Headline in two years: Gen Z’ers are splurging on food instead of giving their money to the rich.
“GenZ struggling to survive in the lower levels of MegaCity5. Their blood is too low in iron to keep the immortal rich alive.”
GenZ not eating nutritious meals is the leading cause of rejection for Soylent processing.
Yeah that might be the most accurate to the blaming tone these kinds of articles write with and to what they will take from us.
Just need to jazz it up with some homemade slang to hide the sad bits and the immortal rich part.
“GenZ struggling in well stocked MegaCity5; “Fecal-de-Cal” diet blamed for lack of macro nutrients during their mandatory weekly Blood-Up donations.”
Gen Z and millennials are splurging on breathing air.
literally, the conservative culture of boot licking the billionaires never ceases to amaze me
I’m hungry. When do we eat?
"Splurging“ on the absolute cheapest most preservative laiden meat available, cheapeer than fucking Spam, and Gut healthy jucis because they can’t afford to go to a doctor.
Fucking ghouls.
Bitch, it is cheaper to buy the fully cooked rotisserie chicken at the grocery store than the UNCOOKED WHOLE CHICKEN.
Don’t fucking tell me how to math, you assholes made corporations people, so I think we have very different ideas of what is important in this world.
because they use shitty frozen chickens and they cook them like 100 at a time and they only taste great because they are loaded roasted with chemicals/cheap ingredients. it’s processed food, so it’s cheap. the chickens use at the grocery store for roasting and like 5 bucks and then but 5 cents of crap on them and sell them for 10 bucks. it’s also way more efficient to mass produce things than do them one at a time.
making your own chicken is more expensive because you’re getting higher quality and fresher product and using highly quality ingredients. a decent whole 4lb whole chicken for me is 10-15 bucks, (20+ if you want a organic free range pasture bird) and I’m adding nice salt, nice olive oil, and fresh spices/citrus etc.
the home made bird is far healthier. but not as tasty because it’s not loaded with crap.
To be fair, avocado toast is an actual scam and can be made home for cheap, while rotisserie chicken is legitimately expensive rn no matter how you get it.
Right but the discussion isn’t if it is healthier, it is what is cheapest. If low income families lack the equipment or knowledge to cook a good tasting whole bird, rotisserie is a good priced option. The fact that the news outlet is calling that splurging is wild.
cheapest here and now comes at a long term cost.
these chickens are a loss leader in order to get people to hooked on shitty premade food that is profitable for the stores so they never learn to cook better food.
i grew up poor. it was splurging for us to buy this stuff. our regular food was frozen and canned. even uncooked fresh food was a luxury for us.
Spend whole life in cage or being trampled by your peers
get fed industrial byproducts from other industries
Told entire life’s purpose is to be killed and eaten by your captors
Get called shitty.
Edit to add:
Even though you were born into this system and have zero agency, it’s still somehow your fault because TubularTittyFrog has had some bad coworkers.
i’ve had co-workers who feel the same way. kept fucking up at work, not showing up on time, and blaming everyone else for being mean to them. they were shitty people and work is much better without them around. being around competent people who take pride in their work and themselves is a joy.
edit: it’s not a system dude. It’s the choices you make. if you’ve made choices to make yourself a caged chicken and you hate it, you’ve nobody to blame but yourself. chickens don’t have existential angst.
You’ve been reported. You seem to be arguing a completely different argument and lightly trolling. This is a warning or I’m going to give you a temp ban.
Wait are you telling me a chicken dinner and juice is more attainable than a home?? Could that be why?
There’s a reason young people are travelling and using their savings on entertainment, we know we will never own. Not until we take housing by force, so what’s the point of saving? I can’t even save enough to keep up with interest. So yeah when I’m old I’ll be poor and the government will have to deal with me
Splurging on the cheapest animal protein… Wowee, really living it up in 2026!
I make black bean based veggie patties; not because I’m a vegetarian, but because a can of black beans is cheap. I call them struggle burgers. I can’t wait to be demonized for buying fucking beans. Fuck this timeline.
Check out Daddy Warbucks over here with his canned beans! Dried beans are even cheaper.
That lucky bastard! Lucky, lucky, lucky bastard.
