Reply #49: A roast chicken? Come on.

[distantearlywarning]

Both my husband and I are excellent cooks. We are foodies and we cook dinner at home almost every night of the week, and we often make pretty elaborate dinners too. I even grow my own herb garden during the summer, just to use in our meals. Furthermore, I know how to roast poultry and have made a chicken on many occasions. Given my own observations of other people of my age level and younger, I think all of this makes us pretty unusual in terms of our commitment to eating food that didn't come from a box or fast food restaurant.

And we don't have any kids, and I have a pretty flexible schedule in terms of being able to prep cooking, go to the grocery store, etc.

And we would NEVER make a roasted chicken for dinner any weeknight. Never. That's completely impractical on multiple levels. It takes 1/2 hour of prep at a minimum to make that dish in your picture, and 2 1/2 hours in the oven to roast it. Not to mention the clean-up. I cannot imagine any family in America where every adult in the household works full-time making a roasted fucking chicken with vegetables for dinner on a weeknight. Maybe if you have a stay-at-home wife like it's 1950 or something. :eyes:

And if I can't imagine us doing roasting a fucking chicken as a normal weeknight dinner, and we have everything going for us in terms of food (money, time, energy, motivation, and skill), now just imagine a single mom with limited cooking skills, working 12 hours a day at an exhausting minimum wage job, bringing her hungry, tired kids home from day-care on the bus, and now it's 7 pm before she gets home and she's supposed to prep and cook a roasted chicken? Fuck that. McDonald's it is, guys. (And by the way, I fucking hate McDonald's and I would have to be pretty damn desperate to eat there, and I would eat McDonald's before I would roast a chicken if I were in that mother's shoes. Just saying.)

And as a foodie, I'm not even going to touch the "pinto beans and rice" thing, except to say you forgot to mention the other possible option of "lentil soup for a month" or "plain bread and water". God forbid anyone ever suggest meals for a poor person that might involve something that actually tastes good and provides an appealing alternative to McDonalds. Better that they suffer for their sin of being poor by having to eat mashed up cardboard in a pot, right?

Seriously, people of DU really need to think about this kind of crap before they post it.