The other day, my wife was complaining about how she had so much to do, and requested that I hose her down instead of her having to take a shower. After the shower, she complained that she was hungry, but it was too much trouble to warm up the meals I had already cooked, so she was going to go to McDonalds instead.
She’s one of these big believers in all kinds of woo like “food deserts” and “poor people become fat because they eat fast food because it’s cheaper than healthy food”. There was a time when I traveled a lot for work, so I would spend all day Saturday cleaning the whole house, then all day Sunday cooking a week’s worth of food and portioning it out into individual meals, and then come back the next week to see the same number of meals as when I left. Our house is not a food desert, driving to the nearest fast food and waiting in the drive thru line is not faster (or cheaper) than 3 minutes in the microwave, and yeah, maybe some people have weird genetic conditions that make it impossible for them to metabolize food properly, but for everyone else we know that’s overweight it’s mostly the drinking, the not exercising, and the boxes of Oreos.
Either way, it reminded me that one of the interesting things on Twitter recently was about the tyranny of packed lunches:
https://twitter.com/dissproportion/status/1658820719969460231
Long story short, some internet-famous person complained about the horrific binary choice between eat out lunch for too much dollarbucks vs bring lunch for too many sad hungrys. As many things do, the sad state of affairs was blamed on the late stage capitalist hellscape, though I didn’t dive deep enough into the comments to see racism and neocolonialism get blamed, but I’m sure it was.
It reminded me of another time in the past when @hilaryagro complained about “violent rhetoric against drug workers”, which then lead, as usual, to complaining about the late stage capitalist hellscape, this time including the racism and neocolonialism:
https://twitter.com/hilaryagro/status/1645434719541010433
https://twitter.com/hilaryagro/status/1645812243869597696
This one really does bother me. Her sentence is “I mean people who are entrenched in a capitalist system where they have to work jobs they don't like, including selling drugs because of the huge demand for painkillers created by that harmful system, or they die of exposure.”
And, mostly because of my own experiences with someone who has all the steps done besides “the food was put into my mouth” done for her, I wonder about the limits of “jobs they don’t like”. Going shopping in a grocery store is a weekly chore that really does take an hour or two, and that’s certainly considerably less than growing the food myself, but it’s non-zero and I could be playing at a park instead. It’s also a modern marvel of the late-stage neoliberal capitalist hellscape, complete with just-in-time delivery that famously almost failed during the early toilet paper runs of Covid. And then I take the food home to a refrigerator that couldn’t have possibly existed until at least 200 years ago, and cook it on a stove that is incredibly safe and convenient, and wash the dishes (half of them in a dishwasher), and all of this is work that I do. All of this work could be done by someone else if I ate out every meal for 4x as much, and I never really get a clear answer on if I still do this work in the socialist or communist utopia, and also who sweeps the floors and wipes the table, and scoops the cat litter.
I got a few serious answers to my question, namely that schemes like UBI or social safety nets are one possible solution, or that the amount of work like this is unusually high with atomic families (encouraged by our brand of capitalism, but non-optimal for many reasons) and would be reduced in a smarter system.
But the answer I like much better was the non-serious one:
The real complaint I have is that Agro seems to be complaining about the concept of "work" extremely broadly in a way that doesn't make sense to me, because just living at all requires some amount of work, including washing your own ass. And I really do see this kind of complaint all over, most typically in these food-related things. Yeah, eating out is expensive, because you pay for someone else’s labor. When you do that labor yourself, you save $20/day, and I keep proselytizing it to my coworkers who never listen. This problem is huge, everywhere, and growing. [insert fancy statistics about how most people don’t have two nickels to rub together.] I’m a fervent social security stan because the government stealing your money from you because you’re too dumb to not spend it all in one place is the correct assessment of our collective long-term thinking. I’m close to unironically thinking that if you took all of highschool and replaced it with cooking lessons and remedial math aimed at home ec, the average American would be much better off. But it is hard for me to tell how much of the blame should rightly be put on capitalism, and how much is wordcel hyper-exaggeration for the purpose of social signaling.
Anyway, I enacted the unpaid emotional labor of yelling at my wife about our budget while doing the unpaid manual labor of taking two bins out of the refrigerator and pressing the “3” button. Having washed her own ass earlier, she sat down and ate at home, saving us $20.
Later that night, while I cooked meals for the next few days and washed dishes, she got Acai bowls and played in the park, unsaving us those $20.