I DREAM of the day I can revel in canned beans! No soaking! No spices! No massive pot!
lucky, lucky, lucky bastard
You are correct, they are. Wet beans saves me time from having to soak them. Lentils are they only ones I buy dry because they cook fast without soaking.
Every time I try soaking dry beans I forget about them and they get gross.
I never bother soaking em. Pressure cooker (instant pot) does the job. I don’t throw away the liquid either, that’s good vitamins. Just do the beans most of the way in stock and spices, throw in rice and quinoa, close it up and cook it the rest of the way. Super easy.
Beans were once seen as poverty food. In the great depression at least. They were the Ramen noodles of that era.
Protein, plus fiber, plus complex carbohydrates. What’s not to love? Plus it makes a smaller environmental impact compared to farming poultry or larger animals. It was mind blowing to hear rags like the WSJ demonize the younger generation for eating avocado toast; it’s a fucking cheap meal. Avocados were like $1 a pop and are a good source of fiber and health fat. I can’t wait for rags like the WSJ to start publishing articles like, “How dare the poors waste money on eating!”
They are great. I was going to make a bean stew yesterday but this article made me go buy a roast chicken just to spite them. Beans are for tonight!
Yeah, avocados imported into Canada are expensive but if they grow near you I can see them being stupid cheap.
Newspaper: Americans Eat Too Much Ultra processed food.
Same Newspaper: Look at these little shits splurging on veggies and chicken.
If you saved that $5 instead of wasting it on food every day, then in 275 years you could afford the average house!
Rotisserie chicken now $7.99 at the grocery stores around here. They also roast them breast-down which makes the white meat greasy as hell, and hard to carve. I just buy a big thing of chicken strips, cook them at the beginning of the week, and use them for protein in every meal throughout the week. All my meals are based around this now.
“Rotisserie” derives from “rotate”, as in the chicken is constantly being rotated as it’s cooked. If it’s being roasted breast-down (or breast-up, or any other consistent breast direction) then it’s not rotisserie.
Sorry I should say it’s packaged breast-down, so the breast are compacted hard and full of grease by the time you get it. Nasty way to do it.
Yes. These are sold more cheaply now because it’s a loss leader and they are pale imitation of the true product that they represent. They loaded with extra fat and salt, which is why people love them. Like they are literally injected with a solution of fat, salt, and chemical agents to tenderize the meat. It’s the same as McDonalds, but people are under the delusion it is ‘healthy’ and ‘natural’ or something. It’s processed food make for mass consumption at lowest possible cost.
A legit rotisserie chicken is 2-4x that cost and would not taste nearly as good because of the lack of fat and salt.
“Splurging” on one of the most prolific loss leaders in grocery is certainly one way to say it. We’re buying them because it’s the cheapest way to eat
Up next: Gen Z splurging on costco hotdogs and mi goreng instant noodles.
GenZ complains about having so much debt and not enough income but they keep buying food! How can they expect to succeed when they waste their money so frivolously?!
… That’s what this headline reads like to me. How dare you buy food with the money you should be spending on the interest you owe to the owners of the country.
So we are not supposed to …eat?
The rich don’t understand the purpose of food, having never missed a meal in their lives.
Ending your sentence after “rich” would have been good enough to answer the question.
Reading the actual article, the lunacy and delusion is real. You don’t even get three paragraphs in and they’re using a sales engineer’s thoughts to represent young people as a whole.
The wall street journal aren’t good journalists.
They cater towards rich people and as such:
- Grant a sense of superiority through highlighting financial disparity
- Portray news in terms of how they would affect rich people, like tax breaks being good for the economy (the economy being billionaires for wsj)
Nothing they write is objective
They’re not journalists at all.
I really wish there’s an alternative to the Wall Street Journal, but from the perspective of the proletariat.
It’s just a picture of a guillotine.
