Silicon Valley Redneck

Home ec

Wikipedia sez:

The term economics comes from the Ancient Greek οἰκονομία (oikonomia, "management of a household, administration") from οἶκος (oikos, "house") and νόμος (nomos, "custom" or "law"), hence "rules of the house(hold)".

Brigid has a nice post on the cost of real food prepared at home vs. "cheap" fast food.

Subject came up recently, here.  I've been making the occasional medium-sized semi-gourmet pizza, and Joy inquired about the cost of ingredients.  Hm.  Well... for vague guesstimates... crust costs maybe a quarter, probably quite a bit less.  Sauce, likewise.  Cheese, if it's mostly bulk mozzarella (i.e., high-protein hot-melt glue) with a little good stuff for flavor, something under $1.  Toppings, anywhere from a quarter to a buck and a half.

So, homemade pizza, putting no value on one's own labor, runs maybe $1.75 to $3.00 for a medium (serves one ravenous person, or two with moderate appetites), plus the cost of running the oven up to volcano heat, and wear & tear on the oven and the pizza stone.

Compare the price at your local pizza parlor, where you're paying for hired labor (and the associated non-wage overhead), rent on the business premises, depreciation on commercial cooking equipment, licensing, inspections, and presumably some profit for the owner (also the shareholders if it's a corporation, and figure in franchise fees if it's a chain).  Oh, and advertising.

This is particularly bad in high-overhead areas like Silicon Valley, but even in areas with more reasonable costs of doing business, fixing your own food is a lot cheaper than buying it prepared... unless you're bad at grocery shopping, or you could be using that food-prep time to earn money.

Hey, if cooking takes time away from your $50/hour job, by all means buy your food in ready-to-eat form and take advantage of the specialization of labor.  But if you have more time than money?  Learn to shop for ingredients, and to transform ingredients into meals.

It's amazing what you can do with rice, lentils, and some spices and such.

And remember: prior to the Industrial Revolution, the household was the basic unit of production.

In the latest news of medical science...

Found here, via Insty:

To translate this last study into teaspoons: the finding was that anything between 1-1/2 and 3 tsp of salt per day is just fine, and there were adverse effects from eating more than that or less than that. Most Americans who are not consciously restricting salt fall in this range (1-1/2 to 3 tsp). People who are on low-salt diets for medical reasons are getting as little as 1/2 tsp, and they’re well into the range where dearth of salt is harming them. The worst impact of low salt is on insulin sensitivity. Loss of insulin sensitivity is a big risk factor for all the diseases of old age.

Um.

I've been on a de facto low-salt diet since college, when I started doing my own grocery shopping and, for example, took to buying unsalted butter because my buttered toast was coming out too salty for my taste.

I don't eat much processed food, preferring to buy ingredients and do my own cooking.

So let's have a look at some labels, shall we?

Looks like, in warm weather, I get around 500mg of sodium (mumble mumble... about 1.3 grams of salt, roughly 1/4 tsp) from milk.

I buy and use salt.  This here canister says: serving size 1/4 tsp (1.5g); servings per container 491.  I'd normally go through such a container every couple of years... with a fair bit of it used for non-food purposes. So, call it about a pinch (1/8 tsp, 0.75g) per day, maybe.

So, absent the occasional salty snack, I'm way down there in salt consumption.  If this latest news is right, I'm perhaps not getting enough... and, yes, I've been having loss-of-insulin-sensitivity issues for some time now.

Maybe not getting as much iodide as I should, either.

Oh, and if I drink water instead of milk I tend to get a strange, electrolytes-out-of-whack feeling.  Which, now as I think of it, could be sodium-related.

It probably wouldn't hurt to start keeping lightly-salted nuts at my desk again.  Or Sun Chips.  Just gotta keep an eye on that blood pressure, just in case added salt really does aggravate it.