When basic needs become a luxury

This is prompted by a post on tumblr that read:

fucked up how cooking and baking from scratch is viewed as a luxury…..like baking a loaf of bread or whatever is seen as something that only people with money/time can do. I’m not sure why capitalism decided to sell us the idea that we can’t make our own damn food bc it’s a special expensive thing that’s exclusive to wealthy retirees but it’s stupid as hell and it makes me angry [user: @grossrabbit] 

The comments that followed were largely in agreement and it became a post of sharing people's "easy" and "quick" bread recipes with comments about how they couldn't believe that anybody would still buy bread. There was a smug implication that those who make their own bread were smarter for having figured this out and for "beating the system" whilst those who did not cook from scratch were somehow foolish, easily duped, lazy or just not trying hard enough. Because obviously, when it was so easy to make bread from scratch with one of these simple recipes why isn't everybody doing it. 

Before I continue I should point out that I absolutely love cooking. I like cooking from scratch, using fresh and basic ingredients. I even like baking, especially breads. Additionally, by and large I do think that cooking is easier than a lot of people believe and do try and encourage people to give it a go. However, we shouldn't be scratching our heads that it is "viewed as a luxury". That's not the problem. The problem is that for a lot of people in the UK and the US this type of cooking is a luxury and one they don't have access to. The question we need to be asking is "how has something as simple as cooking from base ingredients become a luxury in our society?"

Those of you familiar with my blog and political beliefs may have an inkling as to what I believe is the answer to this question. But before I get into the specifics I want to try and explain to you why the act of cooking from scratch and baking your own bread is a luxury for a vast number of people in our culture. Please keep in mind that I am in the UK and my experiences are based on life in the UK but I have tried to be conscientious of challenges that people may face elsewhere, especially in the US. 

The actual obstacles

Cooking and baking from scratch requires - access to fresh ingredients; time; space.

If you are working long shifts, multiple jobs, studying and working, working and doing child care, working and a carer for an adult you simply don’t have time to bake and cook from scratch regularly. Or you might but you would have no time for anything else like sitting and resting, or enjoying a hobby or activity. If it is something you only get the time to do occasionally then it becomes a luxury.

If you have a disability you may not be physically able to cook from scratch regularly - this is often wrapped up in “time” because it relates to having the time to cook when you are physically capable of doing so. Chronic health conditions or disabilities that limit your ability to do an activity essentially act as a time suck that take time away from you being able to do something. The time and ability to cook becomes a luxury.

Access to fresh or basic ingredients is a difficult one. This is often a balance of time and money. Ingredients that you have easy access to from your local grocery store may be limited. Some base ingredients can be affordable, but others may not be. The alternative is going to stores further away or multiple stores to pick up the ingredients you need. This takes time to do, (there is also the added fuel or public transport costs). This issue can be compounded by health limitations that mean travelling further to go to the shop that sells the thing or going to the big busy market is simply not possible. For people who are limited by resources, budget, time or location, access to suitable ingredients is a luxury.

Then there is access to the things you need to cook. You may be able to find some items cheaply in charity shops but it’s a bit hit and miss and you need the time to be able to wait around for those items to appear or to visit a number of shops to see if they have them in. Or you need to be able to buy brand new. Again it’s a balance of time and money to make everything from pans to spatulas to mixing bowls available (and I’m not even considering electrical items or actual stoves here). Access to that equipment can be a luxury.

Poorer people who live in small homes may have tiny kitchens which they struggle to actually cook in. They may not have space to store a full set of pans or other items, they may not have a stove or working oven. They may only have a tiny fridge and no freezer if at all. Additionally if you are in a house share situation or even if you have a family in a small home you can’t take up a lot of time and space using kitchen facilities because other people need that space too. Having regular, adequate space and facilities to cook from scratch is a luxury.

The real issues

Yes, there are people who manage to cook great things from scratch on a tiny budget or in small kitchens and so on but usually these are people who have other privileges i.e. the person on a tiny budget may work from home and have the flexible time to put the effort in. Additionally these people usually enjoy the process so are getting downtime or R&R from it as well as actual food - there is added value tot he process). I have a friend who has a tiny kitchen but loves cooking and freelances as a caterer - it is amazing how much she has fit into a tiny space and how she has learned to use it, but for her it's not just about getting a basic plate of food on the plate in front of her. There is added value and intensive (her enjoyment and proficiency as a cook) in figuring out how to make the tiny space work.  

When there is an additional benefit to the effort needed i.e. it’s not just about sustenance it’s also about quality time spent, that is motivating factor. We can’t chastise people who don’t get that pleasure and for whom cooking is a chore if they want to spend less time doing and maybe more time doing something they like like reading a book, watching TV or just snoozing.