It’s kind of wild how everyday groceries get framed as luxuries. Sometimes people are just trying to eat something convenient and affordable, not make a statement about their finances.
ready to eat hot food is a luxury. it’s not groceries. groceries is stuff you have to prep and cook. if you want stuff you don’t have to prep, or cook, it’s generally going to cost you more, in either value or quality.
it’s just that whole foods and other groceries normalized the concept of hot ready to eat meals being served in grocery stores. that was never a thing 20+ years ago. when i was a kid they had a tiny hot bar, and it was shitty. now my local whole foods 1/4 of the store is devoted to this type of product. and it’s hugely profitable because people value convenience.
is international travel a luxury or a necessity? where I live, people think it’s the latter and if you aren’t traveling multiple times per year, they think you are living in poverty. that is regardless of finances and many people are going into debt to travel because they know it’s not socially acceptable to not travel. i know 28 year olds making 30K a year who are dropping 5-10K a year traveling.
people’s frames of reference for what a ‘necessity’ in 2026 is not exactly objective.
Ready to eat hot food that is cheaper than the ingredients to make it, is not a luxury.
Especially if it can be refrigerated and made to last for over a week, used to supplement other foods such like chicken quesadillas, chicken soup, broth and chicken salad.
Having to prep and cook is such a narrow minded way to look at things, and a way to look down at what people do to survive.
Does the fact that I can just bite into a tomato and eat it without preparation or cooking make it not a grocery? Hell, I can even do that with oatmeal if I’m down on protein and fiber.
Exactly. Additionally a lot of low income families lack the knowledge of how to properly prepare a chicken, or the equipment to do it well. When the difference is 20¢ a pound for an already seasoned and prepared bird its not really luxury prices. Luxury is like some $50 chicken wrapped in gold bullshit topped with exotic flower pistols.
These aren’t properly prepared chickens. They are McChickens. They are fast food that is full of artificial crap to make it taste good.
Low income people eat a lot of fast food because it’s an affordable luxury for them. That doesn’t mean it’s not a luxury, or that it’s a good choice to make a regular part of your diet. Especially due to the long affects.
One of the first things you figure out when you get out of being poor is that paying more for food is not a luxury, it’s a necessity for a higher quality of life overall. I got this lesson in college, which was the first time it was regularly available to me.
when I was 14 years old and eating shitty food everyday, I thought healthy food was ‘gross’ and ‘crazy expensive’. I was wrong. I was just poor and trapped in a poor person’s mindset and had no idea about long term costs because i was consumed with getting things as quickly as possible for as cheap as possible.
You keep going on and on aggrandizing your own very limited experience. “When I was young… when I was poor… when I was in college… after I wasn’t poor”. Do you hear yourself?
This might come as a shock, but not every low income person has the same opportunities you did or the same resources. Just because you found a path out doesn’t give you license to oversimplify the many situational nuances that come with being poor, nor did it give you some special knowledge to lead you to think you’ve somehow solved poverty.
I’m glad you’ve bettered your financial circumstances, but you seem to have lost something else important along the way.
I grew up in a poor community and watched lots of people throw their lives away. They had just as much opportunity as I did, oftentimes, they had more than I did.
Being poor sucks, but nobody is coming to save poor people. They have to save themselves. That’s how it’s always been and how it will always be. Thinking that someday someone will come lift you out of poverty is the most surefire way to stay in it forever.
Call it self-aggrandizing if you want, but the reality of the world is harsh. And yeah it sucks, because the funny thing about working your way out of being poor is that poor people hate and resent you for it and start blaming you for their problems and demanding that you owe. I remember when I got my first job out of college and my old high school friends working minimum wage jobs at home started asking me for money and calling me a selfish greedy asshole for not giving it to them… the same one who dropped out of college because it was ‘too hard’.
They might just hate self righteous dickheads with no empathy. From the context I have it’s impossible to tell.
I agree that a rotisserie is closer to fast food, but I was saying most low income people are lacking any food education to make a properly prepared chicken. Most low income prople who are suffering the effects of dollars a day making a difference also lack the education of the why, where, and how they can prepare equivalent priced meals that are better for them. To some this is all they know.
I also got a lesson in college, a privalidge that you and I were able to afford that some prople genuinely never got the opportunity, and those people are the ones truly suffering from the effect of “luxury” rotisseries.
I know that. I have had partners and friends who were like this. Just because someone is all that you know, doesn’t mean isn’t a self-defeating self-impoverishing cycle of choices.
