do for cheaper takeout (which we have extremely rarely anyway) is order curry but cook rice at home. Although these days ready meals from some supermarkets (I'm in the UK) are pretty great, and you can get a half-decent curry for £3 or so, and again just cook your own rice.
Sharing meals is a cornerstone of human society. Nobody cares if you personally don't want to involve yourself, but the idea that it's the result of some social pressure is absurd. It is society or part thereof.
Honestly one of the most saddening comments I've read.
So why is it saddening to you? It's down to preference. Some people are natural feeders (and they are lovely people) but others aren't. The two coexist very peacefully.
You can feed your people because you enjoy it, me and my tribe of outliers can chill in other ways :)
FWIW: It's not like I'd ever let anyone go hungry!! Just that in my mind there's a big discrepancy between "fully preparing a home-cooked meal for several hours". If you're privileged to have the time, space, energy and knowledge to lovingly prepare big feasts for people, more power to you. Me and my cold-hearted mates will be content with, oftentimes, shoving some chips in the oven or frying a bag of frozen nasi goreng, or getting cheap takeaway to go with our beers ;)
But then why are we talking about having giant houses with huge dining tables? Invite as many people over as your living quarters can accommodate. Do whatever with them. Make whatever food. I agree with you that the value is not in the food but in the act and intention of making it.
I think this whole thread is depressing because it suggests you need a bunch of shit to be happy and have good relationships. But if you have good friends and relationships often you don't need all that shit. If you need a pickup once a year you probably have a friend you can borrow it from. Even better you can invite that friend to help you with the thing you need it for and help them with something else when they need it.
Enjoying it has nothing to do with it. It's better for you and better for taste even if you don't like it. I don't like brushing my teeth but I do it because it's better than not doing it and because I'm a functioning adult. I'm better at brushing than I was the first times I did it, and I'm also better at cooking than I was 20 years ago, because even if I don't enjoy it, I know I'll enjoy the flavor and the nutrition is good for me. This is basic "live your life" stuff.
Imagine lecturing people about saving the planet while defending going out to eat in restaurants or ordering all your meals.
There are many ways to life your life and thankfully in the modern day, you can live your entire life without cooking anything involved yet getting all the necessary nutrients plus enjoying delicious food.
It's just more expensive, so you need to afford it.
I'm intentionally skipping all the other soapboxing in the rest of the comment.
You can confirm that "probably" with 5 minutes of research and find out that the largest contributors to carbon emissions in eating are the production of the raw materials (which ingredients you use). Once that is controlled for, cooking method is the largest second factor (wood / coal / gas / electric). Once that's controlled for, going out to eat in a restaurant is worse than at home. The only communal eating that is more efficient is school / soviet canteen style eating, which is not what you were thinking about when you said restaurants.
Sadly, agreed. I love the idea of being self-sufficient and permaculture, but even myself as someone who grows vegetables on an allotment and batch-cooks nearly all my meals at home, I can't ignore the idea that, just as with agriculture, it's way more efficient to prepare food at scale than it is at the individual level -- unless we all shifted to just eating the food as raw as possible.
If we look at the full chains of:
- Equipment distribution (production and delivery of large domestic kitchen appliances)
- Energy distribution (residential delivery of electricity/gas needed to power kitchen appliances, and water)
- Space required in each home for a reasonably kitted out kitchen (more space to heat in winter, more materials used in building)
- Ingredients and materials distribution (including the production and packaging of intermediate food products made from raw products, since everyone's cooking with canned things, packaged things, cured meats, pastes, pasteurized things, grains, ...)
The restaurants, fast-food chains and ready-meal prep companies are able to operate on economies of scale that are vastly more efficient than the individualistic, nuclear-family domestic "you must cook home-made meals for your family, friends and guests" culture.
We've made eating out seem either:
- Decadent (cost)
- Unhealthy (take-out and fast-food)
But neither of those things need to be true.
The problem with scale is the storage aspect - preservatives we use to reduce spoilage etc., which arguably affect the healthiness of the food. "Just-in-time" distribution works well until it doesn't (see: COVID).
But I'd argue that the individual household probably spoils more ingredients than industrial production does - that just isn't evident; everyone has their little compost heaps or things go to landfill. Old ingredients go mouldy at the backs of cupboards, just as things run out their shelf life in supermarkets.
Maybe the raw-food vegans and paleo bros are on to something...
No problem, just charge your guests some carbon credits to offset for the meal you cooked for them. I even think there's an app there for you Dutch to easily request a transfer from friends and family.
It isn't about looking down on others. It is that in communities where the extra resource are spent on things like slightly better cars or houses eventually many of the local stores, restaurants or other places ends up closing.
Many on Hacker News have some sort of ambition. To create a startup, a side business, an open source project or have a hobby, be more knowledgeable or become better programmer. In theory that can happen having a home office and extra space in the garage. In reality it often doesn't because making any greater strides often requires coming together with others forming connections, exchanging information and sharing resource.
Yes, I can learn to cook for example Chinese food. But that isn't the same as having a good food industry with restaurants, entertainment, staff, importers and whatever else that actually enable a numbers of different experiences for many people.
