Home Cooking

Slate says we should stop idealizing and this guy responds.

I've eaten a lot of meals -- many home cooked and many takeout. My observation is that for a larger group (ie family) it is more significantly more cost effective and healthier to make food. When living as an individual, the cost is only marginally more to purchase reasonable takeout and the effort required to cook a balanced meal for 1 is similar to cooking a balanced meal for 4. Thus, home cooking makes more sense the larger the family. Even with 2 people, home cooking is significantly cheaper and healthier and sort of fun, especially when you incorporate good wine and cocktails, which are outrageously overpriced when going out, (beer less so).

I like some of the points the guy makes about modern feminism:

It turns out that this argument has very little to do with women or feminism—or cooking, for that matter. Instead, it reveals a deeper premise of the left: a hatred of effort. 

It’s actually a diatribe against ideals, against striving, against ambition. This is a huge theme of feminism, the idea of being oppressed by “expectations” about all of the things you are supposed to do in life. Yet feminism is just being used as a mask for the real complaint. It’s a way of giving a respectable cover for something that sounds like insufferable whining if you say it on its own. 

The basic fact is that everything worthwhile requires work and effort. Getting a job, keeping a job, buying a home, maintaining a home, getting married and staying married, having kids. Everything.