Just because a choice is easy and convenient and seemingly cheap doesn’t make it a good choice. There are other choices, even if you don’t know they exist. Especially with the internet in everyone’s pocket. What is stopping someone from just looking up a recipe?
I think you misunderstand the general state of people suffering from the effects of companies forcing this upon us. For you and I it is as simple as look up a recipe and do it, some people truly do not know. They don’t know to look for something else. They dont know if something is unhealthy.
You’re a troll. Go away.
These aren’t properly prepared chickens. They are McChickens. They are fast food that is full of artificial crap to make it taste good.
I literally used to make these. It was my fucking job to make them. They are literally just the whole chickens sold in the deli, the package removed, seasoned with a mixture of things like paprika, garlic salt, pepper, cumin, etc, rubbed down by a worker, and stuck into a rotisserie heater.
That’s it. That is literally it. They’re not manufactured any different. You could make the same thing at home for twice the cost since the cooked chickens are cheaper than the raw chickens. There is nothing devious or sinister behind the scenes. There are no extra hormones or microchips stuck into them. I was asked to go grab X amount of chickens from the shelf, season them, cook them, then put them in their containers and put them on display.
Your ability to make a mountain out of a grain of sand needs to be studied for how unhinged some human beings are.
Again, you worked for Hannaford. That’s a higher quality more expensive store. You worked for one store under one process, YEARS ago no doubt.
Practices change. Food science changes. etc. It’s not sinister, it’s business. It’s objectively the fact that store bought chickens from Coscto and the like are full of fillers.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/06/opinion/sunday/costco-chicken-animal-welfare.html
Again, you worked for Hannaford. That’s a higher quality more expensive store. You worked for one store under one process, YEARS ago no doubt.
I did? That’s news to me. Can’t say I’ve ever heard of them before. I worked for fucking Wal Mart in a town of 3,000 people in rural Ontario. Also you said earlier in this thread that YEARS ago no one made rotisserie cooked chicken, so which one is it?
Your lies are starting to get exposed.
So it’s clearly obvious you’re a troll, an idiot, or just trying to shit on people struggling just to make it to tomorrow just so your pathetic emptiness has someone to look down on so you can feel better about how utterly shit your own life is. And if the latter is true, I don’t feel sorry for you.
you can eat however you want.
however engaging in poverty finance is a way to keep yourself in poverty as it prevents you from developing smarter and healthier behaviors around food and persisting in myths and thought patterns that are objectively unhealthy and defeating.
I know this from personal experience. cheap ready to eat food is awful for you and long term does way more damage to your health and fiances than learning to cook healthy food at home. cooking for yourself is objectively healthier as you get to control what goes into your food.
but yeah if you are narrow terms of gratification and raw cost, why not just grind up the chickens into hot protein paste and let the poors eat that? or perhaps we think there is more to life than calories and macronutrients?
since when was 3-4 meals of tasty protein for under $10 considered a luxury?
because it’s premade food.
fast food prices used to be similar, was that a healthy smart way to get calories? a burger and fries from mcdonalds used to be 3 bucks or so. for a lot of struggling people, it certainly was a standard option until recently and the one by me is still full of housing project kids everyday.
you didn’t answer the question
I did, but you’re being a typical lemmy troll who refuses to acknowledge any counter point to your simplified narrative that lacks any context because you want to bite the ragebait that makes you feel morally superior for doing so.
the article is designed to make you upset and troll you by going at your bias that premade grocery store chickens are some sort of nutritional necessity that is liberating people from the doldrums of their suffering at the evils of capitalism… even though it the chickens being sold like this is really an evil of capitalism itself.
you can’t have your pre-made chicken rage and eat it too!
I did, but you’re being a typical lemmy troll who refuses to acknowledge any counter point to your simplified narrative that lacks any
In fairness, like the troll you accuse everyone else of being, you have zero proof for your claim that these chickens have somehow been modified to be shittier for you, and that’s why they’re cheaper.
it’s just that whole foods and other groceries normalized the concept of hot ready to eat meals being served in grocery stores. that was never a thing 20+ years ago.
Sorry you apparently grew up in bumfuck nowhere, pal. The Hannafords in the sticks that I worked at in high school, more than 20 years ago, had plenty of rotisserie chickens, and had them long before I started working there.