Eventually many tend to realize that it isn't that great. But then they often end up blaming the government, the taxes, major cities, lack of investment or support, or anything other than the reality that they didn't invest in their local community neither through taxes for services or with their own income. But instead there are millions of dollars standing around in things like more expensive cars.
It isn't like I don't understand why someone would want those thing. I just don't think many who do want those things understand that to have a decent career many of their kids are going to have move somewhere where there are good education, successful companies, major airports or other resources. And then, while they get some use of their guest room, won't see them much overall.
There's got to be some name for the "tool fallacy". I like to buy tools. I like to have the capability to cut wood in certain ways. Yet I end up very rarely doing that.
I would like to have a personal garage workshop space. I can think about all the things I would build. I would like to be a person that builds things. But in reality, if I had it, I'd probably still be just sitting browsing Hacker News. It's just way easier than to actually get up and start doing something.
I've realized something similar with sports. I could go running any time, but I don't. I could buy some equipment that I rarely use. But if I sign up for some scheduled weekly team sport, and some friends are also going, it's much easier to keep the routine happening. Or if I do some sport together with my spouse.
The same happens with music. I could play and train on my own, and I do some. But it's really with a band and a commitment to an upcoming performance or upcoming recording session that I start more purposefully doing stuff, both on my own and in the rehearsals.
Computers, content and social networks and the pandemic have provided us opportunities to do cool stuff online and share with and learn from others, but I think we have atrophied some physical social aspects there. We need more electronics clubs or garage meetups or whatever method to do something as a group and share the motivation burden or get a bit of help etc.
The really boring answer is that if we could just go out and run we would and it wouldn't be anything extra. But that often isn't how the world looks. Just like how most of the projects we can do by ourselves in a home office have already been done so they don't lead to much.
It is when we do something with others that it gets better than average and the result in the form of being enjoyable or interesting is more than the effort of doing it. If we already don't have a lot of time, energy and motivation running isn't giving us enough to make it worth it. And often we don't because of other things or boredom.
Restaurant spending is one of the most wasteful sources of spending in America. If you sink money into a car you don't need, at least it has some sort of utility and ongoing (rapidly depreciating) value. Restaurants charge a huge markup and provide zero ongoing utility.
I personally hate to see the millions of dollars wasted on restaurant-cooked food, most of which is not good for you and a lot of it not even good. We would all be better off environmentally, socially, and financially if we returned to the earlier status quo of people cooking most of their own food. "Local communities" still thrived when there were 10% the restaurants there are today. In fact, they were much stronger. Of course, there is nothing wrong with the rare night out as a luxury. But the idea that not eating at restaurants enough is the source of some kind of decline is exactly backwards. Your insight that about the criticality of local connections is critical is true, but it has nothing to do with the number of local restaurants, and they have if anything hindered it rather than helped it. Inviting people over for dinner is an activity that has declined precipitously and forms much deeper connections than going out to eat and patronizing someone's (often vanity) business.
> I think nobody in my country would say going out to eat is better than eating at home.
You haven't eaten at a 2 or 3 star restaurant then. They use ingredients you don't have access too, using techniques you can't use at home and pair them with wines or juices you haven't heard about.
However good you think your home cooking is (I think I'm a fairly good cook), you don't come to the knees of a chef with such a restaurant.
Yes, they are not cheap. But neither is buying a bigger house.
And if it's about getting together, who cooked the food doesn't matter. Or even get together without food, that works too.
... I've eaten at enough Michelin-starred restaurants in my life that if you summed them it'd be well over 200. I'm not a stranger to fine dining.
... and I still want to host people at my house and cook for them?
Fine dining for you may be a strictly superior replacement to home cooking (or alternatively: home cooking is what you do when you cannot have fine dining instead) - but many of us don't see it that way. They are complementary.
Yeah, my cooking isn't Thomas Keller... but that's not actually what it's about? In the same way I'm not Chris Nolan but yet I want to take video at family events?
And if I can say so: seeing fine dining as a strictly superior replacement of home cooking is a regretful way to view the world.
It is very curious for me that in a lot of comments there is no allowance for even a possibility that there is more than a single metric of “betterness” for different people and different occasions.
What these “unnecessary extras” or in the contrary “smaller footprint” give is the increased freedom of choice for that particular individual’s situation.
There is no free lunch - every benefit comes with its set of drawbacks. Extra rooms need furnishing and taking care of, cars need maintenance and parking etc.
Different people put different multipliers for each of them.
And this is fine, by the standards of a modern western society.
Living in NYC I used to think this way. Why would anyone want to live anywhere else, from street food in Queens, Le Bernardin, Omakase only menus ...etc.
The 3 star restaurants get old very fast. too expensive, way too long to eat. Very pretentious. As I got older I came to value home cooking many times higher than any restaurant that NYC can offer.
I highly suggest people try these places to understand what is possible with food, but don't value them any higher.
I never said that you should prefer 3 star restaurant. I was responding to the specific claim that home cooked meals are always better than eating out.
If you want a small house and flying around to vacations, you can do it without looking down on who decides for another trade-off.