We certainly shouldn’t chastise people who are already extremely limited on time to not want to spend all their free time, space or money on cooking.

The reality is that in a lot of modern hyper capitalist societies like the USA and the UK, cooking from scratch is a luxury for a lot of people.

It shouldn’t be, but it is.

Chastising people and trying to jolly them along with “helpful” advice about this great bread recipe you have doesn’t help. It doesn’t actually solve any of the factors that is making it a luxury.

All it ends up doing is shaming people who are not able to cook from scratch due to their circumstances. It can also have the effect of trying to make people feel guilty for not trying enough. It essentially says “if you wanted to you could do this. If you wanted to you could spend literally all your “free” time, money and effort cooking, but you don’t want to. You just aren’t trying hard enough.” and let me tell you that is toxic. That is the sort of toxic rhetoric that is spouted at poor and disabled folk all the time.

It’s similar to the people who look at people like Jack Monroe of Cooking on a Bootstrap fame and say “why are the poor people complaining, if they just tried hard enough they could eat fine. If they wanted to they’d have plenty of money for food.”. While completely missing the message that cook books on “how to stretch £5 to feed two people for a week” shouldn’t even have to exist. Jack produced their initial blog posts and recipes out of sheer desperation.

In our society cooking from scratch is for a lot of people a luxury.

The issue is not people being stupid, or not trying enough.

The answer is not to be smug about your bread or to make blog articles about “5 hacks to making soup”. 

It is not viewed as a luxury. It is a luxury: and that's wrong

The answer is to challenge a society and social structure that has made the very basics of living - preparing food to eat - into a luxury activity. We should be asking why people have to work so many hours each day that putting a ready meal in the microwave is preferable (or the only option) instead of cooking. We should be asking why market forces have made it so that some basic ingredients cost more than pre-prepared ingredients, why these aren’t widely available and why companies are allowed to charge premium prices for limited stock. 

Rather than smugly talking about your sourdough starter and overnight loaf, we whould be campaigning for a Universal Basic Income.

We should be looking at why housing is an ongoing issue, why people are forced into tiny houses, house shares (not happy communes) and sub par housing that doesn’t have proper cooking facilities. We should be asking why private rents have sky rocketed while social housing has been more than decimated and why there are tax breaks to housing developers that push up the cost of buying or renting but not to those who wish to renovate existing housing stock to make it suitable accommodation.

Rather than rapping people on the knuckles for buying a jar of pasta sauce instead of fresh tomatoes, we should be petitioning MPs for tighter control of the rental market and better rights for tenants.

We should be asking we social care and support for disabled people and their carers is so poor that many disabled people end up with malnourishment because they simply can’t afford food, the facilities to cook it or have the support they need in order to feed themselves.

This is not a case of “ho ho, if only those plebs knew how to make this simple loaf!”. This is a case of “why the hell do we continue to support an economic system that makes cooking from scratch a luxury?”

In case it wasn't clear, it's capitalism. Capitalism is the reason cooking from scratch is a luxury.



Like what you've read and want to show your support? You can leave me a tip 

Sunday Short - People>Profit

This post first appeared on Tumblr on Thursday 12th of April [content warning for some indirect racism and colonialism]

[Three screen grabs of a tumblr comment thread. transcripts below]

First picture:

[Jennykilledmyfamily] To my understanding sweatshops are part of the industrial development process of a developing country. like how the united states had child labour and (pretty much) sweatshops during the industrial revolution. so it's awful in the short term but creates benefits in the long term.

[marxistbarbie] what kind of late stage capitalist dystopia are you on to say something like this!

[Jennykilledmyfamily] The kind that puts food on my plate every day and night so I don't have to stand in line for a loaf of bread my whole life

[Sophrosynic] ew

[sophrosynic] TFW you try to defend capitalism but accidentally admit that capitalism is a system that literally cannot function without exploiting people in the most morally reprehensible way possible just so that a small group of people don't have to stand in a bread line

[tomatomutato] So what would people in China be doing if we got rid of sweatshops? Would they all become software developers? They'd likely be doing subsistence farming. They wouldn't live in poverty like they do now, true but they'd starve to death.

I say this as somebody who is not in favour of the status quo with 80% of wealth earned going to the top 1%. I've just heard some arguments against it that I hadn't considered before.

second picture:

[justsomeantifas] congratulations on missing the point, big time.