You’ve gone and invented a massive conspiracy that ignores a simple reality. Offering rotisserie chickens as a loss leader is a simple and effective way to a) move whole chickens with minor blemishes and b) get people in the store with the promise of a cheap bird that almost always required you head to the back of the store, where they could count on you seeing several things “I may as well get while I’m here” to make up for whatever loss they sell the rotisserie chickens here.
I’ve worked in several major grocery stores in different regions, and never encountered any evidence of this nonsense you’re so indignant people won’t swallow wholeheartedly.
tl;dr: Show some proof or shut the fuck up, you muppet. Your own screeds do not count as proof, let’s see some external links.
whatever proof i gave you you’d deny. you can google it. these chickens are overwhelmingly prepared with injections of salt, fat and butter and plenty of outlets have tested them and they have massive levels of sodium, saturated fat, and other stuff like preservatives and chemicals that makes them processed if not ultra processed foods.
it’s not a conspiracy, it’s how our food supply works.
Hannafords is small chain, we’re talking about Costco and Walmart in this thread. Perhaps their chickens are better. I have been to a few of them in my area and they are an expensive store with more premium products. Whole foods has them too and theirs aren’t cheap and are probably more natural.
no, what I’m asking is how a ready to eat food product that is cheaper than the raw materials alternative is considered a luxury in this context
I understand that ready to eat food itself is somewhat of a luxury, but that is not what is being discussed - what is being discussed is the cost of the food.
No no, you see when you pay any amount beyond what is absolutely necessary to survive then you are spoiled by luxury. /S
is fast food a luxury or a necessity?
this is a version of fast food. that’s why it’s a luxury.
it’s also a factor of true cost vs the fact these are sold at a loss and understanding the psychology therein that gets people to buy more than they otherwise would.
because it’s premade food.
When the pre-made food is cheaper than uncooked food, how is it a luxury?
You think people should pay more for food, then bitch about people spending too much?
Get the hell out of here.
Also, from your previous comment:
it’s just that whole foods and other groceries normalized the concept of hot ready to eat meals being served in grocery stores. that was never a thing 20+ years ago.
I literally worked at the Deli in a wal mart in small town Ontario 20 years ago when I was in my late teens cooking the rotisserie chicken you’re bitching about didn’t exist.
You’re either trolling everyone here, or a completely disconnected moron.
Lol you’re changing the topic because you know he’s right. If someone else cooks my meal for me, regardless of price, that’s a luxury. If it costs $1 or $100, the act of another person preparing and cooking my food instead of having to do it myself is something I would consider a luxury. If it was free I would still consider the act of another person cooking my food for me a luxury. Its not about price or how much the ingredients cost separately.
Because if you don’t consider having someone else make your food a luxury, what is it? Normal? Expected? Do you not cook your own food? It’s wild you just call “troll” cuz he has a different opinion than you. If anything you and the people shadow boxing his comments are the trolls.
Lol you’re changing the topic because you know he’s right.
They’ve been changing the topic to try and shoehorn their own elitist opinion into something else. The entire topic is about cost. Not luxuries or people serving others. It’s about money and how much things cost. The reason @TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world is being downvoted to hell and back is because they’re missing the point from the beginning. If money is tight, why should people be forced to buy uncooked food and ingredients to make food at home, spend more money to do it, just to make some uptight person on Lemmy feel better about themselves?
If the already cooked chicken is cheaper, and money is tight for things like bills and electricity, buy the fucking cooked chicken. The only person who brought “luxury” into this was that idiot who completely missed the entire point of the conversation and the entire point of the post and had to stick his elitest fucking nose into everything.
Yes, I do cook my own food. I make dinner at home all the time. My partner cooks as well. Because we can afford dropping $20 on a club pack of pork chops, wrap a bunch in our vac sealer, and stick them in the freezer for future use. We have the means in order to store ingredients and have two freezers in our farm house and own a 14 acre property.
But we’re the exception, not the rule in today’s day and age. And guess what? I’ll still order pizza and come home with that. Or get a rotisserie chicken because work sucked and I don’t feel like cooking. And the fact that people like you and Tittyfrog genuinely care so fucking much about how other people spend their money and what they eat is remarkably pathetic.
