Then you grow older on a professional level of income, learn to appreciate great food and realize your food budget averages $1000/month. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

As Misao Okawa who reached age 117 said, eating delicious things is the key to longevity - though western "delicious things" are way different to Japanese "delicious things", I still like to lie to myself and proceed to order the bread pudding.

If you cook, no.

I know quite a few kids that are at least "comfortable" financially and they prefer boxed mac and cheese and simple hot dogs and cheese pizza and so on because that's what they get at day care and school.

My mother is an excellent cook, but to be honest it took me until my 20's to prefer homemade mac and cheese over the boxed kind, simply because I had developed a taste for it as a child. And my mother, ever the pragmatic one, wasn't gonna waste her time making something from scratch when her worthless children preferred the cardboard crap.

I've done a full 180, and now I'm the pretentious hipster who refers to it as "Elbow macaroni with bechamel sauce".

I was an exchange student who became Canadian after some time , later traveling to outside of north america I found Aunt Jemima's was not what people are thinking of what is maple syrup(something that the host family was buying as a staple and sometimes adding to corn and barn flakes).

For me this is the only kind I would put on pancakes.

God that whole article struck close to home.

I was lucky with food, though. While my parents would stock up how they could, we lived in an agricultural community and there was plenty of fresh vegetables around. My mother also grew them in the back and we learned young to love raw, fresh vegetables instead of eating [too much] candy or other stuff. Even when we did have something like boxed mac and cheese, there was almost always broccoli in it. We didn't get a lot of meat, let alone good meat, and to this day I suffer a B12 deficiency partly for it, but I still love getting my fresh greens, raw or cooked. Lucky that way.

Do you suffer a deficiency because it takes a long time to build up B12 levels, or because you are used to not eating much meat?

To be honest, I'm not sure what caused it. I eat a fair amount of meat now. I haven't had my blood done in a little while and I'm probably due.

The last time I had it done was a couple of years ago and it was noted that I had low hemoglobin as a result of low B12/Iron. My doc suggested I eat more red meat and take a supplement. I never used to be able to afford much in the way of beef so I got my protein through other means. Anemia runs in my family, so it may be related to that—though I'm not anemic myself.

Culturally interestingly though, he mentions needing a new dryer right now, when you can just air-dry them.

That isn’t an option if you either have a small enough apartment that you don’t have any space to hang clothes, or don’t have enough presentable spare clothes to be able to wait until the washed clothes are dry.