[arcaneinteractions] Wait how the fuck did you get from "subsistence farming" to "starving to death"? Like, China prior to the entry of the agents of capitalism wasn't exactly some barren hellscape waiting for western intervention to save its starving people.

[Tomatomutato] "Wait how the fuck did you get from "subsistence farming" to "starving to death"? " Pretty easily, actually. If you are making just enough to feed you and your family you are pretty much screwed if anyone gets sick or so there's a dry season and you can't farm.

[arcaneinteractions] aw man i am going to knock your socks off by inventing the grain silo

[Tomatomutato] So that implies that you are growing enough to have excess to store it. Which is great if that's the case but that's a different scenario. I don't want to mince words here but what exactly is it you're saying should happen? Hypothetically, we shut down all factories that could be described as a sweatshop, what happens next?

Are there any other jobs the citizens could do to make a living? Is farming and growing your own food and building your own grain silo etc something you are saying should actually happen in China or are you just being rhetorical? 

Because many of the factory workers are people who left the countryside to move into the city because of extreme poverty. If farming was viable and preferable to working in a sweatshop more people would do it.

[justsomeantifas] at first I thought this was funny then i just got sad because I honestly can't imagine being this unimaginative or this misinformed or this resistant to actually learning shit. lol

[geekycubil] Where does @tomatomutato think all the people currently working in factories are getting their food from? More people working in factories means fewer people working on farms. Since the factory workers aren't currently starving according to tomatomutato this means the reduced number of farmers are already producing enough food for them. If these people suddenly stopped working in factories the food supply wouldn't be affected. If they all started farming, all other things being equal, the food supply would reasonably be expected to go up. It's a myth that increasing safety decreases jobs, in general, but let's pick something like reasonable overtime rules. Wouldn't reducing the number of hours a given person works create more jobs since more jobs would be needed to reach the same number of labor-hours?

Third picture

[anfem-cripplepunk] I can't believe people are seriously justifying slave and child labour and sweat-shops. People in Asia don't deserve to suffer for "first world/developed" and Western countries and their comfort, privilege and capitalism. 

So much racist, colonialist, imperialist, nationalist, xenomisic, ableist and classist bullshit wrapped up together in a nice pile of shit and tied with a bow.

Goddess fuck, we shouldn't need to debate the economics when human lives are at stake. People >profits.

And when those of y'all are busy defending capitalism no matter the cost don't suddenly pretend like you care about the plight of Chinese people, and how they'd deal with the aftermath of ending the aforementioned three [slave and child labour and sweatshops]. You're really jsut concerned with how we would deal with the aftermath.

My contribution:

[Skeletonmug] plus nobody is saying just close down those factories. What most people are saying is “hey why not pay a fucking living wage to people and regulate their working conditions.” they can keep their jobs if they want to but they don’t have to be working in dangerous conditions and earning next to nothing.

And before you say it that doesn’t mean that prices of products have o go up which will hurt other poor working people who need to buy that stuff. If they really want to, if they have an ounce of actual ethics, companies can absorb all that extra cost of production and just have a smaller profit margin. Don’t forget profit comes after wages and overheads, it’s litterally just numbers on a page. They don’t need super high profits for anything other than supporting a capitalist economy that places more value on profit than on human welfare.

And if the cost of products go up then here’s an idea for you, how about ... how about those companies that are paying their hard working staff so little that a small price increase makes buying things prohibitive ... how about hey give their staff a pay increase too. And where would the money for that come from? you guessed it, that fucking useless profit margin, or the equally fucking useless CEO bonuses and pay that is often 800% what their workers get. Maybe if they can go manage to live on less than £1000000 a year then some of their staff can live on more than £13000 and not be in poverty. Wouldn’t that be nice.

See how we’ve managed to reduce sweatshops and poverty and dangerous working practices? It was that easy. And that’s still working in a capitalist structure, that still abiding by he rules of business ownership and profit and wages material consumption and CEOs making big salaries.

Now me personally I’d go a hell of a lot further than that and mandate a universal basic income for people so that they aren’t forced into working in horrendous conditions and have the power to be able to demand better working conditions because they know they won’t starve. But you know, that’s just me.

also for the love of kittens can we please stop with this othering of an entire continent (Asia) and country (China) and stop treating them like some parochial slightly stupid cousins. There are actually some super developed economies in Asia as well as incredibly complex socioeconomic and political histories which make it not a straightforward issue and makes comparison to countries like the USA meaningless. Also we need to stop thinking that terrible working conditions and virtual slave labour only happen in "foreign places" it happens in the US and the UK and probably other "developed" countries too.

If you like what I do you can support me by buying me a Ko-Fi