And because I know they’re going to read this comment too, to quote something they said…
The existence of $6 ready to eat roasters is seem some inherently good and worthy thing… but it isn’t when you start to ask why they cost so little.
When you are struggling to literally feel yourself, your kids, pay rent, fill your gas tank, and make ends meet paycheque to paycheque, you don’t have the time or the energy to give a shit where the supply chain comes from. Some people are literally just trying to survive, and you talking down to people like that make you a fucking asshole.
Edit: Words.
Thanks for not really addressing anything I said and just jumping right back into your own stuff. That was cool. It let me know you didn’t really read what I said, think about it, and formulate a response. Great stuff. Oh and you should scroll back up to the first comment in this chain and see that the original poster called it a luxury first, so I guess you didn’t read that either. TittyFrog hasn’t been the one calling people idiot, or pathetic, or asshole, YOU have been.
Maybe take a step back and read what I’m trying to say. We are talking about the idea of if hot and ready to eat food is a luxury item. Not food in general or how much it costs (which you keep bringing up when I’m telling you it’s not about the cost). I don’t really care how you spend your money lol, I wish my tax dollars could go towards providing food, water, and shelter to everyone instead of the military industrial complex and corporations. Most people are just trying to survive, you and me both and everyone else in this chain I’m sure.
Thanks. Yeah that’s part of the point I’m trying to make.
But people don’t see the world that way… they see premade food as some sort of normal thing. And ironically all the nutrionists and public health people straight up tell us that premade stuff is unhealthy and problematic in both terms of nutrition and cost. Cheap food is always full of additives and shitty stuff. Natural foods are not, but they cost more. Better food production practices and regulations, cost more, etc.
But people just want see the sticker price in front of their face and ignore all the things that go into that price and don’t want to talk about them because acknowledging how the supply system works is ‘trolling’ because it makes them uncomfortable. The existence of $6 ready to eat roasters is seem some inherently good and worthy thing… but it isn’t when you start to ask why they cost so little.
We increasingly live in this weird world were the notion of cooking your own healthy food is some form of class oppression and privileged or something. When what it does is give you way more control over what goes into your body and typically you eat less.
acknowledging how the supply system works is ‘trolling’
Because that’s not what the conversation is about, and you know it.
If all you can afford for dinner is a supermarket roast chicken, you’re not in a position to give a single iota of a fuck about why it’s so cheap.
TIL eating at a soup kitchen (ready to eat hot food) is a luxury.
a soup kitchen is for the homeless.
the homeless aren’t buying 5 dollar rotisserie chickens
Well, they can’t, because you can’t buy hot food with food stamps.
How is it a luxury if it’s cheaper than actual frozen whole chicken?
because the true cost is hidden
I guess you’re right because there’s an awful lot of nitrates, nitrites and salts in those things and they’re mass produced so I guess there are a lot of long-term health costs involved.
These might help you.
Rotisserie Chicken is cheaper than groceries. The expensive “luxury” is the grocery in this case.
Idk what’s up with the downvotes. I think you’re right, having someone else cook and prepare my food for me IS something I consider a luxury. Same as if someone else cleaned my dishes or did my laundry. I’m not commenting on the “quality” of the food, or the cost, just the idea of someone else cooking and prepping my food for me.
people aren’t reading or thinking, they are just being outraged that their entitlement is being called out.
i get this a lot with travel too. travel is a luxury, but if you say that people tell you are a close minded asshole and that travel is a necessity for their well-being and happiness and if isn’t for yours you are mentally ill.
millennials and gen z travel way more than ever and spend massive amounts on it and then cry poor about not being able to spend more on it.
life is expensive, but spending your money on luxuries like travel, ready to eat food, and food delivery and then whining about how expensive necessities are (housing, healthcare, education, groceries) is so straight up absurd. apparently everyone is broke all th e time and struggling, but when it comes to getting their grubhub, their pot, and their international vacation travel, they miraculously always have money for that… and it can’t be that these two things are maybe related?
Gen Z are buying food, that is why they can’t afford houses. What logic is that ?
Have we moved on from Boomers bashing Millennials to them complaining about Gen Z, or is it Gen X complaining about Gen Z now?
